Your Next Role: E-Commerce Strategist

Efficient operation of e-commerce applications is now a part of many CIOs’ portfolios, but their responsibility goes far beyond providing support. CIOs who wait for marching orders from the business units?as many did in the early days of e-commerce?are liable to miss the opportunity to apply technology strategically. "During the bubble, the CIO really got jammed in the back office," observes George Colony, chairman and CEO of Forrester Research. "The real action driving e-commerce was on the marketing side and the business side. Postrecession, the chief information officer is [going to be] an equal partner [in e-commerce functions], with a much broader role."

Sears’s Kelly views e-commerce as a component of his company’s overall IT strategy. "E-commerce is an extension of a business- selling model, whether it’s business-to-business or business-to-consumer," he says. "We have to develop and implement an IT strategy that supports Sears at an enterprise level and a business-unit level," where Sears.com is one of several business units. Kelly heads an IT investment committee that includes representatives from Sears’s customer-facing businesses. That committee decides which systems to build, based largely on whether the expenditure will help create additional operating income.

McMakin, who spent 22 of his 28 years with Air Products in non-IT positions, rising to vice president of the specialty chemicals division, says his views about the value of particular technology expenditures carry more weight because he participates in business strategy development. A few years ago, when Air Products made its first investments in e-procurement technology, McMakin advised using an application service provider rather than run a system in-house. "The [procurement] technology is very volatile," he says. He didn’t want to waste money developing systems that the company might later abandon. More recently, like many of his peers, he has advised against investments in new e-commerce ventures, instead supporting Elemica, an online marketplace for the chemicals industry. McMakin has also assigned staff to work on industrywide data exchange standards using XML?a necessity if companies with incompatible systems are to easily communicate online.

At Solectron, Mathaisel reports he has "more of the total accountability" for moving additional business processes to the Web. In conjunction with each business unit, he’s in the midst of reviewing which processes are the best candidates for moving online, whether they’re manual or automated using older EDI technology. Like other contract manufacturers, Solectron competes by making it easier or more cost-effective for customers to use its services. Recently, Mathaisel deployed an application, suggested by one of Solectron’s business units, that lets customers track the progress of their orders on the factory floor. Now customers can monitor circuit boards as they are assembled, look up test results and get other information without having an inspector onsite.