In recent years many Web sites have evolved from "skunk works" projects within information sevices or the marketing organization. These early Web deployments in the basic presence and prospecting stages, are simple to set up and are often low-traffic with relatively static pages. According to the needs of the business and competitive pressures, these small sites often evolve into large and costly internal development projects considered strategic to the business.

Once an organization sees the strategic potential of the Internet for its business, it makes a significant investment, in software, hardware and development headcount, and the Web application evolves to the business integration or business transformation stage. These sites can include many interlinked business applications. Software forms the heart of these applications, whether they are Web front ends to traditional transaction systems or collaborative environments where customers can share ideas.

For determining the maturity level of organization's e-business initiatives, the Gartner Group, a leading market research organization, has defined four stages of evolution, which we strongly support and adopt in our project approach. De following depicts the stages in which we differentiate.

stage process Basic Presence The company deploys information about the company, its products, and its services onto the Web site. Pages are static and limited in number. Prospecting & Channel Enhancement The company adds many more pages of information about the company and its products. Visitors can interact with the site to request additional information by submitting forms to the site and can conduct keyword searches of site information. Business Integration The site supports eCommerce transactions, has full-text intelligent search capability throughout, and provides services to customers, including account and delivery information, support, and community building features such as online chat, hosted Web pages, and other activities. Business Transformation & convergence The Web site changes nearly every aspect of the company's business processes and becomes integral to the business. Web sites at this stage of development provide electronic document interchange with suppliers, vendor integration services, and content personalization services for visitors.