e-Strategy Pure and Simple
Chapter One
Strategic Fuzziness ²: Page Seven

Last year close to 50% of the capital investments made in this country were on information technology, or IT, as it referred is to in the vernacular. This number is projected to increase 10 to 15% per year for the next several years.

The New Economy

This represents an enormous shift in the country’s resources away from the traditional investment in so-called "bricks and mortar" to IT. This shift is creating what has become known as the "new economy". We are swiftly becoming a "wired" economy which is rapidly moving from "bricks" to "clicks".  

The cause of this increasing dependency on information technology is the Internet. Here are some statistics that demonstrate the rapidly growing influence of the Internet on businesses and consumers. In the last five years, the amount of transactions conducted on the Internet jumped from a negligible sum to over $600 billion and this number is projected to increase at a double digit pace for several years. To date, 80% of these transactions are business-to-business (B2B) whereas only 20% is business-to-consumer (B2C).

The business-to-consumer portion, however, is projected to increase as the following charts indicate.

Source: International Data Corporation