Introduction to Part 2

Abstract

As we have seen in Part 1 of this book, a number of challenges occur on the road towards offering electronic services. We do not claim that in every organization each of them escalates to the level of what people perceive as a crisis. Neither do we claim that the challenges necessarily appear in this order (although generally they seem to). As an example, late starters may be better off than those who started in 1994, because there are now better tools available for the construction and administration of Web sites, and some of the challenges may therefore be more easily avoided, for instance, the “thousand pages” one. On the other hand, late starters will not be able to benefit from the bonanza of the early Internet years, and will have to show results more quickly; that is, tackle the latter challenges, such as “Where are the users?” and “Where is the payoff?”.