Professional Expectations
how geeky are you?
The (hard to measure) goals of this course:
To develop a more accurate mental model of the driving and
restraining forces affecting what digital networks are doing to organizations
and economies.
How will you know?
Your fluent use of vocabulary and the sophistication of your ideas
at the Bistro and during oral presentations
To maintain a complex
web site.
How will you know? Your online portfolio (web site); your
laptop's web development toolkit
To use the Internet to responsibly and professionally
communicate, present,
research, and collaborate.
How will you know? The shifting balance among oral, print, and
online information transfer, for example, your homework, presentations, and
class participation
e-Business
The Effects of the Internet
The easy to measure goal of this course:
to develop a business / marketing plan designed to compete in the pop
music industry in an age of transition
Some quick definitions: what's the difference between e-business
and e-commerce?
Port 80's The Docks
Systems and Processes:
e-Business
Planning to Succeed
In this course, we are going to collaborate on a business plan
and marketing plan designed to compete with the Big Five -- now Big Four -- record labels. In order to write an
informed and propitious plan, you need to learn more about how that industry
works. It is currently under great stress from the driving force of the
Internet, so it makes an interesting case study of an industry especially
vulnerable to competition. Right now, the four/five largest companies that have 80%
of the market are not growing as fast as they would like to. So they're suing
their customers. Talk about a revenue model!!
It begs the question of why growth is so important. Why can't
they just adapt to a shrinking market? The transportation industry has many
examples from horses to trains to cars to 18-wheelers. Other segments of the
entertainment industry have many examples: live theater to movies to TV to VCR
to DVD. What's
so special about the pop music industry?
What will our business plan look like?
outline for your plan
example - BPlan.com's
Edgar Risk Ventures, Ltd.
I am going to adapt the standard plan outline for our purposes. For example, at this stage of
R&D, any financials you come up with are going to be whimsical, at best. Thus, in the section
of your business plan on Financials, we'll probably just use some ballpark
numbers or maybe we can use US Economic Census statistics to draw a
portrait of the industry as a whole.
The last night of class, you -- alone or with a partner -- are going to take turns presenting
your plan. You will be the principal author and steward
of the ideas.
For the next two months, we will go through the parts of a business plan in order of development, not
in order of their final presentation.
Internet in class
We are going to use the Internet for all the things you used it
in MBA 504. The course web has the same pages, reports, syllabus, case,
roundtable, news. You'll learn more about doing research online, harvesting
information, and displaying the results of your research on your Plaza web in a
professional-looking web page. These pages will include images that you will
want to crop and resize in Paint Shop Pro.
In MBA 600, you'll spend more time in the Port 80 section than
you will in the Gizmos, Inc., section. You'll make a couple of web pages
to show during oral presentations. You'll use the Bistro for weather reports and
roundtables. Hopefully, you'll keep up with the discussions in some of the other
forums, such as Ask Stephanie and MBA SO.
Key concepts
If we're here by 9 PM,
that would be good
The Always-On Commons:
Our Culture, Our Heritage
What is the Internet?
It's not a thing; it's an agreement.
The networks that comprise the Internet are things,
however. Cobbled together from peering agreements among the networks (they
freely exchange bit steams without accounting), they make a built environment.
The Internet has a nature, but it is not natural. That nature can change. It can
be un-built and re-built.
You've been aware of the Internet for at least a decade or so. At some
point, you started participating. You
may not like it, but you can't avoid it.
Your mental model of the Internet has developed slowly and
as the result of personal experience rather than from learning about it in a
textbook like you might learn about the railroad system or the telephone system.
I hope that these first three web pages below confirm your mental
model. However, I suspect that the vision they present will contradict at least
parts of your mental model.
What will you do? Stick with your old mental model? Or change
it? To what?
What the Internet is like now:
World
of Ends
The
Paradox of the Best Network
Rise
of the Stupid Network
These next three web pages, from Ricci Street's Port 80, are
full of links that will take you off in a thousand directions. I'd like you to
read the three pages and then to explore as far beyond as you have time and
interest.
New
Media aka Distributed Networks
What
is the Internet
Who
Runs the Internet?
The Internet is
an agreement to share data among computers.
These computers are networked via
copper and glass fibers and via radio waves. This network of computers has several features that distinguish it from other
networks:
digital
as opposed to analog (C-A-T as opposed to a picture of a cat)
binary, which
means two (ones and zeros), as opposed to other digital
systems such as DNA, which has four "letters", or our English
alphanumeric system, which has about forty if you toss in a few punctuation
marks
packet-switched
as opposed to the telephone's circuit-switched
distributed
heterarchically like a fishnet as opposed to hierarchically like your employer's
org chart (above right)
standardized on
openly developed (as opposed to proprietary, secret) protocols such as transmission
control protocol / Internet protocol (TCP/IP) and hypertext transfer protocol
(HTTP)
The Internet is an
open-source self-organizing adaptive many-to-many
peer-to-peer international file-sharing public collaborative
agreement
based on human goodwill, which means it's teetering on anarchy. In human
culture, this commons has
the fertile ground of innovation.
