InformationWeek

"Our sphere may be very different from that of Amazon.com," says Kathy Taylor, managing director and global marketing head of the company, which has $800 billion in managed funds, "but we still face a similar challenge in pushing E-business throughout the firm from top to bottom."

Barclays has plenty of company. The third installment of InformationWeek Research's biannual E-Business Agenda survey finds not only strong growth in the momentum of E-business (now accounting for an average of 15% of a company's revenue), but also a decided trend toward E-business as an integral part of the corporate mission. In the survey of 375 business and IT managers, the share of companies that have deployed E-business in a majority of business units surged from less than half (46%) just six months ago, to nearly two-thirds (61%) today.

At the same time, there's a rapid drop-off in treating E-business as a separate, apart-from-the-central-mission project. Such approaches include partnering or investing in Web-only startups or creating a new Web-only division (see story). The upshot? In a growing number of companies, E-business isn't an adjunct activity; it has clearly become a key component of selling to and serving all customers. "My ultimate goal is to someday stand up before the senior management team and recommend that we do away with the E-business organization," says Fred Buehler, director of E-business at Eastman Chemical Corp. in Kingsport, Tenn. "The Internet is quickly becoming like the phone or fax-it's just the way you do business."

As a result, it's boom time for service providers. Companies are turning increasingly to traditional IT service providers, integrators, and consulting firms to help formulate and implement E-business strategies. With E-business so integral to doing business, these service vendors' familiarity with their clients' overall business strategies and legacy IT systems is seen as crucial. Two out of three companies surveyed use service providers to help them with

E-business; nearly half of those (49%) say that traditional outsourcers and consulting firms are their preferred choice.

"Traditional players still dominate this market, and I don't see them losing a lot of ground," says Denny Wayson, VP and chief analyst at market research firm Dataquest. EDS, IBM Global Services, and the major consulting firms "are relying on their brand names and traditional relationships" to win E-business engagements, Wayson says. "To them, an E-business initiative is just another type of IT implementation."

With one major difference: the need for speed. "Internet time" may have become a clichı, but the business imperative of delivering new Web-enabled services to customers is a very high priority. And it's arguably the No. 1 driver behind the use of service providers for E-business. Many companies believe they simply don't have enough in-house staff to build E-business applications and infrastructures in the necessary-and ever-shrinking-timeframes. Asked to name the single most-important reason they hire services help, 73% of companies cited the lack of in-house IT staff experience or manpower, or the need to focus staff resources elsewhere.

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