Now the that the bloom is off the dotcom rose, and the economy and stock market have been doused with cold economic reality, it's a good time to answer the question: What should CIOs, CEOs, and IT professionals be doing with their technology? To determine what comes after e-commerce, I have interviewed spokespeople, and reviewed and summarized news from the front lines of business, to distill 10 tips to mull over while the economy and industry evolve into the post-dotcom era. The observations presented here are a mix of best practices, new technology, business advice, and visions to be digested and implemented as the savvy reader desires.

1. "The Web is Dead"
At least it is according to Forrester Research and other forward-looking pundits.

One thing that the demise of the dotcoms has taught us is that the Internet, at least in its current form, is not a panacea. It is not the ultimate profit generator. It will no longer make you a millionaire over night. And, while many people realize that having the little 'e' in front of everything they do isn't golden anymore, they may be surprised to find that the Web is dead-at least according to several analysts and Internet gurus.

What these analysts are really saying relates to how we use the Internet and Web today. Early on, the Internet, the Web, and the browser-friendly technology that made the Internet so popular were revolutionary. However, the way they allow us to interact with the Internet is basically static, boring, and as Carl D. Howe of Forrester Research puts it, "dumb."

By contrast, the extended Internet (XNet) will do what today's browsers can't do. In essence, the extended Internet will have embedded logic, intelligence built into the interface software, and computations going on behind the scenes. These will break us loose from being tied to our desktops, laptops, PDAs, and cell phones. When we surf the Web, we won't have to use so much time sifting through the junk that our search engines dredge up. Nor will we be dependent on the keyboard and a phosphorous screen.

The XNet will "reach out and touch" all sorts of things for us, like thermostats, dog bowls, lawn sprinklers, stock markets, and flower delivery folks. And we'll only have to tell the XNet-enabled device to do things once. As we invent smaller chips and learn to embed 'smarts' into everything from household appliances to aircraft parts, the XNet will be able to turn on dinner in the oven, and change an aileron jack screw before it fails. The table illustrates the payoff:

Feature	Old Internet	XNet
Primary user interface	Browser, HTML, XML	Personalized applications
Input tools	Keyboard, mouse	Voice, video, sensors, smart devices, tablets, wearable kits
Architecture	Client/server-centric	Peer-to-peer, autonomous machine based
Connectivity Model	User driven	Pervasive or opportunistic
Languages	HTML, XML, JAVA	XML, JAVA, PDA OS, GUI tools, Net Appliance OS

As the Internet evolves, extending itself to devices well beyond the PC by moving intelligence to devices and local computers, the XNet will deliver more to the customers and employees of today's corporations. The challenge will be for CEOs, CIOs, and IT professionals in general to prepare for the XNet, instead of having to react to it. To do so they must anticipate the changes, and start understanding how their business requirements may be influenced by the evolution of the extended Internet.

Relevant Sites
For an interesting academic treatment of this topic, see the book, Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte. This site presents several reviews: www.maxwell.syr.edu
See Forrester's site, which discusses the "death" of the Web: www.forrester.com
Other sites that are working on the Xnet include: www.e-vend.net, www.weblinkwireless.com, and www.wrs.com

2. Drive Down Cost
If sales aren't so great, organizations should leverage technologies that drive customers to help themselves-at a fraction of the cost. These technologies include speech recognition, portals, and Web self-service pages.

Use of a speech-enabled, Web-enabled, or easy-to-use technology can save an organization many dollars per transaction, although this will not work for every customer or business model. It is very cost effective for businesses to have customers who can take care of their own business, when and how they want, and self-service raises customer satisfaction and builds customer loyalty. Early adopters of this concept were banks and financial institutions, airlines and travel-related businesses, and shops of almost every kind.

Self-service becomes cost effective in situations where technology provides the same or better level and type of service as a live worker, and is cheaper to maintain than humans. For instance, 60 percent of the operating cost in a typical contact center is attributable to labor. Hardware, software, network infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance make up the remaining 40 percent. Corporations that realize this fact have begun to deploy technology that lets customers serve themselves, either in contact centers or in the enterprise in general. And, while self-service is not for every type of business, it is rapidly becoming a standard offering, especially as the Internet matures.

