How Digital Is Your Business?

The biggest, most important issue in business today--becoming digital--touches not only traditional enterprises but the most avant-garde of Internet companies as well. Old-economy companies must take steps to avoid becoming victims of capitalism's creative destruction, the unofficial system that flushes out the old to make way for the new. For dot-com companies the question is whether or not they are flash-in-the-pan businesses with no long-term prospects of profitability and customer loyalty. Most of the early efforts to answer the question "How digital is your business?" have been shrouded in techno-speak: a veritable Tower of Babel unconnected with the real needs of business. Slywotzky and Morrison show, first of all, that becoming digital is not about any of the following: having a great Web site, setting up a separate e-business, having next-generation software, or wiring your workforce. What they so creatively demonstrate is that a digital business is one whose strategic options