In this sense, the Internet differs from most business
organizations, which are top-down, inflexible, information-hoarding, for-profit
corporations with legal status. These organizations have been built over the last hundred years
with legal protections and sanctions. The commercial code of laws and the regulations supporting them are voluminous, contradictory, overwhelming,
confusing, and
hard to follow in practice. And expensive. The cost is measured in the billions
of dollars annually. Since the last presidential election, they have increased
dramatically. Business has never been as regulated in the U.S. as it is now.
Washington's Ten Thousand
Commandments
An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State
by Clyde Wayne Crews Jr.
Cato Institute, July 2003
The exact cost of federal regulations can never be fully
known. Firms generally pass along to consumers some of the costs of the taxes
they are required to pay. Similarly, some of the costs of regulations, although
generally imposed on businesses, get passed on to consumers. But governmental
and private data exist on scores of regulations and the agencies that issue
them, as well as on regulatory costs and benefits, some of which can be compiled
in a way that makes the regulatory state more comprehensible to the public. That
is the purpose of the annual Ten Thousand Commandments report, some highlights
of which appear below.
• The 2002 Federal Register contained an alltime record 75,606 pages, a nearly 9
percent increase over 2001.
• In 2002, 4,167 final rules were issued by agencies.
• In the 2002 Unified Agenda, agencies reported on 4,187 regulations that were
at various stages of implementation throughout the 50-plus federal departments,
agencies, and commissions.
• Of these 4,187 regulations now in the regulatory pipeline, 135 are
“economically significant” rules that will have at least $100 million in
economic impact. Those rules will impose at least $13.5 billion yearly in future
off-budget costs.
An enormous amount of resources goes to
managers to comply and to accountants to assure and to lawyers to influence
judges and legislators and regulators.
Limits of the Internet
At this point, you can't have the Internet without electricity.
There are six billion people in the world. According to the
International Telecommunication Union, two-thirds of them have never used a
telephone (and according to my study of history, never will use one). This
informative but large (600K) image
from NASA (partial thumbnail below) shows you how little of the world that
the World Wide Web could cover. David Gram pointed me to it in an email
that read, in part:
The image is a panoramic view of the world from the new
Boeing-built space station taken last November on a perfect night with no
obscuring atmospheric conditions. It is a night photo with the lights clearly
indicating the populated areas. You can scroll East-West and North-South. Note
that Canada's population is almost exclusively along the U.S. border. Moving
east to Europe, there is a high population concentration along the Mediterranean
Coast. It's easy to spot London, Paris, Stockholm and Vienna. Check out the
development of Israel compared to that of the Arab countries. Note the Nile
River and the rest of the "Dark Continent". After the Nile, the lights
don't come on again until Johannesburg.
carryover from MBA 504
Tools vs jobs
What is open source?
What is p2p?
(Gizmos Toolkit Instant Messaging page)
structured information: tree
hierarchy on your hard drive
| in a document
Fighting
(with) Hierarchies
By Gerd Waloszek
SAP Design Guild, March 9, 2002
Concept maps:
models | business models | mental models | concept maps
Bits and
atoms are terms used to understand the difference between the
"real" world and the "virtual" world, along with
analog/digital and old media/new media.
What's behind it all? It's scalable and extensible. Moore's Law
The
Driving Forces of the Internet
Diffusion of Innovation
Survival
is Not Enough
by Seth Godin
Fast Company, January 2002
Just in case you weren't paying attention: We live in
turbulent times. In five months, Napster went from having 1 million to 10
million users. Eleven months later, it had 80 million users -- the most
successful technology introduction of all time. And then it essentially went out
of business. (Now it's back again -- maybe.)
Last year, 17,000 new grocery products were introduced. Yet the average grocery
store stocks only 30,000 items.
Is there any question as to what's going on here?
Everything in our world -- from marketing to technology to distribution to
capital markets -- is changing faster than ever (and not always in the same
direction). Yet most companies are clueless about what's causing the change, how
it might affect them, and, most important, what to do about it. Successful
businesses hate change. People with great jobs hate change. Market leaders seek
out and cherish dependable systems.
