Inside the E-Commerce Strategy That Could Save Borders, Part 2
As the struggling retailer makes a massive effort to win e-commerce success, can it capitalize on any late-mover advantages? Borders IT and business execs take CIO.com inside the technology effort, the early results and the competitive challenge that you can call nothing but Amazonian.
CIO — While Borders didn't have an e-commerce presence on the Internet for seven years, thanks to its partnership with Amazon.com, it also didn't have a "long-in-the-tooth" assemblage of legacy systems to deal with, either.
In a sense, then, the team developing the new Borders.com could leapfrog right to the latest Web-facing and back-office applications. (See "Inside the E-Commerce Strategy That Could Save Borders, Part 1" to read the first article in this two-part series.)
"The technology available today makes it a lot easier to do," says Kevin Ertell, Borders' senior VP of e-business and a leader on the project. For instance, vendor Allurent's software package provided the functionality for the Flash-video-based Magic Shelf, which was done "relatively easily," he adds.
On the back-end, Borders didn't use anything exactly out of the box, says CIO Susan Harwood. "We took things as a platform and expanded on them and customized them," she says. "But [lack of legacy systems] did give us a shortcut to get some basic functionality up and running and to give us a framework in which to develop. So, to that extent, it was easier."
Harwood says the applications supporting Borders.com are a combination of customized packaged software and completely custom code, and that those all had to be integrated with Borders' existing back-office systems and some that connect to external partners—for order management (Sterling Commerce's Order Management system), financial systems (Lawson Financials), credit-card processing (CyberSource), third-party fulfillment (Baker & Taylor) and Borders' internal reporting systems, to name a few.
"All of that had to be built and tightly integrated," Harwood says. "It wasn't any more daunting than any other aspect of the project, but it added to the workload."
At one point, "we had someone from virtually every applications team and almost every group on our technology services areas involved in one way or another with the e-commerce development project," Harwood says. "Certainly it had an impact on what we were talking about in the conversations with our [business] partners and the bandwidth we had to take on other initiatives. Because this wasn't the only project we were pursuing."
"We Were Demanding as Hell"
Naturally, in a project with a scope, scale and overall importance as large as this one was for the $3.8 billion Borders, collaboration between the e-commerce, IT and marketing teams was critical. The pressure was intense. When asked what his Web group was looking for from Harwood's IT group during the entire development process, Ertell says "everything."
"We worked really, really hard on this, and we were demanding as hell," he adds. "I'll raise my hand and admit that."
"I don't think this was out of place," responds Harwood. "We had a very high bar set for us. We had to come out of the gate at a competitive pace [because this is] a mature industry, and we did that."
