TO do well online, close your website department.

The website department as we know it today is approaching obsolescence, even anachronism.

It’s like a typists’ pool-—convenient but unessential, an extra layer of fat that is fatal in today’s time of lean startups and agile companies.

Today, the Internet should be central to everything that you do. It should be the base on which you add layers for your specific business processes – not the other way around. Having one department do online tasks while the other sections stay offline is as old-fashioned as the typists’ pool.

In today’s business environment, the Internet should be a core component. Everyone in the company should be mindful of and take part in the Internet strategy, which must permeate every department.

To fully understand the Internet, however, you have to keep in mind that it is a product of engineering, a field that worships efficiency. In the digital world, less is indeed more. You also have to understand the military roots of the network and its initial designers’ needs for the Internet to be decentralized to survive a nuclear bomb attack on several nodes.

These are the reasons behind the disintermediating character of the medium — it renders centralized and inefficient systems obsolete.

Putting an Internet layer on business processes is not efficient. What you should do, instead, is to reengineer business processes on the Internet and make these efficient and decentralized.

The opportunities the Internet brings into any sector are huge and local businesses have started to realize that.

Most businesses nowadays have at least a website and a social networking presence. Increasingly, Internet skills have also become a requirement for workers.

No business or sector is untouched by the Internet. Those that embrace it and take advantage of the efficiencies it brings to any business operation do well.

Those that don’t are swept away.