The IT professional in many businesses is increasingly becoming
an IT integrator. The thrust of this transition is toward piecing
together a portfolio of applications from among legacy systems,
some new development particularly of mission critical or
competitive advantage oriented software, customizing and
integrating packages, working with vendors and outsourced
developers, and creatively matching the infrastructure with the
pastiche of elements. The expansion of e-commerce and its
related tools has accelerated this tendency by adding to the decoupling
of client and server programs, allowing greater ìmixing
and matchingî of tools and components. From this perspective,
the IT role in e-commerce projects may be a fleeting one --
coming in to blend individual applications into the organizational
infrastructure and providing general consulting regarding the
technical specifications needed for enabling e-commerce
applications. In this scenario, e-commerce applications would be
treated as additional components in the organizational portfolio