When you are building your B2B digital strategy you should first sit down and map out your current IT landscape. Get some Textas and make it visual, so everyone is on the same page. After that, map out your future state IT landscape — we recommend looking three years ahead — making sure to add all systems, platforms, plugins, and tools. Most B2B businesses will have 15–25 elements that all need to work together. 

Once you have your landscapes mapped out visually, you can start your planning and scoping process. Your digital eCommerce platform is a critical part of a bigger IT landscape piece, and when considering which platform to use or build upon, how these systems talk and connect is critical. 

The key systems to consider and map within your IT process landscape are: 

1. Enterprise resourcing planning (ERP)
2. Finance systems (if not integrated into ERP)
3. Contract management systems (if not integrated into ERP)
4. Payment gateways
5. Shipping providers
6. Order management systems (OMS)
7. Warehouse management systems (WMS)
8. Product information management systems (PIM)
9. EDI systems
10. Punchout automation (and customer ERPs)
11. Marketing automation
12. Customer segmentation and content personalisation systems
13. In-store technology / point-of-sale (POS), self-service kiosks and information panels
14. Customer relationship management (CRM)
15. Customer service systems 
16. Analytics / business intelligence
17. Data warehouse systems 
18. Middleware systems / enterprise service bus (ESB) / API management 

Download our whitepaper ‘How to Succeed at Digital Transformation in B2B eCommerce’ here download the whitepaper, to read the full ‘Your IT Landscape’ Chapter.