Today, customers can help themselves using:

• The 'Net: Since the invention of the telephone, nothing has allowed folks to communicate so well, so far, so fast as the Internet-although is might not be the panacea that we all thought it was a year ago. Organizations can make it easy for their commercial or consumer customers to serve themselves by building a Web portal. This is today's hot concept to which businesses can tie such enabling technologies as voice over IP, Java, e-mail routing, Web requests, chat, page push, collaboration, database and record access, sales and product pricing, and general information. They can bundle this technology together and present it as an Active Server Page, which customers log into from their browser. Basically, this is a Web page embedded with the intelligence to know customers, understand their past buying behavior, allow them to collaborate with salespeople, view products and determine sales prices, create orders and examine a particular company's products-whenever they want. The difference between a plain Web page and a portal consists in what a portal allows internal or external customers to accomplish.
• Talking Machines: With the continued development of speech recognition and speech processing technology, it is becoming quite common for firms to add speech recognition or talking machines to their customer touch points. For example, the feature that allows an airline's scheduling system to speak flight schedules to customers (who can respond in natural language) is based on two technologies: interactive voice recognition (IVR) and speech processing. Although IVR has been around a relatively long time, and may be associated with impersonal voice mail systems, it is very effective as a self-service tool. It has already become mundane to allow customers to look up their account balances, pay bills, check airlines flight information, and get the weather. If a company adds speech recognition or natural language processing to the traditional IVR (whereby a customer pushes 1 for sales, 2 for customer service, and 3 for billing), customers can now have a conversation with their favorite company at 4:00 AM, perhaps about trades they would like to execute. For example, Charles Schwab has both Web and voice self-service. Customers can call an 800 number and speak their instructions (e.g., "buy 10 shares of X company") or check their IRA balances without being forced into menus, talking to a human, or waiting for one to become available.

Relevant Sites
Take a look at an IT-centric portal for business people: www.techrepublic.com
An IVR site that allows review of several vendors and capabilities: www.kcnet.com
Interesting dialups and examples can be found at: www.speechworks.com or www.nuance.com

3. Keep the Customers You Have
This is a perfect time for electronic customer relationship management, loyalty, and analytics.

Now that the economy has returned to earth, and businesses are retreating from their spending sprees, it's more important than ever for them to hold on to the customers they have right now. You know the old saw about a bird in the hand yielding better margins than two in the bush. That is, if you capture and manage all manner of data about your customers during the selling and service process, you could analyze this data to anticipate your customer's wants and needs, and personalize your company's response to those needs every time your customer calls, faxes, e-mails, or logs onto your company's Web site.

Today, this is done through the deployment and integration of software tools like customer relationship management (CRM); analytics, whereby organizations analyze the information captured in a database to better predict buying behaviors; and loyalty, whereby companies use data captured in a CRM to personalize the customer interaction, theoretically making the experience better for the customer, and securing their loyalty to the company. These tools are brought to life through the use of CRM software.

Organizations shouldn't be afraid to examine how far they can go to make their customer's experience pleasurable through the creative use of human and technological resources. Building customers' loyalty helps leverage their patronage, and enables a company to realize "return on relationship."

The Seamless Customer Experience: The virtual corporation has multiple touch points for the customer to use to access self-service or assisted service models. Back-end financial and sales data systems are connected, so both customers and employees can use the same data-which is up to date and accurate. No one has to hunt for or duplicate information. The customer experience becomes quite satisfying, especially when personalization is added to all customer interfaces. All customers get their own greeting, menus, and interfaces into the corporation, based on their history, buying patterns, and preferences. This is pretty powerful stuff.

Relevant Sites
There are several good CRM and electronic CRM (eCRM) Web sites, including:
Ziff Davis Business Portal for CRM: www.zdnet.com/enterprise
Jim Novo's site provides a great discussion of the concept of loyalty: www.jimnovo.com
There's a virtual tradeshow devoted to eCRM, CRM, and Internet interaction technologies at: www.crm2001online.com

4. Proactive Internal Project Management
Now that many ambitious internal projects have slowed down or have been put on hold, organizations can track what they've got.

Now is the time, while the economy takes a breather, for companies to review all the technology initiatives, platform standards, legacy systems, and Web strategies that the company has in play. Many companies have deployed so much so fast in the past several years, that they have created silos of information and technology.

Organizations should be asking the following questions and acting on the answers while they can:

• Can you get your arms around the business requirements for the technology you have deployed?
• Do the solutions interoperate?
• How scalable and upgradable are your systems and applications?
• How many technology-related projects are ongoing at any given moment? How much do they overlap?
• What is your vendor strategy?
• What project management, software design and development, quality control, and return on investment modeling tools does the company mandate?

