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NobleOak's team of business experts have put together articles on
business planning and business models, marketing plans, and tips and
strategies on web site design and functionality. We also introduce
the terms 'pixie dust' and 'guerrilla marketing' both vital elements
to your short and long term business success. Enjoy!
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"Web Site Functionality" (Part 1 of 2)
The Web at the beginning of the 21st Century is all about:
· Reversing out the work (eg. ESOP automation)
· Process automation
· Groupware or shareware
· e-payments
· Data
· Relationships (sissyfight.com)
· Supply chain management
· Customization
· Simplicity and focus
· Guerrilla marketing by media release
· e-commerce
· e-business
· email
· surfing/the browser
· intricating the web in work flow
· Personal Web Sites
· Personal Intellectual Property
· Making Money While you lie on a Beach
Reversing out the work
The web allows you to get your customers, clients, suppliers or what have you to do your work for you and be happy doing it too! People want more control over what they do. Take a homebuyer for example. Let them go to the web and select which subdivision they want to live in or neighborhood, whether they want to buy a new home or an existing one, if a new one, let them choose which architect, which house plan, which builder, which upgrades, which lawyer and so on.
All of this is hugely time consuming- why not let the purchaser do your work for you?
The internet is all about automation.
Let me give you an example.
Today, with all due respect, the home building business is still a craft based endeavor which, if it were compared to the computer industry, would still produce five function calculators that look like primitive World War II vintage Turing machines (used for breaking Japanese and German codes)- big, clunky and expensive.
Ultimately, a home builder's web site will allow consumers to 'goggle' in to the site in three dimensions, to choose the model that they want, the lot that they want and then to load up their shopping carts with the features they desire. As they make changes to their design and add and subtract amenities, the calculator will tally and show them their costs.
Visa and Mastercard are moving upstream- their credit cards will be used for everything including buying a new car or buying a home. There is a small but fast growing market for power cards that carry credit limits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But this home buying e-commerce transaction using a credit card is only the tip of the iceberg. In all probability, it is the e-business applications that will have the most dramatic impacts on home building. Pre-authorized suppliers and sub-trades will log on to the builder's web site to estimate the volume of work required and to bid on it. Scheduling, based on just-in-time delivery, will be net based. Payments will flow business to business via e-payments. Municipal inspectors will log on to see when they are required for inspections. Municipalities will recognize that homebuilders are their clients. The number of separate subcontractors and trades will fall from 25 or 30 today to just 6 or 7.
If former Russian President, Boris Yeltsin in his early days as a construction boss in Sverdlovsk (1,000 miles east of Moscow) could build five story, wood frame apartment buildings in five days (albeit with a huge crew), surely we can learn to build houses in 30 days or less at higher levels of quality, with fewer defects, higher margins for the industry and lower prices for consumers.
The homebuilder will become a web site operator. Legal closings, land registry documentation, mortgage financings … all will be web enabled.
Process Automation
Example: ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans). In the not too distant past, large companies had an army of clerks to run their ESOPs. It meant that every time you wanted to change your payroll deduction to buy your company’s shares, you needed to fill in a paper form, get it over to payroll; someone there would enter it into a proprietary computer system (making errors in the process) to get the bank to change their system (also proprietary) to change your pay cheque. Now you can go onto the system yourself, plug in your password, see how many shares you own, what your current deduction is, change it and submit it automatically. You can buy more shares or sell the ones you already own. This is democratization as well as providing a higher level of service. It also reverses out the work to the client (in this case the employees) and gets rid of an army of clerks who can now go on to retrain and presumably do a higher level and more interesting kind of work. It is pennies a transaction instead of $80.
Example: AutoCAD and Budgets. Imagine how powerful a tool it would be for architects if their autocad program was also tied into a unit cost calculator so that every time they added an extra ten meters of drywall, their overall budget number appearing in a corner of their screen went up accordingly. Better yet, tie in AutoCAD to not only a unit cost program but a cost/benefit analyzer and a CPM program so that you not only know what impact a change in design has on your budget but also your cost/benefit ratio and your schedule too.
Groupware
It is important to distinguish between email and groupware. Groupware allows people to share files and documents and update and change them in a collaborative way where they are working on one source document. Email is totally abused- far too many people are getting cc'd or bcc'd and then we have a huge problem of multiple copies of the same file at different stages of development bogging down our systems.
Now it is possible to work 24 hours per day on shop drawings using groupware and offices in, say, New York, Korea and India all having access to the same drawings and each working 8 to 5.
e-payments
Everything from invoicing to personal bill paying is going to go on line.
Continued
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| 11/1/2002 |
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"Mapping Interface"
"Getting the Business Model Right and Pixie Dust"
"Tips On Web Site Design"
"Web Site Functionality" (Part 1 of 2)
"Web Site Functionality" (Part 2 of 2)
"Marketing Plan: Find Clients and Customers through Guerrilla Marketing" (Part 1 of 3)
"Marketing Plan: Find Clients and Customers through Guerrilla Marketing" (Part 2 of 3)
"Marketing Plan: Find Clients and Customers through Guerrilla Marketing" (Part 3 of 3)
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