7 key recommendations to improve E-Business

Based on experience with a lot of organizations and supported by the research I have been conducting, improving E-Business performance by improving the effectiveness of E-Business organizations often comes down to 7 recommendations.

Key recommendations:

Verify that the current maturity of your E-Business organization is in line with strategic business objectives, online strategies and meets performance criteria. Benchmark against external parties but be careful in choosing them, include other customer groups and sectors.
Build sponsorship and involvement at senior and operational level by showing the real value of E-Business for the organization.
Clarify ownership (governance, roles & responsibilities) but also review governance and ownership for all customer facing processes. Make ownership transparent throughout the whole organization. Leverage the positive culture towards E-Business to do this.
Bridge the gap between different units in the organization, specifically marketing and IT, by establishing a cross departmental E-Business steering team. Work on creating an integrated E-business roadmap. Pay attention to improving E-Business process integration (cross-departmental) and Business & IT alignment.
Invest in improving E-Business performance and cost measurement. Include cross-channel measurement metrics to determine the real value for the organization. Continually measure e-business performance and take corrective action where needed.
Specify the desired internal E-Business competences, roles and location. Invest in developing in house E-Business competencies (cross departments).
Contemplate (re)organizing IT: start differentiating between short and long term projects, (re)organize IT accordingly and/or contemplate outsourcing either. This will enable the IT organization to be more flexible in meeting business demand, getting better results.

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