Companies aspiring to be e-businesses must expect years of upheaval before they can take full advantage of the technology, according to an expert.

Leslie Willcocks, Warwick Business School's Andersen professor of information management and e-business, said most companies would take up to three years to sort out the legacy of past culture.

"The vast majority of companies I see are still struggling through the re-engineering stage, after finding their infrastructure is inadequate. There is often a big organisational capability gap and a major rethink is needed on business processes," said Professor Willcocks, who moves to Warwick after nine years at Templeton College, Oxford.

"The whole area of e-business has been massively over-hyped and 'e' can stand for e-nough. I think many companies were anxious to demonstrate to the City they had an e-business strategy, but it is another matter to have one that actually delivers."

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Professor Willcocks named Dell and Cisco as two of the few e-businesses that had successfully made it through the re-engineering stage. Others were retrenching after throwing money at e-business, and a shake-out of the more fragile companies would be accelerated by the economic slowdown, he said.

"I see e-business as an attempt to seamlessly integrate the whole with customers, suppliers and business allies," he said.

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Professor Willcocks added that IT needed far more insight and academic rigour than was usually applied.

A consultant to companies including IBM and Ericsson, Professor Willcocks won the PricewaterhouseCoopers 2001 World Outsourcing Achievement Award for his contribution to the field.