ECommerce Crisis

1999-05-04

A crisis, it is said, is a problem with no time left to solve it. It may be triggered by external factors, such as losing a job or winning on the horses (and it’s a harder pill to swallow when the cause of our pain is that our wildest hopes have been met), but its causes lie most often in the past and creep up unawares. When dealing with a crisis, it is first necessary to admit fallibility: only then is it possible to start coping with the hand that has been dealt. We are all individual, sayeth Brian, but we are not immortal and we are all subject to the same patterns of behaviour as out peers. Even the stages of coping are predictable, to an extent – consider those identified by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, for people coming to terms with terminal illness – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These stages have been applied, in one form or another, to everything from dealing with herpes to coping with mediochre golf. It may be that the stages are not exact, but then this is not an exact science. The stages are a gross simplification of real life, but they are still recognisable to the majority of those who have lived through “difficult times”.

Why am I saying this? Well, lets look for some parallels. Despite the powerful BPR rhetoric of the past ten years, do we look about ourselves and find a brave new world of mature, evolving, learning enterprises? Nope. It is fair to say that, although the headcounts are reduced and we are more reliant on bought-in services than before, not much has changed. To be fair, huge efforts are often made, for example reorganising corporate structures, merging with the competition and investing in call centres. But generally, these investments occur because the decision makers’ hands are forced by external factors such as increased competition and Y2K. It is no secret that the biggest blocker to business change is “resistance to change,” and the forming, storming, norming and performing mantra of organisational change bears a remarkable resemblance to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages.

Whatever we want to call it, the Internet, the Web, eCommerce is just one more external cause which is going to trigger business crisis. Fundamental change we will see - it is already happening in the states and will come over here as inevitably as disco dancing and the skateboard. This is not just another stateside fashion, however – this is unavoidable change on a global scale. There is a fundamental difference between this and previous industry-shaking events.  The first off the blocks, if correctly prepared, is appearing to win the race. Time is becoming crucial: companies which procrastinate are losing market share. This well-documented trend is an omen for us all. What is also interesting is the other side of the coin, where companies have been victims of their own online success – for example the computer systems of eTrade, the online brokerage, suffering a number of outages due to the volume of people accessing the site. eTrade has survived (with a mere 25 thousand complaints) but other such companies have not been so lucky.

Admittedly we are not in crisis yet, not quite. The percentage of UK business conducted online is at 0.5%, so there is no need for unmitigated panic. The trends and supporting factors suggest that in ten years time a large proportion of business will be conducted online. We can wait until external factors force our hands, or we can start a process now, remembering that the stages we will go through a re largely predetermined. Sure, we need our denial phase. It is a time during which we assimilate the facts, assess the consequences and come to terms with the fact that nothing will ever be the same. Better that we start the process now and still leave time to reorient our businesses and profit, yes benefit, from the eCommerce revolution. We cannot make the revolution happen, and neither can we predict or plan for every eventuality. However, by forcing our own hands and coping with the consequences, we can at least orient ourselves so we are facing in the right direction when the time comes, for example by building business relationships with possible partners, or implementing the open, secure, scalable architectures which will be necessary for online access to our systems. Surely this is preferable to doing nothing in the blind hope that nothing will come of it, or worse seeing the policy of wait and see become wait and watch others succeed.

(First published 4 May 1999)