How Information Flows
The Hype
Five years now after it was first announced, it's hard to find much about "eGM",
especially on the GM Web site. It seems to have shifted buzzwords and become the "New GM", according
to Cherri Musser, who has a telling job title: Process Information Officer of
Supply Chain & Chief Information Officer for eGM. In the spring of 2001, she
gave a PowerPoint presentation titled The Next 48 Months (.ppt
1.06 MB):
GM is leveraging technology to streamline its processes and
enhance internal / external communication
Real-time
integrated business processes -- dealer, manufacturer, supplier
Sufficient
supply chain visibility
GM
is committed to engaging the customer and fulfilling customer needs throughout
the owner lifecycle
GM
is positioning itself to move towards a Build to Order model
Build to Order means that they won't build the car until you
order it, they'll get it to you in less than three weeks, AND they'll still make
money. The key is in the first three bullet points about sharing information: streamlined, integrated,
and visible.
We're more than four years past Ms. Musser's presentation. Did it
happen?
The Reality
Meanwhile, with the exceptions of the GMs and the some brand-new
Internet companies, our organizations operate more or less as they always have.
We have networked our computers, but we ask the same staff do the same things in
the same way. Most organizations have yet to rearrange their machines and
re-design their work flows ("streamline" "integrated"
"visibility"). The relationship between power and information is still
premised on paper and atoms not networks and bits. GM executives now acknowledge
with some humility how long it will take to drive information culture deep into
the ranks of the company.
Take the "drive deep" part literally. In spite of Ms.
Musser's presentation, to get GM's employees to embrace "information
culture", to think differently about information, will take many years and
cause many employees to find employment elsewhere. Those who stay will resist
all but superficial changes and absolutely unavoidable changes. To the extent
that GM is successful, their organizational chart will flatten. Middle
management jobs will be lost to more efficient information flow. Upper
management especially will feel betrayed, that the rules they played by have
changed. When Ms. Musser tells you, "Sufficient supply chain
visibility," she's telling management, "Your personal control of
information is decreasing drastically." That's a slippery slope. Soon
everyone's going to know everyone's business. It won't be pretty.
Let's look at General Electric.
The Hype that
Jack Built: General Electric's Spin Machine (no longer available online)
by Mark Roberti
The Industry Standard, January 22, 2001
This article elaborates the difference between what GE wants the
Internet to do and what the Internet is really doing at GE. While praising its
attempt, the article compares GE's performance unfavorably to other
companies'.
Here's how Jack Welch got those early attempts going:
The story goes something like this. In late 1998, Jack Welch
noticed GE employees shopping online. At home, his wife was buying gifts on the
Web for the grandchildren. Suddenly, Welch "got" the Net. At an annual
meeting of 500 of GE's top executives in Boca Raton, Fla., in January 1999,
Welch ordered everyone to come up with a strategy for moving their businesses
online. The executives were to set up "Destroyourbusiness.com" teams.
The aim: Reinvent each unit's business before some upstart in a Silicon Valley
garage did.
But the execs knew nothing about the Web. So Welch took an idea he'd heard about
while visiting a subsidiary in Europe and made it a corporation-wide mandate:
Some 1,000 Web-savvy employees were assigned to mentor senior executives about
the Internet. Even Welch got a mentor. Armed with the wisdom of people like
Stuart, the red-haired slacker who tutors the old-line executive in the
Ameritrade commercial, the remaking of GE was under way. The teams got beer
parties and brightly colored offices, an attempt to create a proper dot-com
aura. Eventually, they discovered that there probably weren't any Internet
entrepreneurs hiding out in Silicon Valley devising ways to sell turbines or
aircraft engines online. With that fear laid to rest, the teams were transformed
into "Growyourbusiness.com" units. Later, they were disbanded
altogether, and e-business was brought into the mainstream of GE's operations.
The following article probably isn't available still for free,
but the quote below says enough.
Local man
transforming GM into e-commerce firm
by Matt Glynn
Buffalo News, November 10, 2000
Kutner said it's not easy selling his fellow GM executives
on his e-commerce message. "Driving a culture change in this company, and
in any big company, especially an established company, is a very difficult job.
"There's still a lot of people who still don't believe we have to be
connected in everything we do, from the Internet to the home to the cars and the
office," he said. "Some of those people will not fit anymore in our
company and are going to have to go. So for those of you who want to do
something exciting and want to change, there's lots of opportunities for young
people in all the industries in North America, because we all have to do
this."
You don't fit. You're going to have to go. That's called
management by fear.
Alphabet Soup
Port 80's The Docks
Systems and Processes:
Alphabet Soup
RFID Tames the Bullwhip
Port 80's Charthouse
Frameworks for the Future:
Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) Tames the Bullwhip
I am always doing what I cannot do, in order that I may
learn how to do it.
-- Pablo Picasso
Slogans and Mantras
the network is the computer
hyperlinks subvert hierarchy
Introduction to e-Business:
