Chinese CIOs Take Lessons in E-Commerce

SADDLE BROOK, N.J. (02/04/2000) - They came from the other side of the world hoping to learn how tech-savvy U.S. organizations are leveraging the Internet to grow or improve their operations. They left with lessons about how some U.S. companies and government agencies are making e-commerce work for them - and where there's still room for improvement.

Last month, a delegation of 31 CIOs from Shanghai embarked on a two-week tour to learn how U.S. companies are transforming themselves into Internet-based businesses.

What insights did they glean from their visits to Silicon Valley and metropolitan New York? For one thing, electronic-business technology infrastructures in China are remarkably similar to those in the U.S., said Peng Jialiang, CEO of Shanghai Real Estate Information Network Co., a Shanghai-based real estate agency. And as in the U.S., high-tech initial public offerings "are hot" in China, especially those that target consumer markets and retail services, said Peng.

But there are differences. In China, companies and government agencies use "more of a top-down push" to sell products or distribute information online, Peng said.

In contrast, U.S. organizations have created online applications and services that are much more customer-focused, an approach that Peng and other Chinese executives said they would like to adopt.

Unlike U.S. CIOs, who would rarely expect to learn innovative business practices from government agencies, many of the Chinese CIOs said they were impressed with the online business applications at New York City's Department of Information Technology.

The executives were flabbergasted, however, to see just how much paper ends up on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Jia Yigang, chief engineer at Shanghai's environmental protection agency, said the trading floor "should be much more automated."

The trip included visits to 3Com Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif.; Apple Computer Inc. in Cupertino, Calif.; Cisco Systems Inc. in San Jose; and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. in New York. So which company most impressed them? "Cisco," said four of the CIOs in unison. Why? "Their marketing structure is set up very well," said Xu Fei, a research and development manager at Shanghai Information Investment Inc.

Many U.S. CIOs gripe about not having a seat at the board level. But they're leaps and bounds ahead of Chinese CIOs, who are treated much like the back-office data-processing managers of the 1970s and early 1980s, said Richard Mandelbaum, chairman and CEO of AppliedTheory Corp., the New York-based Internet service provider that arranged the U.S. site visits.

The Shanghai executives said they hope the lessons from their U.S. tour will help change that back-office perception. Said Yang Chenqu, CIO at Shanghai Zhong, a business-to-business e-commerce vendor, "We can learn a lot from the dot-com companies and try to develop that type of culture to improve [our businesses]."

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