Customer relationship management was cited as the most important focus for firms, followed by e-business, sales-force automation, enterprise resource planning and applications management.

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E-Trade's options management business may prove to be a secret weapon, with a market share of 60% and 3, 500 corporate clients.

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At Oracle, Ray served senior product management roles in the E-Business Suite.

FORBES: I cover enterprise strategy and disruptive technology

It plans to hire specifically for e-commerce, business analytics, application development, engineering and project management areas.

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Second, don't be lulled into believing that e-business alone is a substitute for the rules of good project management.

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Mohanbir Sawhney, professor of e-commerce at Kellogg School of Management and Steven Kaplan, at the University of Chicago Business School, argue in a recent article that the value created by business-to-business hubs, where every buyer and seller can potentially link with every other, vastly exceeds that of business-to-consumer models where there are lots of buyers, but just one seller.

ECONOMIST: Construction and the Internet

The technology magazine Red Herring sponsors a workshop on attracting investment, there are keynote speeches from senior management figures at Intel, Digital, Citicorp and Cisco Systems and Intel unveils "e-business solutions and consumer applications" on its stand, its first-ever appearance in the five-year history of the show.

BBC: UK takes on the Internet World

Companies surveyed said building an infrastructure to support e-business is their top priority for next year, followed by ERP implementation, sales force automation, customer relationship management and applications management.

CNN: 8 of 10 companies expect no major Y2K woes

This may mean that you use low-cost Web-based services to provide order taking, accounting, e-mail services, database management, or a hundred other functions that are central to the operation of your business.

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