A study conducted by Accenture, the $11.5 billion global management and technology consulting firm, on the future use of Internet-related technologies in industry has found that there still exists optimism across industry on the use of technology despite the changes in the market condition over the past one year.
The study covered 62 of the largest companies in corporate India with the sample being spread across the length and breadth of the country including the four metros and major industrial centres like Chandigarh.
The companies were also representative of services and manufacturing companies and included companies from financial services, FMCG, white goods, chemicals, automobiles, pharmaceuticals and the technology sectors.
Kumar K Iyer, partner, Accenture, commenting on the findings said, " In looking at e-commerce opportunities it is important for a business to look at what value they can derive by such initiatives. In the last two years a lot of companies did not really look at whether e-commerce would drive value. Companies were not very focussed on what e-commerce would do and that is now beginning to change."
According to the study, businesses have recognised that the dotcom crash was actually a failure of unviable business models and are therefore not hesitant to adopt e-commerce technologies. 82 per cent of the respondents were of the view that e-commerce was just a normal part of everyday business as opposed to a distinct business venture or an alternate source of revenues. E-commerce is now being recognised as a productivity enhancing tool rather than a business model.
74 per cent of the respondents have plans to incur the same level of expenditure on technology in the current year as that incurred in the year 2000 and 42 per cent of business have not let their e-commerce plans to undergo any modification. This is in spite of 56 per cent of the respondents having the view that changes in market conditions has had a negative impact on their willingness to implement technological solutions.
"Business managers have definitely accepted that e-commerce has a role to play in increasing efficiencies and also in improving customer relationships. Indian industry has realised that this is not something about going hi-tech but that it is all about generating business and value, " Iyer added.
The impact of e-commerce technologies on business dynamics has also been acknowledged with 87 per cent of respondents agreeing that B2B exchanges would turn many of their goods and services into commodities and that it would increase competition in their marketplaces.
On the flip side though, the study found that implementation of technologies was now taking longer than expected. 56 per cent of the businesses which were in the process of adopting technological solutions were of the opinion that the time frame for implementation was taking more than the estimated time and availability of right skills was an impediment to e-commerce initiatives.
Also businesses preferred to follow rather than be leaders in their e-commerce related initiatives and only 16 per cent of the respondents identified themselves as innovative leaders.
63 per cent of the businesses in the sample cited their inability to implement new technology on a workable basis as an obstacle in the implementation of e-commerce. This was attributed to the lack of alliances or joint ventures and sidelining of external entities in these e-commerce initiatives.
According to Iyer, " Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Indian companies have lagged behind in implementing an e-commerce strategy."
