Without integration to back-end legacy systems, your whizzy Web
front-end will fail to deliver. Julia Vowler reports
The letter 'e', as in e-commerce, has assumed magical
proportions in business, but if companies are to derive any real
value from the Internet, says Winfried Bungert, department director
of consultancy IDS Scheer, the 'e' needs to change to the letter
'i'.
But that 'i' does not, he emphasises, stand for Internet. What
organisations need, says Bungert, is not electronic commerce but
integrated commerce.
"I-commerce is simply the synergy between e-commerce and supply
chain management," he says. "It incorporates the integrated
customer and supplier relationships embedded in e-commerce,
combining them with other sales and marketing channels."
The biggest mistake Bungert sees in companies heading for
e-business - apart from not drawing up a hard-edged e-business plan
- is ignoring the 'i' in e-commerce.
"In the very first stages of an e-business project you have to
consider what happens to the legacy systems when you do
e-business," he says.
"The information you need [to fulfil the transaction] is stored
in legacy systems. If there is no interface providing that
information to the Web front-end, you can't offer good services and
products over the Web."
But one of the main reasons no one wants to hear this is because
interfacing to legacy systems is neither cheap nor swift.
"Building the front-end of e-business is cheap - it's very
low-cost to do the interface to the client. Doing the back end is
expensive," says Bungert.
Expect, he warns, to spend 10% of the cost on the front-end, and
90% on the back-end. Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid
spending money on interfacing to old systems. Money saved on
integrating the Web front-end with core production systems will
only be spent on keeping a whole lot of manual workarounds in
place.
The typical e-business workaround is to translate a "yes I want
to transact" click on a Web screen into an e-mail, which is sent to
the corporate call centre and the transaction details rekeyed into
the systems manually for the legacy systems to execute in the
normal way.
What you save in interface development costs you spend on
increased operational costs. "If you spin off your e-business
you'll need to build up a complete second sales channel with its
own IT systems which is even more expensive," warns Bungert.
Sadly, it's almost inevitable that the degree of integration
between the new Web-channels and the existing operational
infrastructure will be built as the familiar rush-jobs of
point-to-point connections that will inevitably create another
layer of unmaintainable legacy middleware.