Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

April 10, 2000 Volume 3 - Number 6

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Not only is Bernard Boar’s war metaphor irritating (“The Dawn of IT Fighting,” Intelligent Enterprise, Feb. 9, 2000), it’s wrong.

In the Industrial Age we saw the mechanization of warfare (culminating in the atom bomb) lead to its final loss of viability. Concerns for humanity aside, war is obsolete as a business strategy. In fact, the Information Age is playing out as a nonhierarchical, indeed anarchic, ocean of “coopetition.”

If you must have a metaphor that highlights the competitive side of business today, may I suggest professional sports, in which there are opposing teams competing within a unified business plan (the league) in support of all teams?

Andrew Culver
Clinton Corners, NY

Bernard Boar responds:

What is wonderful about the IT field is that there are as many opinions as there are people. Mr Culver may be right, but I don’t think so.

The greatest book about strategy is The Art of War, in which Sun Tzu uses aphorism to describe how to win in hyper-competitive conflicts. Business is approaching an

ultra-competitive state, and in that climate, only companies that engage in IT fighting will win.

Online Buyers’ Remorse

Ian Shoales’ idea that people shopping on the Web feel empowered (“Business Models: Fashionably Thin, or Anorexic?,” Intelligent Enterprise, Jan. 20, 2000) is probably the most exacting realization I have heard.

Besides the obvious freedom one feels perusing the racks without an annoying salesperson fumbling through a “trial close” every 10 seconds, the whole process involved with shopping online empowers us to make our own decisions, change our minds several times without any social fears, decide not to buy something because the grand total is more than our monthly incomes, and so on. There are many social engineering concepts that a virtual environment removes from the shopping process.

I think retailers realize this to some degree, and for that reason, infiltrate their Web sites with as much propaganda as possible to re-introduce these outside influences.

Pretty soon, we are going to see a pop-up message when we attempt to delete an item from our shopping carts that kindly asks us if the $300 pair of shoes we are removing will really make any fiscal difference. Then we are going to see windows popping up to add cross-sell items to every item purchased and you will have to go through 30 screens just to get out of the store. Welcome back to “brick and mortar.”

This buyer/seller interchange is a social paradigm that will continue to morph in order to give customers the perception that retailers care, until it is finally blatantly obvious that they do not care. Then it will change again. I guess I ask the same question you asked, “What has changed?” Nothing, really!

Mark Puskar
Jacksonville, Fla.