The Case for an E-Commerce IT Org Change

As multi-channel retailers move more and more towards implementing cross-channel strategies, organizational structures need to change to support those new strategies. I am a huge proponent of breaking up most e-commerce silo  organizations and integrating online and in-store marketing and merchandising teams to ensure a common vision and voice across channels. For IT, though, I actually recommend the opposite approach. I believe technology  professionals who work full time (or near full-time) on the e-commerce site should report directly to the head of e-commerce.

While at a high level is seems like technology should have the same kind of continuity as marketing and merchandising, I believe a close look tells a different story.

Here’s why e-commerce IT is significantly different from traditional IT:

In e-commerce, the business is technology

Traditionally, IT creates tools that help employees be more productive and efficient. However, in e-commerce, IT is actually creating software designed to generate revenue. E-commerce “stores” are really self-service software  applications designed to help customers perform a service — in this case it’s to buy the products and services we sell.  Intuit has Quicken; Microsoft has Word and Excel; retailers have our e-commerce sites. We really need to think about  our sites more as software products and organize our teams in a product management type of structure.

Also, a particular pet peeve of mine is when IT folks refer to those in other functions of the company as “the business.”  Just that reference alone insinuates that IT is not a crucial part of the overall business and creates a separation that  frequently leaves IT coming across as second class citizens, which they are not. While I’ve never liked “the business”  reference in any circumstance, it’s doubly bad in e-commerce where success absolutely depends on technology team  members actively working as part of the business.

Self-service applications require a different mindset

Working on an e-commerce application that is designed to be used directly by customers requires a very different  mindset than what is typically required when working on applications that support employees. Even when the  underlying technology is similar, the mindset required is substantially different. New employee applications usually  come with training programs and manuals. Moreover, employees are ultimately forced to use the app; they get used to it and get incrementally better at using it over time through daily usage. Customers, however, don’t get the benefit of manuals and training programs. They’re on their own. And if the experience doesn’t satisfy them, they give up and the sale is lost.

Site functionality and customer experience are major components of the e-commerce business strategy

The website application is a key differentiator for the business, and customer experience is hugely driven by site functionality. While functions other than technology certainly contribute to an e-commerce site’s success or failure, there can be little doubt that the quality of the technology is a massive contributing factor.

E-commerce is 100% dependent on technology to be open for business.

While technology is critical in all areas of the business, most retailers have offline contingencies for stores so they can  continue to make sales even if the system is down. Websites obviously don’t have an offline mode.

Web businesses are still immature and need considerable agility and flexibility to mature as quickly as possible

For many absolutely legitimate reasons, most IT organizations at multi-channel retailers have significant (and some might say onerous) processes in place to manage technology requests and roadmap prioritization. Because requests for technology improvements come from all corners of the company, it’s important for CIOs to ensure they are spending their resources on work that is thoroughly vetted and likely to generate the highest return on investment for the company. But given the absolute dependence of the e-commerce business on technology, typical IT prioritization and allocation processes are too slow for e-commerce businesses that need to be able to adjust quickly to issues that arise with customer experience.

The e-commerce competitive marketplace innovates far quicker than the brick & mortar marketplace

The CEO of a pure-play e-commerce company is in basically the same role as the head of e-commerce at a multi-channel retailer. If for no other reason than there is no alternative, the CIO of a pure-play reports to the CEO. This reporting structure gives the pure-play leader a leg up in agility and the ability to react to customer needs. In a multi-channel retailer, the CIO must split time between many functions of the business, and I find e-commerce often gets time allocated in a ratio roughly equal to its financial contribution to the business. While such an allocation is understandable given everything on a busy CIO’s plate, I believe this lessened focus can lead to stunted growth and lost ground to competitors such as Amazon who are more devoted to improving their software application and increasing their customers’ satisfaction with their site customer experience.

I believe if a head of e-commerce is to be truly held accountable for the success of the site, he or she should have  appropriate authority over such a major contributor to the success of the site.

So why should the head of e-commerce have authority over e-commerce IT and not e-commerce marketing and merchandising?

To me, it’s all about what faces the customer and what doesn’t. A brand should be clear to its customers about who it is and what it stands for, so continuity in marketing and merchandising trumps silo control over those aspects of the business. Site functionality has no parallels in other parts of the organization. Since it is both unique and customer facing, I believe the head of the online channel should maintain the authority to develop and execute the technical strategy for his or her business unit when it directly affects the customer relationship.

I’ll add this final point: I’ve lived through many different org structures surrounding e-commerce IT, and the only times I’ve found the pros to outweigh the cons of an org structure have been when e-commerce IT was part of the e-commerce operation and reporting to the head of e-commerce.

