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January 31, 2000

Rapid-Fire IT Infrastructure
E-business is causing new blueprints to be drawn for IT architectures

By Jennifer LeClaire and Lane Cooper

Illustration by Bob Daly

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hen outdoor outfitter Cabela's Inc. first looked at doing business on the Web in 1996, the company considered approaching the Internet as another tool in its marketing arsenal. But Internet marketing director Craig Brauer quickly realized that this strategy would result only in a glossy front-end system that would increase customer-service requirements with a deluge of new and prospective customers.

Beyond creating a good first impression on its Web site, executives for the Sydney, Neb., company wanted to make sure that product databases, customer profiles, and fulfillment applications were integrated with the browser interface to ensure a positive experience for clients visiting the site. That's why Cabela's, a 36-year-old, privately held direct-mail company, had to integrate front-end apps running on Sun Microsystems hardware with the back-end fulfillment and customer-service systems that had run for years on an AS/400 platform. "Cabela's is very much a customer-oriented company, so we attacked things from the back-end integration first and did the front end second," Brauer says.

Cabela's has basically standardized on TCP/IP as its communication protocol and Unix for its front-end Web applications. "While the AS/400 continues to be the primary online transaction processing system, Unix became the platform of choice to handle content management and production," Brauer says. To integrate the two environments, Cabela's developed bridge software that runs over the existing TCP/IP network.

Brauer has addressed problems that many IT managers are just discovering: Network infrastructure is "the foundation that makes your online business get the return customers," he says.

The infrastructure issue is affecting all businesses. From fledgling dot-com startups to established companies such as Cabela's, E-business is forcing companies to rearchitect all or part of their IT infrastructures--and to do it quickly. For better or worse, the classic timeline of total business-process reengineering--where consultants are brought in, models are drawn up, and plans are implemented gradually over months or years--just isn't fast enough to give companies the E-commerce-ready IT infrastructures they need. A much more ad hoc IT development process is frequently in effect--one that provides fast, piecemeal solutions to the burgeoning capacity and scalability demands of E-business.

"People talk about process reengineering. However, a lot of these things sound very good in practice but are very difficult to do, because they affect the whole company," says Jonathan Adams, technical lead at an IBM E-business software group in London.

Adams says many companies can't afford to go back to the drawing board and completely rearchitect critical systems such as order fulfillment and product databases from the bottom up because they greatly depend on existing infrastructure. More often, business-process reengineering is done reactively. Beyond its disruptive effect on business operations, most IT managers and executives don't feel there's enough time to take a holistic approach to the problem, so they attack tactical issues one-by-one. Many companies tackle a specific problem with a definitive solution rather than completely overhaul the workflow that spans from a customer query to online catalogs to order processing.

A flexible plan is key to effectively managing the speed at which sites must be updated, says James Chong, chief technology officer for PlanetRx. com Inc., an online pharmacy in South San Francisco, Calif. PlanetRx.com maintains more than 20,000 pages of health-care content on its site.

James Chong Photo by Robert Houser "A plan sometimes doesn't work, but planning does," Chong says. PlanetRx. com migrated from a Windows NT development environment to Java and Enterprise JavaBeans in the last few months, becoming more reliant on Unix.

Chong, a former VP of architecture and planning at Charles Schwab & Co., says having to update the PlanetRx. com site twice or more a week forces his team to move at breakneck speed. Working with parallel teams is the only way his company can keep up with the constant releases of the site. He has two versions of the site in development at all times with one team of programmers and designers working out the kinks while the other team focuses on future releases and upgrades.

"Time is absolutely of the essence. The whole notion of a development cycle--if you were to apply it to two releases a week--is probably not workable," Chong says. "So we have to adapt to a model that lets us move that fast and still doesn't compromise quality."

At St. Joseph Health System in Orange, Calif., keeping pace with new federal regulations as well as E-commerce are equally pressing goals. With installations spread across California, New Mexico, and Texas, St. Joseph has already instituted a centralized E-commerce infrastructure to administer the flow of data among its owned sites, affiliates, and trading partners.

When the company expanded its network in 1998 to share patient data and track the flow of supplies throughout its trading community, it built an E-commerce engine that supports multiple trading protocols--including Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Exchange (S/MIME), the Extensible Markup Language, and EDIFact. Centralized administration lets St. Joseph troubleshoot electronic transactions throughout its health-care system (see Case Study, "Centralized Administration").

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