Being a Technate Executive in a Screen Society

by Dr Elwyn Jenkins, Electronic Composer

After the hype of the dotcom era, our attention, as business people, must now be on commerce in general - now that we have had new business models demonstrated, and loads of fresh knowledge built relating to the adoption of large-scale networks into business activity, our focus must be on how to apply this knowledge to business at-hand to build new revenues streams, greater profitability, and thus more successful businesses.

To achieve revenue building and profitability attainment goals. the three major issues we need to come to grips with in this 'post-dotcom' world are:

making sense of the technology - what are its capabilities, what applications make sense, and how can these be used in real money making business;
how to leverage the network to cut costs, grow business and extend that business to a global level;
how to make money out of doing this.

You have to be aware that this article cannot hope to give you the last word on these three topics. This is now a faster moving world than even the 'dotcom' world. Business speed has now grown to a wilder pace than even the 1990s Internet speed. Things need to show potential money making revenue is less time than it took for a 'dotcom' to attract $5m and a boat-load of people craving after stock options. Any new implementation needs to be conceptualized, built, implemented and drawing customers in 10 weeks or less! New technologies are announced daily! New business models are created each day and ten are proven to be worthless models of making money each month. So all I can do here is outline some principles. To obtain the detail you will need to contact me directly. I can give you an updated presentation right in your boardroom.

Making sense of technology

Since the Internet revolution, the two disciplines of 'business' and 'technology' have merged. You cannot be a successful business person without a command of the issues technology puts in front of you! So, you ask, how do I, a business person, come to grips with technology and make sense out of this from this business perspective?

For any new technology, and any new potential a technology brings us, there are three questions that must be asked and answers need to be sought on a daily basis:

How does this technology work? - what has to be done for my business to develop content for this technology? How do people view this content? How do people interact? How can we put in front of people a purchasing opportunity? and how do we close and get our money?
How do we build a marketplace where customers will actually see this new content? Is it offline advertising? Is it leveraging current relationships? And how much does this cost?
What are the costs of doing business this way? And what are the vital statistics of this new business venture? What is my return on investment?

As a business person you need to know the answers to these questions. Some of those answers come about through personal exposure to the new technology. Get the technology, use it, test it and work out what makes it attractive to you and what makes it a pain to use. Be critical of the thing you have in your hand. Business technologists are not 'wow-sers'! (Look at this "wow" people.) They are realists who see the potential of a tool and at the same time see the downside.

After sampling the technology yourself, find out what the experts are saying. What experts? The people who built the thing! They are the experts of the technology - why go to people who think they know the thing. But then there are the experts who analyze this stuff - they need to be considered in total. Do not take one expert in isolation. But you must realize there are very few business people who are experts in understanding the business potential of technology. SO you have to learn from the makers and the analysts and then make up your own mind as to the usefulness of this technology for your specific business.

Now with more than fifty new technologies around the corner this year alone, how do you keep abreast of all this rising new stuff and how do you keep sane while running a business? Let me inform you, you are not interested in the absolute bleeding-edge new stuff! Some of the new gizmos, concepts and other hype-stuff are for the geeks and the geeks alone. New stuff is made and sold to them and if they don't use it very much then the new gizmo dies. If it takes off with the geeks, then it could have some relevance to other people - even that is not assured, however. Test marketing is done and then eventually the rest of the world catches on and hey - we have a market.

Now when a technology is on the edge of being non-geek and nearly ready to be launched to the rest of us, that is when you got to know about it. Sometimes if it is hot you will want to know about it a little earlier. The time to get into a new technology is when the market for that technology has been established with the geeks and the early adopters, and it is ready for a wider market. This way your investment will produce better results. You will have an immediate market for your product or service.

There is another measure to test the concept of a new technology. This has to do with human activity. By identifying the level of technacy (the technical know-how to make meaning using a computer connected to the Internet) required for a technology to be used will indicate the potential spread of the technology and therefore the potential size of the market and the rate at which it will be adopted. Very high levels of technate ability will limit the use of a technology because it is very complex and therefore only a certain group of people will find a use for it.

On the other hand, if the technology is under $200 it may be cheap enough to sell loads of them but in the long run may not get used as much as one would potentially consider possible. But because of its difficulty level, it may not be used. For example, the Newton and other similar devices that were too difficult to use. People bought them and then they simply did not use them.

