When you build software today, you're building a wide-open channel directly to and from your users. Everything about e-business is immediate, apparent, and vulnerable to quick judgments and fast exits. The software — your site — is the business. Is this how you think about your websites? If not, you're living with risks you may not recognize. Risks like sending mixed messages about your products and services, your brand, and what you think of your users and customers. Because your website is your business, your web development approach must be well-integrated with your business strategy to succeed.

The IconProcess was developed from IconATG's best practices, seamlessly integrating e-business strategy, creative design, and usability considerations into the development of a robust technical solution. It defines an ordered set of activities, major milestones, and critical artifacts (or deliverables) representing best practices in building successful e-businesses and other types of websites. The IconProcess contains a Business Strategy discipline, one of nine disciplines — mandatory for creating successful sites.

A business strategy should define what the business offers its target customers and how to generate revenue through those offerings. How do you begin to develop a business strategy? How do you incorporate the business concept, online brand, marketing strategy, and operational processes to carry it out? The IconProcess Business Strategy overview diagram, known as a workflow, highlights the activities necessary to develop a strategy that informs web development.

When your project starts, you are usually in one or two broadly defined situations:

• A well-formed business strategy exists
• A sketchy business strategy exists

When a well-formed strategy exists, your team can perform these activities by reviewing existing material, usually without producing formal artifacts because the needed information already exists in some form. In this situation, the people fulfilling the Business Strategist, Brand Strategist, Business Process Analyst and other roles may not be experts in those areas because their goal is to understand the context of a system to be developed. However, if the team finds significant gaps between what is known and what should be known, then the mix of skills needs to change in order to address those gaps.

When a sketchy business strategy exists, you will need to perform the activities in the workflow to a greater degree of completion. The most critical of these are Analyze Industry and Enterprise, Evaluate Business Opportunities, and Formulate Business Concept. The IconProcess identifies several key artifacts:

• Industry Analysis
• Competitive Analysis
• Situational Assessment
• Usability Benchmarks
• Opportunity Analysis
• Business Concept

These early activities and their artifacts allow you to discover where to focus your business resources. The artifacts may be formally documented in complete reports or informally through presentations, email, or notes on a whiteboard. Your team will tailor the formality of the approach to their situation.

When developing a new e-business, having experienced persons involved in the creation of the Brand Strategy and Brand Identity is as critical as having experienced people defining the business plan. If no Marketing Plan exists, you may need additional resources to develop an offline Marketing Plan as well as an online one.

Whether you have a solid or a sketchy business strategy, you should evaluate the need for business process modeling. A strategy is useless if you don't have the business processes and organizational design to effectively carry it out. The IconProcess offers guidance in business process modeling and addressing other operational concerns.

Driving e-development efforts with sound strategy is critical in today's environment. The strategy decisions you make should inform everything you do on the Web — services, content, editorial tone, branding, visual design, partnerships, digital marketing and more. To ensure your websites have the best mix of services and features to power your business and engage your users, you must integrate business strategy into your online ventures. IconATG knows how to define business strategy for the Web. We believe the networked world has great potential, and we want to reach it faster. To that end, we're sharing this approach through the IconProcess Business Strategy discipline, and in more information on this site. If you'd like to be notified when this new information is available, please subscribe so we can email you updates.

Contact us if you are ready for a better way to build e-businesses or other Internet, intranet, and extranet sites.