Another of Mathaisel’s e-commerce tasks is to decide how to apply Web services, which will enable integration with Solectron’s customers. Taking into account new investments the company is making in Web services, Solectron’s total investments in e-business are increasing. While it’s easy to define e-commerce narrowly as online buying and selling, investments in systems that support purchases and sales are included under the e-commerce umbrella for many CIOs.

When Sears acquired catalog retailer Lands’ End 10 months ago, top executives decided that Lands’ End should retain its own IT organization while Sears studied opportunities to integrate the two organizations’ systems. Kelly says that although a unified IT strategy for all of Sears’s direct- sales organizations is his ultimate goal, it isn’t on the agenda right now. How and when the integration happens will be a corporate decision, says Kelly, in which he’ll have a significant role.

Your E-Commerce Future

When the economy improves, governance structures imposed by CIOs today will become the main vehicles through which they retain their influence on e-commerce strategy and expenditures. "The CIO is going to become the gating factor, so we don’t go back to willy-nilly spending," says Gene Alvarez, vice president for e-business strategies with the Meta Group in Stamford, Conn.

The challenge for CIOs, however, will be to maintain discipline when money is no longer tight. There’s more than one organizational model for managing the next phase of e-commerce, and not all of them put the CIO on top. Future leadership in e-commerce "depends on who is the best available ’athlete,’ and power arrangements and politics in a company," says Forrester’s Colony. Whoever emerges as the next e-commerce champion will be an executive steeped in his company’s customer needs. At most companies, Colony predicts, that won’t be the CIO, since the CIO simply isn’t close enough to the customers.

CIOs who want to retain influence in e-commerce must build close partnerships with the business side. While they’re in the e-commerce driver’s seat, CIOs need to hold e-commerce strategy sessions and initiate conversations with business leaders about how IT supports the big picture. Alvarez notes that as CIOs fine-tune existing e-commerce systems, they have an opportunity to educate their colleagues about how, for example, upgrading a system might provide new capabilities that fulfill their business strategy. He also hears CIOs asking tough questions about whether a new need can be fulfilled using existing resources.

At Staples, the Framingham, Mass.-based office supply retailer, Executive Vice President and CIO Paul Gaffney has used a steering committee of IT and business representatives to establish support for integrating separate e-commerce initiatives into a common infrastructure. While different business leaders run Staples.com and the division in charge of Staples’ contracts with corporate customers, they have begun to share applications such as order processing. "We’re very focused on the systems side with finding commonality," says Gaffney, because it helps improve the company’s operating margins.