What do you think? Am I completely misguided? What structures have you seen work and not work? What structure do you think is ideal?

Defending the status quo kills companies

“Defending the status quo is what kills companies.” That line comes from the excellent book More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson written by former Harley CEO  Rich Teerlink and his organizational consultant partner Lee Ozley. The book chronicles Teerlink’s and Ozley’s process to change the culture at Harley-Davidson to ensure the company was ready for the challenges to come. What I found most remarkable, though, was that they didn’t initiate this massive change when the company was troubled — they initiated massive change when the company had just completed a successful financial turnaround and the press was actively singing their praises.

They changed when conventional wisdom would have said to keep doing what they were doing.

Bankruptcy courts are littered with companies who kept doing what they were doing and failed to adapt to changing marketplaces and changing customer needs and expectations.

I spent 20 years in the music industry with Tower Records, so I’ve see one of the best examples in recent years of an entire industry that desperately clung to the past rather than embrace the future. The music industry didn’t suffer because of Napster and illegal downloads; it suffered because it turned its back on its customers in favor of short term profits.

The music industry failed to recognize the opportunity that came with the advent of the Internet and digital music formats. Rather than see their industry from their customers’ perspective, the industry fell pray to the elitism I’ve discussed previously. So a computer company took their business from them. Apple‘s iPod and iTunes took the music retailers’ business and substantially wrestled control away from the music labels.

The retailers could have created digital music stores if they weren’t so worried about protecting their current businesses. And there were other opportunities available. Seth Godin spoke to the industry last year and gave some excellent examples of opportunities to change the business model.

Now other traditional industries like newspapers, video stores and bookstores, among others, are also losing substantial market share to new, technology based upstarts. Others, like travel agencies, are mostly gone.

But some companies are embracing change even during the height of success.
A recent Forbes interview with Xerox’s retiring CEO Anne Mulcahy highlighted her strategy to focus Xerox on “paperless printing” even though the entire organization was basically built on paper-producing technology. Rather than focus on paper, Mulcahy instead said the company’s value was always about the creation, management and dispensing of information, “Democratization of information, however it happened.”

Threats to existing business models aren’t only coming in the form of digitization.
Look at the shoe business. In ten years, Zappos.com went from a germ of an idea to a $1 billion company. Their model? “In March of 2003, we made a decision to be about customer service,” say their CEO, Tony Hsieh, in a recent Fast  Company profile. “We view any expense that enhances the customer experience as a marketing cost because it generates more repeat customers through word of mouth.”

Customer experience as a marketing cost. It’s a whole new way of looking at the shoe business (or retail in general), and it’s a hit worth a cool billion in a short amount of time.

I can’t believe that billion dollars was incremental business to the overall market. That share came out of somebody’s  hide. And that means an existing shoe business could have done it first if the thought process and the courage to act  was there. If the Zappos model works, it can be applied to anything, and it appears that’s exactly what Zappos intends  to do.

And the radical ideas keep coming. Chris Anderson has a controversial new book, Free, that describes a future he believes will be centered largely around business models that give away 95% of their offerings and make money on the remaining 5%. Are Anderson’s ideas open for debate? Sure, but they and other seemingly nutty ideas should be regularly and honestlydiscussed. One of them may well be the next billion dollar idea.

It doesn’t take wholesale change in the marketplace to significantly disrupt a business model.
A drop in business of 10-15% can have massive impact, as many have clearly seen in the current economic downturn. But the economic downturn has not sunk all boats. Amazon.com reported a sales increase of 18% and a net income increase of 24% for their first quarter this year.

As e-commerce continues to be the growth vehicle in retail, and as Amazon continues to dominate e-commerce, I wonder how brick and mortar retail models will adapt. I believe there are many opportunities today to leverage both the growth and value of e-commerce and existing physical real estate.

Certainly, tying the web experience and the store experience together via cross-channel capabilities is a must. In the industry, we talk a lot today about capabilities like order online and pick up in store, and I think those are good.

But how can we take it further?
For example, I know from my experience with in-store kiosks at Borders that a lot more people than I expected still aren’t comfortable shopping online. They want someone to help them use the kiosks, and then they want to pay with cash at the register. Why not use our store POS systems to take cash payments for online orders? What if we took it a step further and took cash payments for other sites’ orders. What if the physical store essentially became an affiliate for a pure play e-commerce site and took the cash along with a commission? What type of opportunities might that open for both the pure play and the brick and mortar store? What other reasons should customers continue to shop physical stores well into the future as technology and delivery systems continue to improve?

What challenges does your business face in the coming years, or what businesses in general do you see most at risk? How could your business model change — maybe radically — to address those challenges? Or, do you think this is all hogwash? Let’s discuss.