InformationWeek

January 22, 2001

The Wilder Side:
The Uncertainty Factor

We seem shocked when events hurl us back to the lessons of the past

Clinton Wilder n the December night that Al Gore conceded the U.S. presidential election to George W. Bush, I was in a Broadway theater watching Gore Vidal's The Best Man. In the play, rival presidential hopefuls wrestle with the question of just how far a candidate should go to win the White House, and at what cost to himself and the nation.

Sound familiar? Vidal wrote that play more than 40 years ago. In both politics and business, the most important challenges we face don't change as much as we're often led to believe. Yet we seem shocked and amazed when events, however unpredictably, hurl us back to the lessons of the past.

Think back 13 months to how we viewed the approaching year, 2000, as 1999 drew to a close. We were apprehensive about our computer-dependent world with the Y2K bug looming. But the new economy of E-commerce? No worries. It was humming along. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was Time magazine's Person of the Year. And if you thought business-to-consumer E-commerce was hot--well, that was nothing compared with the potential of B-to-B!

We were also entering the year when we'd choose a new president, the first to be elected in the Internet age. The candidates used the Web for fund raising, E-mailing, and campaign messages. They wooed support in Silicon Valley and the potential of online voting was debated and discussed. It was the year 2000! We were living in a brave new world, and it was pretty darn exciting.

Then came November and December, when both our electoral system and our new economy seemed to fall apart before our eyes. I don't think the two events were related--as far as I know, no one tried to seek venture funding for www.count ingchads.com--but the parallels were remarkable. While CNN's reporters camped outside Tallahassee, Fla., courthouses anticipating the next legal twist and turn, we awaited the closing of the latest Web site or B-to-B marketplace on a daily basis.

Perhaps the coup de grace came in early December. Ventro Corp. disclosed the shuttering of its pioneering Chemdex and ProMedix marketplaces during the Net Market Makers GroundZero conference in Los Angeles, the year's marquee gathering of E-marketplace operators.

A week later at E-Business Expo in New York, the feeling was palpable: The party's over. "Now," said opening keynoter and IBM chairman Lou Gerstner, "we come to the hard part. 'E' does not stand for easy.

E-business does not mean easy money or easy life. We all have a lot of hard work ahead." Example: integrating Web-enabled business processes so customers can get a simple view of the company and employees can easily share documents and files about those customers.

Gerstner's speech was quite a contrast to the kinds of Internet trade-show keynotes we used to hear, with rhetoric about Changing the World Forever and the End of Everything, from manufacturing distributors to print magazines to malls.

"It's time for seriousness," says Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. "A lot of people weren't building serious businesses the past two years. The Net itself isn't a business model, and it never was."

So where do we turn for guidance in all this turmoil? The past. To help figure out how to resolve the election mess, we looked back to the times of John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison and how the country handled crises in those eras. Many of the challenges facing CIOs and E-business executives are similar to those of earlier technology eras--mainframes, client-server, whatever.

In many cases, the biggest challenge is just figuring out what your ideal business process would look like. "If you can tell me exactly what you want done," quips Warren Weiss, CEO of software integrator Asera Inc., "I'll do it for free."

The Internet is a very powerful force, but not even the Net can change the basic laws of sustaining and growing a company. Technology and companies will continue to change at warp speed, but what will never change is the ultimate goal: harnessing IT and the Web to attract, retain, and satisfy customers while running a profitable business. In these uncertain times, it should be reassuring to focus on such an immutable truth.

At least it's more solid than the one about how the selection of a president occurs on Election Day.

Clinton Wilder is InformationWeek's editor at large, covering E-business. You can reach him at cwilder@cmp.com.

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