I am currently quite intrigued by this question. Having worked in online channels within various organisational structures, including pure online, to multichannel and multinational, creating change and getting things done is impacted greatly by the organisation's structure.
Does it even matter?
Perhaps the question should be about what type of person you have leading the change?
Should the marketing team have their own IT resources separate to internal IT staff. Should the Ecommerce channel team operate as their own department and have a mix of sales, marketing and IT reporting directly into the team lead? Should an Ecommerce channel be a heavily sales driven channel, or does it thrive better with a balanced mix of marketing, sales and engineering?
Is the 'unknown' the reason why some major retailers in Australia today are not thriving in this area, because they simply cannot see the potential and do not have an organisational structure to support the change? Only last night I was researching online for a gift I wanted to buy this morning. I do not have a lot of time to browse and walk around, so I wanted to go to the shopping centre with a plan and know exactly the gift to buy. While some websites offered ‘ok’ pieces of information about their products and others did an excellent job, not one site offered me the option to know if that product was in stock in the store that I was going to. Nor did I have the option of selecting the product from the website and letting the retailer know ‘I am coming to you tomorrow, to this store, to pick up this product’. Now that would be great for me as the customer because it saves me time trying to find the product, and great for the store because they could have my order packaged and ready to go and sell me the matching accessories at the checkout.
Australians are typically known as a forward thinking, tech-savvy-loving nation. Why are we so far behind the USA, UK and other nations when it comes to businesses transforming and reinventing themselves in this digital era? Consumers want it, they are all over the web searching and selecting and shipping products from overseas, because many businesses here in Australia, for some reason, are stuck in a mindset, preventing them from evolving with the internet.
What is it about the attitudes of these businesses that is not pushing our Ecommerce nation forward. Of course, this is not directed towards all Australian businesses. There are many who see the light. Perhaps it is their US or UK parent company directing the change or perhaps they simply just want to find ways to provide their customers with a better service.
I have some assumptions to these questions but do not have a complete answer ... yet ...
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