InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
September 6, 1999
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Most E-commerce sites haven't grown as quickly as eBay's, and therefore don't face the tremendous growing pains that the online auction house has. But the inescapable reality is that no site is bulletproof. And there's nowhere to hide in cyberspace.
"The wonder of the Web is that the customer knows about IT problems the same time you do," says Jan Hier-King, senior VP of electronic brokerage technology at Schwab. In the old days, customer-service representatives could run interference while IT departments fixed system glitches. Not any more. "There's no camouflage," says Hier-King. "Some people say you can't put lipstick on a pig anymore."
Rick Vanzura, who resigned as president of Borders Online last month to head one of Dell Computer's Web sites, agrees that preparation is critical. "Do very careful planning before you start to truck along," he says. "If you make architectural mistakes up-front, you can pay for them for a long time."
In addition to redundancy, programmers need to include error- logging and audit trails in their programs, so problems can be identified quickly and then studied afterward. "You have to build that into the code base," Tanning says. "You can't add it after the fact."
Companies are also learning that simple, reliable technologies have some advantages over cutting-edge features on a site--which can lead to problems. "The No. 1 success metric is availability, and No. 2 is performance," Hier-King says. "They're more important than functionality. That's a big change."
Another key is having rigorous rules for managing changes to the IT systems. Hier-King says Schwab makes 2,000 to 5,000 substantial changes to its information systems every quarter. It ranks each on a scale of importance from one to five. Level One changes, the highest level, affect the processing of customer transactions, while Level Five alterations impact Schwab's internal operations.
Illustration by John Bleck
Perhaps no company knows it better than eBay. When the online auction site went down for 22 hours on June 10 and June 11, some investors lost faith in the company. Its stock plunged $47 to $135 during the two-day crisis, wiping out $5.7 billion of its market capitalization. The stock continued to slide through the summer and dipped below $80 in early August, as eBay experienced repeated outages despite the attempts to rectify its problems (see sidebar story, "Auction Site's Bid For High Availability").
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Build It Right
Crisis management starts with trying to avoid disabling problems in the first place. Experts say every Web site should have a redundant, scalable architecture. That sounds obvious, but it's something many sites lack because they grew too fast or were created by inexperienced staff, according to Larry Tanning, CEO of Tanning Technologies, a consulting firm that specializes in helping firms that have had their E-commerce sites crash. "The first generation of the Web has been developed by 26-year-old kids who think they're Internet gurus," he says. The result is that architectures often aren't planned with crisis management in mind.
Maynard Webb, who's been brought in to help put eBay's technology house in order, agrees. "The more successful you get, the simpler you have to get," he says. "You have to make sure that anything that adds to complexity has a huge return."
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Photo of Vanzura by Andy Sacks
Photo of Hier-King by Catrina Genovese
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