Relevant Sites
Microsoft's best practices for project and program management: www.eu.microsoft.com
This nonprofit institute fosters all manner of thought and advice regarding project management: www.pmi.org

5. Tune Your Partnerships
Make yourself easier to do business with, whether in e-business or otherwise.

Much of the discussion surrounding the pull-back in the technology sector has focused on declining sales activity, the fight to keep market share, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. However, not enough has been said about the distribution channel-which retains the vital links to the customer. For many industries, although it may not be glamorous, the distribution channel is the only way things are sold. After all, everything from automobiles to Xerox machines uses some sort of intermediary, dealer, or sales agent to deliver the goods to the end customer.

Therefore, it's now time to review how your channel does business with you and the end customer by asking:

• Can you use a Web portal for your partners, as well as the end customer?
• Can you simplify the ordering process using an on-line order entry system?
• Can your partners check the status of an order, on-line or via fax or telephone-without expensive human intervention?
• Are your catalogue, parts list, schematics, and reference materials available via the Web?

Businesses should also ask:

• Are customer buying behavior, customer demographics, new product roadmaps, and other sales tools on-line and available to your partners?
• Are your warranty, support, and customer service process and access on-line and explicitly spelled out?

If your answer was no to two or more of the above, you may be considered hard to do business with. With the maturation of "we-based" transactional computing-the ability to complete complex sales transactions on-line-your distribution partner should have the electronic means to describe the goods to be sold, and actually execute the sales order for those goods. By automating both the selling process AND the support process, your partners can sell more of your goods faster, and have happier end customers.

Relevant Sites
This site provides a compendium of business to business (B2B) Web portals: business.geoportals.com
Also see: www-1.ibm.com

6. It's Time for the Lock-down
In turbulent times, with budget cuts and layoffs, angry people can make your technology very broken. How can you prevent it?

CIOs may well be wary of denial of service (DoS) attacks, chat rooms where participants disparage corporations and their executives by name, worms, Trojan horses, and hackers. Never before has there been such opportunity for mass economic destruction, principally via the Internet. While the 'Net provides a vast opportunity for positive and fruitful interaction, there is also the potential for great mischief when millions of people are connected together in a massive network of PCs, servers, databases, and information resources of all sorts-virtually unpoliced and unregulated.

When the wild swings of a global economy are added to the new frontier of electronic commerce, which hires and fires at a drop in the interest rate, there is high potential for a disgruntled employee or an opportunistic rogue to cause real economic damage. What should you be doing to protect your business assets from bad guys and "optimized" employees? What can you do to prevent random acts of DoS? Do you have a well-articulated security policy? Can you tell how well it works? Take a look at some the security sites and applications you can deploy today to stem the tide.

Relevant Sites
This site has a wealth of information regarding network security, DoS, hacking tools, firewalls, password schemes, security policies and more: netsecurity.about.com

7. Mobility: The Internet Anywhere, Anytime
If the vendors of mobile computing gear have their way, we will all end up using one gadget with our universal number programmed into it. As the functionality of our desktop and laptop computers is extended to our cell phones and hand-held computing devices, this one number will follow us everywhere.

By being connected, organizations can make their employees and themselves more productive, better informed, and better able to deal with the frantic pace of change. They can do so via mobile computing, rather than just wireless communications. The cell phone has evolved to allow anyone with the correct device, service, and software to:

• Access their customer database, using their CRM software over the wireless application protocol (WAP)-enabled handheld device; be it cell phone or PDA. In essence, people can use and see the same software they would use if logging in from their office PC.
• Receive almost the same plethora of services and information now available to PC users via the Internet
• Eventually combine all their computing and telephony devices into one desktop and one mobile tool. This means no more cell phone, PDA, laptop, GPS, etc.

Since mobile and wireless applications can be great self-service tools, organizations must make sure they focus them toward their customers, as well as their employees. However, before conversion to a wireless format, they need to examine very carefully whether to convert traditional applications as well as Internet-based ones.

Relevant Sites
Here are some examples of what's happening in the world of mobile computing:
This illustrates how to have your car diagnosed from the Internet: www.networkcar.com
This provides some sense of what's coming: www.dallasnews.com/technology
Yet another portal, this has mobile computing on display: itconsulting.about.com

8. How's Your Plumbing?
Just because the economy is not growing at 100% year after year anymore, users still need bandwidth.

Just because we are in a "soft landing" period, as Alan Greenspan would say, it doesn't mean your customers, employees, and senior executives won't be expecting-no demanding-that your IT infrastructure, applications, and technology embody these three F's: fast, fault tolerant, and friendly. Now is the time to look under the hood at what your network looks like. It's also time to take a look ahead at what is coming down the pike, application-wise, so you are ready to satisfy your user community when they want better plumbing. This means more bandwidth, faster application response, better remote access and mobile access, faster applications, more Internet integration and portals, and the like.

