Personal Web Site-
Functionality
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KEYS TO THE WEB! |
The Web at the beginning of the 21st Century is all about:
· Reversing out the work (e.g. ESOP automation)
· Process automation
· Groupware or shareware
· e-payments
· Data
· Relationships (sissyfight.com)
· Supply chain management
· Customization
· Simplicity and focus-- For example, Internic.ca Corporation is a domain name registrar. Their "pixie dust" is their name-- anyone who knows anything about the net knows to look up the name 'internic' (internet nickname). Also they keep their web sites very simple to use and understand and they are much focused on doing one thing really well. If they want to add a second function, they start another site. Robert C. Hall, internet guru.
· Guerrilla marketing by media release
· e-commerce
· e-business
·
Source Control
· surfing/the browser
· intricating the web in work flow processes (move your desktop to the web-- everything is on the web (either in a public space or private, password protected space) unless you specify differently; e.g., CPM and project scheduling, file sharing-- the MIT model: IP wants to be free but 'tools' cost you money.)
· Personal Web Sites
· Personal IP
·
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 home buyer 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 endeavour 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 home builders 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 storey, 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 home builder 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 metres 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,
e-payments
Everything from invoicing to personal bill paying is going to go on line.
Data
The web is all about ... data. People want to get the information and get off your site. The killer app is ... information not downloadable movies.
Many real estate people don't put prices on their web sites; they want people to call in for that info. This is in most cases a mistake in my view. If you are selling lots for $150k each, you want to screen out people who are looking for $35,000 lots- less embarrassing for them and better for you.
Relationships
People are forming intense relationships on line- between suppliers and their clients, romances, pen pals, game playing buddies (Bobby Fisher, the reclusive chess genius, who has not been seen in 25 years, is reputed to be playing speed chess against other grandmasters over the net in 2001), newsletters, discussion groups, IM, chat rooms, video conferencing, cyber sex, and so on. Check out www.sissyfight.com to see how little girls are building relationships on the web. (I have three little daughters who are sissyfight champs).
Computers did not really find their métier; reach their potential until they became mediums of mass communication with the advent of Mark Andreessen’s Mosaic browser in 1992, 93 and 94. They took almost as long as early 20th Century electrification (a rollout in N.A. that took many decades) to start to lift the productivity curve. And we are just at the beginning of the productivity impacts of the web despite the recent slowdown of 2001.
Supply Chain Management
Most people take this to mean managing your relationships with your suppliers. I think the definition should include beginning to end- from the customer to the end product or service to the furthest possible supplier. This is e business not to be confused with e commerce.
(I have my doubts about e-commerce, at least the type of e-commerce represented by the amazon.com book selling business model.
The internet is all about automation.
That means that downloading music from the net makes sense but placing an e-commerce order for an amazon.com book on a UPS truck, followed by a UPS plane, then another UPS truck just to get it to your front door to find that you are not home, that does not sound like a revolutionary technology to me.
But amazon.com does offer some truly astounding advantages to the user- their use of a relational data base means that their web site can prompt you with titles of other books that other people are buying who bought the one you were initially interested in. Because they have millions of customers, this is a powerful short cut for researchers and one of the reasons I use amazon.com. It also obviously helps amazon.com sell more product.
When IBM or others finally perfect e-paper then the amazon.com model for book selling will have truly arrived.)
E business means that when you sell tons of hockey skates in
It means that in your architecture office, your suppliers and sub contractors like say the structural engineer or HVAC systems engineer have access to your design drawings, they can add their designs to them, invoice you for their time and your billing systems are tied to your clients including construction certification. It means that your consultants show up in the field ate the right time to certify things!
Customization
The web allows you to customize your offerings. Every customer or client can be treated differently.
In the home building business, customers can each choose a different upgrade package and your suppliers can respond accordingly. As they add more features to their shopping carts, their total price is changing too.
You want to be using standard processes to produce custom products or services (e.g., web based, reverse out the work to clients, new home store). This gives you maximum leverage of your IP. Custom processes for custom results is expensive (e.g., the traditional consulting business.) The worst model is of course where you have custom processes to yield standard products or services (the barber or the shoe maker).
Dr. Bruce M. Firestone,
http://www.dramatispersonae.org/DesignEconomics/PersonalWebSite.htm
http://www.dramatispersonae.org/DesignEconomicsFrontPage.htm
http://www.dramatispersonae.org/