Despite the antihype, e-commerce isn’t dead. "There’s a real excitement vacuum, but there’s not a spending or an interest vacuum," says Whit Andrews, a research director with Gartner in Stamford, Conn. And responsibility for e-commerce spending and strategy falls increasingly to CIOs. According to a survey by Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research published in August, three times more companies are now making technology decisions centrally than they were in 2001.

Now that e-commerce is no longer an experiment, business executives understand that an integrated enterprise is critical to online success, says Edieal Pinker, assistant professor with the W.E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester. "As the role of e-commerce in these firms has matured, you no longer need this special figure [of an e-commerce unit leader] trying to educate the organization about e-commerce and trying to promote it," says Pinker, who has studied e-commerce operations at 35 large companies. "You want reliability. Now you really need the chief information officer."

And CIOs are actually spending money?even if not a lot of it?on e-commerce. A survey of over 500 CIOs and IT directors published by AMR Research last September found that most planned to spend at least a small amount on e-commerce systems in 2003. The survey respondents said they would focus on infrastructure investments, such as enterprise application integration, that ultimately support online commerce.

For instance, Sears, Roebuck and Co. spent an undisclosed amount in 2001 to revamp its inventory management systems to support in-store pickup of online purchases. "The overall [e-commerce] business model is focused on growing sales, providing enhanced security and stability, and efficient fulfillment," says Garry Kelly, senior vice president and CIO at the Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based retailer since October. "That means the back end of e-commerce?pick, pack and ship?has to be every bit as good as the click, select and check out."

In answering the call for efficient and reliable e-commerce architectures, CIOs have become the overseers of online operations. But there’s a danger that when the economy picks up, business units will chafe at the constraints CIOs imposed on e-commerce spending during the economic downturn. Smart CIOs can take steps now to create a framework for making decisions on online strategy and the investments that are necessary to execute it.