The economy is making everyone very cost conscious. Why not save your company some money by:

• Outsourcing the maintenance and upkeep of your network
• Consolidating competing applications, technologies, and departments-which are providing functions like application development, Web site building and hosting, network management, the PC desktop help desk, and so on. Organizations grew so fast in the last three years that there are islands of functionality and technology spread throughout most corporations. See the discussion of enterprise application integration (EAI) below for further insight.
• Supporting a home-based workforce. Technology now supports all sorts of remote access, wireless, and Internet-connected commuting.
• Testing what you have. Does anyone really know the state of the network? Use this time of uncertainty and retooling to really get to know your network baseline, and build from a position of knowledge.

Relevant Sites
Here's a site with advice on IT upgrading: www.techweb.com/techcenters/networks
IT directors can go for advice to: www.it-director.com

9. Enterprise Application Integration
The silos of legacy data, applications, and processes are being torn down by EAI. Make sure your organization is ready.

Although EAI sounds pretty complicated, it's not really, if you consider how your company grew. In the beginning, there was one customer database for sales, because the corporation was small enough to need only one database. Then the organization formed a marketing department, which built its own applications and database, and a customer service function, which also built its own applications and database. And this continued.

For the last 25 years corporations have been growing in this way. When they needed a program for a new function in the business, they bought it or built it, and assumed that IT would support it. As corporations grew, so did their needs for enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), e-business, and mainframe legacy systems.

As each new system was thrown into the breach, organizations paid little iif any attention to how well these systems would integrate. Rarely could information be gathered in one system and passed to another. Customers, employees, and vendors seldom had access to the same user interface and databases. And few applications were written in the same programming language, used the same hardware, used the same underlying database, and required the same skills to use.

Enter EAI. Conceptually, it integrates all the systems of hardware, software, and processes that make up a unique application. More importantly, it is methodology for and the implementation of total corporate application integration.

EAI is a holistic approach to assessing the value and requirements of each business application. EAI not only evaluates the interoperability of existing applications, but the EAI process determines the potential for future integration. It also provides a strategy and detailed plan for how to get all applications working together and performing better, and making each easier to access. This cuts down on use of the organization's network infrastructure.

Corporations cannot afford separate islands of information and functionality. Nor will customers and corporate users weaned on Internet ubiquity, ease of use, and accessibility, stand for the chaos of a hodgepodge of corporate applications. It's time to adopt EAI.

Relevant Sites
A Web portal devoted to understanding and integrating corporate applications may be found at: eai.ittoolbox.com
The authoritative journal on EAI is at: www.eaijournal.com

10. Grab the IT Bargains
Vendors are hungry, businesses are auctioning off assets, and there may be a deal that's right for you.

Throughout the U.S., the local auctioneer is one the busiest people in town. As the bottom fell out of the stock market, and the venture capitalists began to flee dotcoms, one thing was certain: The coming period of business failures and contractions was creating a huge market in liquidated assets-and very hunger vendors. Those dotcoms whose stock price was valued at $200 or $300 a share last June are seeing share prices of 50 cents, if they are still in business. Many never got that last round of financing and couldn't keep their doors open. For some, the only thing left to do is see what debts they can cover through auctioning off their inventory or capital assets.

The vendors who were supporting these high-flyers, if they are still around, are mighty anxious to make a deal these days. Therefore it's a nice time to look at your vendor relationships, contracts, and agreements. Maybe that deal you signed with PayrollOutsource.com last May might be ripe for a reevaluation. If you need some cable pulled, send the job out to bid beyond your normal circle of vendors. Check with everyone you purchase from. It's the season for renegotiation.

Relevant Sites
www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech
www.fairmarket.com
retailindustry.about.com

In Conclusion, What Does It All Mean?

It may take the economy-especially the tech-heavy side-as many as 10 years to recover. However, there's still great technology to be had; a myriad of exciting new applications, devices and approaches to be used; and new ways of doing business. All of these can help you to survive and prosper-after the fall of the dotcoms.

About the Author
Doric Earle is a Senior Contact Center Architect and Senior Manager of Professional Services for Nortel Networks, Enterprise Portal Solutions. He is also teaches Fundamentals of e-Commerce as on-line faculty member of the University of Phoenix, and former co-host for the following technology talk shows: the Computer Minute, the Computer Connection, and Bill Doric's Excellent Computing.

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