December 11, 2000

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Entering R-Commerce From E-Commerce

By Lou Bertin

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" is the highly profitable tool, but "R" is the goal.

During a week when I'll be enmeshed in the doings at the E-business Conference and Expo in New York, it feels a bit strange to be thinking about "R-commerce."

My Dallas friend Ben Allen Francis, principal at Cremos Partners in Lewisville, Texas, coined the term. It made simple, perfect sense as he explained it to me following a recent InformationWeek roundtable.

By Ben's reckoning, we'd all be better off if we quit thinking "about E-this and E-that and just kept focused on R-commerce, which stands for right commerce. If we would just think about what's right for our companies at this particular juncture, we'd all be a lot better off. If nothing else, we'd quit confusing ourselves with buzzwords and we'd be looking at what really matters for us and for our customers." Amen, Ben.

Without bombast about blowing up existing corporate structures (both physical and metaphoric) and setting up strategic plans for cannibalization of existing customers through a separate intra-enterprise funds-digestive tract, Ben gets it exactly right.

What matters most isn't whether our organizations are paradigms of leading-edge E-technology or whether use of the online medium for conducting business meets only daily minimum requirements. What matters is how well an organization is taking care of its current customers and how well it is positioning itself to take care of future customers.

I'll happily wager a restorative beverage to any and all takers if the "back-to-business sense" theme doesn't dominate the proceedings at E-Business Expo this week. After years of advanced and occasionally fanciful theorizing, it's high time that we all cease treating the E-phenomenon as a phenomenon. "E" is no longer theory; it is now a part of business as usual. It is as much a part of our day-in, day-out tools as carbon paper and adding machines once were. "E" is the telephony of commerce at the start of the 21st century.

Does that mean we do ourselves a service by no longer scrutinizing the technologies and techniques that make the E part of the fabric of our ventures? Not by a long shot. That would be akin to long-ago physicians sitting back, satisfied that leeches had solved blood disorders, or not stopping to assess the importance of strategic technology use a decade ago when desktops first were widely littered with PCs.

The point, though, is that by looking at "E" as a separate discipline, we view the supremely idiosyncratic and complex process of managing an organization through a lens that limits the viewer to a one-dimensional view. And if businesses are anything, they are three-dimensional.

As Ben suggests, R-commerce is a far more rational way of approaching the challenges and opportunities before us. "E" is the tool and highly profitable. "R" is, or should be, the goal.

There's no need to tick through the specific negative case histories we've seen over the past 12 months--and especially the last six months--that support Ben's coinage. It's better, and certainly cheerier, to look at the success stories that support the "R" theory. Charles Schwab, Delta Air Lines, Enron, Ford, General Electric, Viacom, and WalMart. Not a dot-com among them, but all are decidedly E-aficionados and all can--and have--pointed to their use of E-business and E-commerce as the differentiator that sets them apart from their competitors. And isn't sustainable competitive advantage what business innovations are all about? So it was and so it will be. "E" was merely the latest trend to be identified as such.

In this space a year ago, some smart, good-looking fellow prognosticated (you can look it up) that this would be a year during which some decidedly old-fashioned notions would return to prominence. Little things like profits. At least my prediction was more accurate than the self-description provided above, and I thank Ben for giving simple voice to my thinking.

What's up for next year? Lots of smoke and heat and fire based on what the folks just across the Potomac from this office decide about Microsoft (it'll be split, says I) and AOL/TimeWarner (Steve and Gerry can order their new business cards). Lots of quietude, otherwise. This feels as though it's going to be a hunkering-down sort of year when organizations tend to their knitting and, in much the same way that they really began using technology as a strategic tool three or four years ago, begin adjusting to the reality that E-commerce has become R-commerce.

Does that mean no more innovation? Not at all. It simply means that innovation will come from within organizations, not from the product-development organizations of hardware and software providers or service companies. Toolmakers will remain critical, but the vision and intelligence of those wielding the tools will be the ones commanding our interest in the 12 months to come.

And as this year closes out, I hope you all have fun and play smart over the next couple of weeks. See you around the corner.

Lou Bertin is a contributor to InformationWeek.com and is a principal at Bertin & Co., an organization he founded in 1999. He formerly was managing editor/industry at InformationWeek, a founding editor at Computer Reseller News, and a senior vice president at Fleishman-Hillard in Washington, D.C., where he led government relations efforts on behalf of a variety of technology companies and consortia. He also was a vice-president at Burson-Marsteller in New York. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and is a commentator on CMP Media's TechWeb multimedia online service. He can be reached at lou.bertin@gte.net.

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