Referring to the FT (Financial Times) article "It's Too Early For E-Business To Drop Its "E", do you think that it is sensible to still speak today of e-business strategies or to drop the "e" from the term "e-business"? Defend your argument.

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It’s too early for e-business to drop its ‘e’ FT Jargon is used to make the banal sound enthralling, the simple sophisticated. It is often used to disguise the fact that the speaker, or writer, does not know what he is talking about, or cannot be bothered to find a more precise word. In the past five years, one letter has come to symbolize the worst of jargon. The fifth letter in the Roman alphabet, it has been used in front of business, commerce, finance, procurement, learning, enablement, government. Almost any noun you can think of has probably been an enoun. Companies have used ‘e’ liberally to give themselves a buzz on the stock market.

Now, ‘e’ is on its way out. Yet, despite everything I have said, this is bad news. The ‘e’ has been chased away by the dotcom crash, which transformed it from magic drug to kiss of stock market death. But, even before that, it was going out of fashion. One senior consultant told me in 2000 that the ‘e’ would be dropped by his organization within a year or two (it was). His argument – widely accepted – was that internet-based business would become so pervasive that it would be pointless, indeed damaging, to talk about it as a separate discipline.

E-business would and should disappear into business. And so it should; but not yet. At the Richmond Events e-forum last October, several hundred senior managers from blue-chip companies gathered on a cruise ship to be assaulted by a mixture of cabernet sauvignon and hard sell from vendors of e-services of various sorts. There was a ‘last days of Rome’ feeling about it, as delegate after delegate let slip that he or she had either just left their e-job, or was about to.

What was particularly interesting was that people were revealing their ‘real selves’ beneath their e-titles: they were either information technology people, or they were something else. While a few could talk strategy and technology with equal fluency, most gave their backgrounds away. They were happy speaking about marketing and strategy, or about integration issues; not both. I have since received a letter from Richmond Events announcing the death of e-forum, saying that its functions would be rolled into either the IT directors or the marketing forum. The divide that was apparent at the event has been formalized. Why does this matter? Because, even as it has crumbled, the value of the letter ‘e’ has become ever more clear. It is, or has been, a bridge between technical and non-technical managers. From the earliest days of the commercial internet, proponent after proponent of the strange new medium said the same thing: ‘Don’t let the IT people run it.’ They believed the effective use of the internet depended not on the technology but on a strategic understanding of what it could do. Technologists were, of course, vital for implementing the strategy, but they often knew too much about the trees to be able to see the wood. Also, most IT directors had a ‘supplier’ role to an organization; they were rarely involved in strategic decision-making. As the commercial internet became e-commerce and then e-business this view held, though there were tensions. Many companies put their trust in new media consultancies led by marketing people who loved to talk strategy. ‘Leave your strategy to us; we understand it better than you can,’ they would tell their openwalleted clients. They hired technical people – indeed, the real skills shortage was at the technical end – but they kept control. Sadly, these agencies also sowed the seeds of their own destruction, because they could not match either the technical skills of systems integration specialists, or the strategic skills of the big consultancies. Meanwhile, a sizeable minority of organizations kept their e-business strategy inhouse and under the control of their IT departments. Add to this the rush by boards to pour money into Internet ventures simply for the sake of tickling the share price and it is not surprising that so much was wasted so fast by so many.

How is it, then, that any companies managed to exploit the new technology effectively? How did Cisco, Dell, Electrocomponents, General Electric manage it? Largely, because people at the summit saw that the secret was in bringing technologists and non-technologists together and making them work together – and often they used the banner ‘e’ as a marshalling-point. The good e-business managers I have met are (or were) either technologists on the way to becoming strategists, or non-technologists with an increasing understanding of IT. On the way, I stress; rarely close to achieving fluency in both. The new media agencies, for all their arrogance, were also attempting to master both skills. Again, they had a long way to go; so it is a shame that they have been humbled so brutally. The danger, as the e-bridge crashes into the river, is that the great unrealized possibilities of the internet will be swept away with it. When an organization has a cadre of managers with a real understanding of both strategy and technology, fine – let the bridge collapse. But until then, some form of e-business department and function – labeled with whatever jargon – should remain essential to any intelligent group’s structure.