How to Stay on the Move ... When the World Is Slowing Down

"When we created this organization, my job was mostly about the three Es: educating people about e-business, enticing them into trying things, and engaging them in our work," says Claitman. She initially put her efforts into brainstorming with colleagues about what Boeing might want to offer its customers online, rather than into building a fiefdom of her own. "One thing that I didn't talk about was forming committees and councils, and getting budgets."

In fact, Claitman had no budget at all for the first two releases of the MyBoeingFleet portal. "Our original budget wasn't approved," Claitman recalls, "so we begged, borrowed, and stole resources. We rolled out the first two releases of the site last year without a formal budget. I believed we needed to get the product out there in order to start seeing the impact."

Once MyBoeingFleet.com began attracting users -- and once Claitman had a chance to educate, entice, and engage nearly everyone within the commercial-aircraft group as a whole -- she finally got a budget approved. But the onus was on her to show that the site would not only make customers happy by giving them unprecedented access to information about Boeing's products, but also that it would bring in revenue.

"It's incumbent on us to add more and more capabilities on the revenue side of the equation," Claitman says. "We're adding the ability to request quotes for maintenance-and-modification services, and we're beginning to sell navigation maps and charts from Jeppesen, one of our subsidiaries. Soon, you'll be able to buy a Portable Maintenance Aid (PMA) through MyBoeingFleet." (PMA is software with maintenance data for specific models of airplanes, which can be loaded into a laptop.) Claitman says that the e-business team is concentrating on three sources of revenue: products like spare parts, information services like manuals or engineering drawings, and maintenance-and-modification services.

As the emphasis within Claitman's group has shifted from experimentation to revenue generation, Claitman has introduced more structure and more-formal procedures. She now chairs an e-business council made up of business leaders from several divisions of Commercial Aviation Services. "When you present an idea to the council, you have to stand up and explain how it can help reduce costs, grow revenue, or improve satisfaction," she says. "You have to do one of those three."

Similarly, at Minneapolis-based Target Corp., Cathy David dedicates plenty of energy to banging the gong about Target.com's successes. "I'm in a state of perpetual evangelism, trying to capture people's attention," she says. It's important to her that, as other e-tailers fade away, her peers at Target don't begin to feel complacent about the company's Web strategy or curtail their support of e-commerce.

Target's entrance into e-commerce was slow and cautious. Vice chairman Jerry Storch recalls being chided throughout the late 1990s by journalists and analysts, who told him, "You just don't seem to get the Internet." Storch's reply was, "We believe in it, and we think that it's one of the most important developments of our generation. We just don't believe that it's going to take over everything tomorrow morning."

David watched the death spirals of many of the pure-play Internet retailers and tried to conduct a mental postmortem on each of them. "Some of them were clever sites, and they offered unique products," she says. "But consumers want a brand that they know and trust. And the markets won't tolerate years and years of making no money." Target had just begun ramping up its Web store as competitors like Boo.com, eToys, Fogdog.com, and Furniture.com started winding down. And as Target has increased the resources that it dedicates to its online channel, more dotcoms have disappeared. Though neither Storch nor David is very explicit about this, they hope to attract customers who want to buy from a trusted brand, from a retailer that will still exist in a month's time. David says she has crafted Target's e-commerce strategy in part by learning from the missteps of the pure-play e-tailers. "We were happy to move along methodically, slowly, even if we had to take our licks for it," she says. "We needed to make sure we had a business model that would work."

Part of the learning was about merchandising. Though Target sells groceries in many of its 1,000 or so stores, David watched as companies like NetGrocer.com and Webvan struggled with the low margins, perishability, and logistical complexity of selling food online, and she decided "that it would be hard to do it profitably." She also decided to avoid fashion apparel and commodities like shampoo, detergent, and toilet paper. "They're not really crucial to the brand," she says. "We opted to focus on the stuff that makes Target Target. Stuff like the Michael Graves collection, which is exclusive to us, or like camping equipment from Eddie Bauer, which Eddie Bauer doesn't even carry in its own stores."