Gaffney recently revamped the pricing model used by the contracts division to make it easier to maintain and less demanding of server power. The old model was really multiple applications that have now been consolidated into a single one. "We had as many pricing models as customers," says Jay Baitler, who runs Staples’ contract division. Now, Gaffney figures, the rest of Staples can use the application too. "It’s better having one pricing subsystem for the whole company," he says. The e-commerce steering committee is an avenue for communicating how applications that were developed for one part of the company can benefit others.

Baitler says business leaders, himself included, are more willing to share applications and go along with corporate technology standards because they understand better that an integrated IT strategy for e-commerce benefits the entire company. "There’s less yelling ’me, me, me’ and more, What’s right for Staples," says Baitler. "My success is based on [CIO Gaffney’s] success. That’s a very, very important cultural change in this organization."

Similarly, Air Products’ McMakin says that online success depends on business unit leaders acting together for the greater good of the company, with the understanding that e-commerce isn’t just a flashy trend. "These are fundamental capabilities we will be building to use for the rest of the time the enterprise exists," he says. Like Gaffney, McMakin must show his colleagues how applications deployed for one business unit affect the company as a whole, and he must show them how to assess the trade-offs among different e-commerce investments. That kind of education is critical to McMakin’s efforts to obtain continued buy-in from other senior executives to his view that the company should build scalable, generic applications, rather than one-off applications tailored to specific supplier or customer groups.

Air Products still has an e-business team that decides which online initiatives should be corporate priorities, while an e-business steering committee decides which systems to fund. The e-business director reports to both McMakin and Bill Cantwell, the company’s vice president for process management. Meanwhile, McMakin, Cantwell and several other executives sit on the e-business steering committee. Through each group, McMakin has a hand?but not the final say?in which online projects are budgeted.

McMakin says it’s important that he have input on e-commerce and appropriate that he share decision-making power. "Any CIO has to have enough understanding of the value equations within the business to sort through where to spend money and how to have impact through e-business initiatives," he says. "At the end of the day, it’s the profitability of the company that matters."