Suspended E-nimation?

trix_e asks: "I am Director of E-business at a medium-sized traditional manufacturing company (US$3B. annual revenue), my team and I are responsible for many of our e-commerce initiatives (selling on the web, CRM, etc.). My company, like most others, still has the PR wheels rolling full steam ahead, claiming undying allegiance to the concept of 'e-ing', e-business, e-commerce, e-process, e-verything... However I don't feel the same internal fervor for this as I did a year ago. I wanted to ask all of the good Slashdot folks what they were seeing from the inside of their respective organizations. more to the personal point, do you feel that as companies continue to belt-tighten, will groups like mine be the first to go (with no regard to actual value, but instead because we're viewed as non-essential)?"

"Is there still massive internal commitment to e-ing everything, or has the combination of the 'Dot-bomb' era, the down economy, and the notion among some circles that this was all just another fad like Re-engineering & TQM, taken the bloom off the rose?"

Comments

Next few quarters are not looking good.

[Kefaa]

I do not want to sound bleak but 9/11 was damaging to many businesses that depended on air transport, shipping, or travel. People are worried about the situation and their jobs. Add to that the layoffs of the past three months and that is impacting business projections.

I am seeing a number of companies that are involved in arbitrary "slash and burn" in order to turn numbers around for the next few quarters. Internal organizations must either bring in revenue or cost savings which can be quantified. ROIs over 9 months are being rejected as too long given the current market.

I do not know what your organization looks like, but if you cannot show real dollars as revenue or savings, consider your group "at risk." and act accordingly. I never recommend acting out of fear, however much like a fire extinguisher is precautionary you may want to look around at what options are available to you to generate quantifiable savings or revenue.

Sounds like a great time to get together the entire team for a brainstorming session.

What happened...

[cmowire]

What happened was that everybody signed up to put an e- before everything. Some of it made sense, some of it didn't.

For example, it's a pretty good bet that if you have a catalog, having a website will be helpful. The computer catalog places are still seeing benefit from their sites, which is why they are still up.

What you will most likely see is people dropping the e- prefix and the .com suffix from things. Same as they are not buying those funky mesh chairs anymore, making people wear nicer clothes, cutting back the absurd benefits, etc. Nobody wants to be associated with the possibility of becomming the next dot-bomb, e-bomb, or other such thing.

And this is the best way to keep your job and make smart decisions. If you are selling people only on the e- part of the name, that's bad. If you have a business plan for the feature that centers around things like "Making this paper-driven process accessible online so that you can kick back clearly wrong submissions without spending a real person's time, save time, not have to deal with so much paper, etc." and have an attached cost-benefit plan, then you are doing real business that leaverages computers.
And making things electronic will still be useful. If they can replace a staff of 100 low-level employees with an electronic system that requires a pair of servers and part of somebody's time to maintain it, that's saving money.

But putting a system that works fine as a paper-driven process, especially if your users are uneducated and computer-phobic, is a bad idea. Switching all of your databases over to using XML for no apparent reason other than hype is a bad idea. Changing the way a system works without a good appreciation for why it works that way is a bad idea. And that's the e-stuff that is bombing.