This approach to creating an eBusiness strategy is built on four steps:

1. Knowledge building and capability evaluation
   Develop a clear vision of what the customer’s needs are. Develop a clear understanding of what capabilities you need in order to address the customer needs. This vision must be communicated in a way that every employee understands.
   
2. eBusiness design
   Develop a coherent design that lays the foundation to address the new customer needs. If the customer wants self-service, then your business design must facilitate that. The eBusiness design is the foundation that helps the company get where it needs to go.
3. eBusiness blueprint
   Create a link between the eBusiness design – the business goals – and the technology foundation. If you want to provide a self-service business model, determine what application framework you need. Clearly define the projects and key milestones that must be achieved.
4. Application development and deployment
   Translate these key milestones and projects into integrated applications. Make sure that employees know how performing their job helps corporate objectives. Get periodic feedback about what’s going well and what isn’t so that the plan can be refined.

The management team described it as an ‘evolutionary’ process that took a couple of months to complete. A key point was the extent to which their needs and/or their perception of their needs changed over the process. Firstly, like all businesses their business evolved during the process thus changing the requirements and, secondly, their understanding of their customer’s needs changed during the process too. A good example of this is the way they came to realise that none of their customer’s requirements required online purchasing. Their assumption at the outstart of the project was that this would be a natural evolution. They now have no plans to move down this path.

Lotus’s approach also highlights the importance of investing time and resource into understanding how key customers would like to conduct business with you. The Managing Director invested time on customer visits to draw out the customer ‘wish list’. Lotus also employed an external consultant to help design and run the process. This consultant then went on to join the company. The team were confident that the external perspective of a consultant helped in the design of the process and with choosing the right technology to deliver on the requirements. They also felt that it was really useful to then bring the consultant into the company on a full time basis as it internalised his knowledge and skill set and thus strengthened the company’s IT capability.

The next section looks at the business requirements that were driven out by the process described above.