Patricia Seybold
The successful and leading advisor in e-commerce tend to come from two camps, the management strategy camp and the technology monitoring and application area. Patti Seybold, an experienced researcher, observer, and prominent of applying technology with intelligence, started a veritable revolution with her customers.com book in 1998, and she continues to be insightful and prolific in dishing out useful advice. She takes a very customer-centric view of building e-business systems and their development. By analyzing how business is being done today, and answering questions about how it can be done differently, a model will emerge to establish the right level of change, the supporting technology, and of course something that prospects will adopt.

Ensuring that other will actually use the technology and the business model together is at the foundation of all successful strategies. Seybold makes this very clear with her customer-centric approach.

Focusing on the success factors, Seybold proposes a five-step process to deliver the goods to you and your clients. These are:

1. Make it easy for customers to do business with you.
2. Focus on the end customer for the product and service.
3. Redesign your customer-facing business process from the end customer's point of view.
4. Wire your company for profit: design a comprehensive, evolving electronic business architecture
5. Foster customer loyalty - the key to profitability in electronic commerce and e-business.

Thomas Koulopoulos
Researchers that have followed the growth of the industry and stayed out on the leading edge would have to include Tom koulopoulos. His book "The X-economy" takes high ground on e-business economics and how they will affect all operations in the future.

Believing that the dot-com collapses were merely the thin eggshell surrounding our evolving e-business based economy, he argues that all business is moving this direction - the e-business direction, that is.

I agree with him: much of his approach is based on the integration of collaboration, marketplaces, and communities. The blurring of these lines has been relatively unclear due to a changing marketplace, and the wide range of success and failure of e-business solutions.

Reflect on the list below, outlining what to watch in the creation and development of your own e-business strategy.

1. Supply chain awareness: The ability to quickly access your inventory of skills and core competencies.
2. Supply chain responsiveness: The ability to rally the collective competencies of a supply chain in order to bring a product to market or respond to a customer need.
3. Demand chain responsiveness: The ability to respond to changes in a complex market by rapidly making decisions and taking action to align supply chain capabilities with the requirements of the demand chain.
4. Demand chain awareness: The ability to understand how the market perceives the value associated with its products and services, and to recognize and decipher market trends and other factors that potentially impact the business offerings or customer needs.

Each of these steps focus on taking a macro view of the capabilities of the operation, and then understand clearly what dynamics are affecting the marketplace surrounding the operation. Understanding these elements will cause a strategic path for the development of e-business strategy to be developed - one that takes into account the dynamics of the marketplace around you.