So when do you build a business that adopts a new technology as a central organizer for that business? When is it safe to back a particular technology? Over the last ten years, I have adopted a scale based on an assessment of the way people adopt and use technology. People who are highly 'technate' adopt technology in one way. People who are less technate adopt and use technology in another way. Depending on how the technology is actually used and therefore the different impediments to both technate and non-technate users a reference on the scale is given. Through using this scale, I predicted the demise of Beta video technology, the difficulties and eventual demise of the Newton, the difficulties of adopting Lotus Notes and thus an explanation as to why it was never to be a mass business-consumer product, and why mobile phone e-commerce is never really going to have a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. I am also predicting the demise or substantial nee for reinvention of the 'cue-cat' (Why has Radio Shack, Forbes Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, Coca Cola and others put so much money into this technology that essentially scans advertisement codes to zap you to a website page? From the point of view of technate practices - the way people do things with computer technology - it is all wrong! See my analysis of this technology from the point of view of technate activity.)

So do we start building a business based on broadband technologies, you may ask? Not for the consumer market in the next two years - although it would not hurt to begin strategizing now and creating alliances so that you can move swiftly when you need to do so. Broadband is happening - look at the amount of investment in this area. For the business market it is time right now. But which technology and what should that business be? This is another topic for which we will need to sit down and have a discussion later. (I will be posting an analysis of this on my site within the next few weeks.)

Back to the main business to which we must pay attention. We are talking about making money. So how does one make money by backing a new technology with some form of content, business activity or serious money making drive? By adopting a technology that has a ready market, that does not have the total number of users yet signed on who are going to use the technology and by leveraging the spread of that technology and getting your brand associated with that spread.

The important issue is, however, every business regardless of what it is must now have leaders who are techno-saavy. If you are not capable of thinking the way I have outlined thus far in this article, you need help to ensure that your business is going to make it. The disciplines of 'business' and 'technology' have converge now forever and you need to be thinking from a 'business technology leadership position' to be making the grade in this new millennium.

Leveraging the network to grow global business

So, now we have the technology concept that rides the best, what about leveraging the network to grow the business?

Most business models are built using a picture of 'the ideal customer' in a theoretical marketplace. That is not the real world. Any theoretical model of the marketplace is sure to be wrong, because it is theoretical first and second because in this fast moving arena of what we now call business it is impossible to really build a theoretical model. What works is a direct connection into an online network of people who can give you responses via the Internet as to what a 'sample market' may think and do at this very second.

Second, what is 'the network'? Is it purely the sum total of people on the Internet? (Let us not use the term 'Internet' any more because that suggests website, browser, e-mail and personal computers when actually there are many networks created on the connectivity that 'the Internet' provides.) Is this network made up of one million people using cell phones as messaging devices? Is it made up of 50,000 people chatting online using java-chat tools? Is the network 5,000 buyers of steel who check on availability of product, price and transportation? Get the idea.

A 'network' is made up of people who do something each day to be in contact with information, knowledge and direction concerning her/his concerns. It assumes there are people who make connections, who know how to make sense of this world through this communication medium, and who get things done because of this medium. We get a sense of a network like this when a unique e-mail message is shared in one company and it ends up in 500 or 600 companies worldwide by e-mail over the next couple of days. But what is not always understood about leveraging networks is how much of the business activity (you know, actually taking money) is as a result of you content and how much of it is because of the collective content of everything else that is happening within that network.

This is where the theory of Technacy comes in, again, and helps us understand how people actually do things in the context of using a computer, connected to other people, and who do things in combination with other people (are part of the network in other words). Just as we needed to be 'literate' in the world where the predominant and most powerful form of communication was the printed word, people now need to be 'technate' to participate in the most powerful medium of our time -- computer to computer communication.

Just like literacy, technacy is not a skill that people develop in isolation. You are literate and you are technate only in the context of a particular group of people and a particular way of doing things. To illustrate this let me ask a question. 'How well do you know how to sell something to a reader using a single e-mail?' To answer this question you will need to know about the way people use e-mail, what 'spam' is, how people avoid e-mails, how people read or do not read e-mails, and how to create e-mails that are directed at individuals with their names in places through the e-mail that makes it personal, and how to send thousands of these in a single day. Answers to all these questions is quite different for the busy business executive to the evening browser who uses e-mail as a diversion to pass the time. Different skills are in use for the business person as for the evening browser. Each makes meaning in quite different ways, and so selling something to one via e-mail is quite different to selling to the other.

SO then, how do we leverage networks to do business? There are four things to take care of:

Build multiple databases each describing a network and what the practices of that network involve, who the people are and how to contact each.
Know how technology-rich the group of people are within that network and how they use the favourite technology.
What constitutes capturing the network participants attention and keeping that attention long enough to get your message across.
Understand and be ready to implement messages and interactional technology that suits how a network participant best responds to buy what it is you are selling.

The technology of the Internet has spawned an array of micro-audiences, multiple-networks. Only those companies that understand this and collect and maintain information about each network and how to tap into each network are going to be successful.

How to make money out of this

Then we come to the most important thing for your business - making money.

The 'dotcoms' taught us a good deal about providing our markets with free samples. 'Dotcoms' thought that giving away the whole thing for free was the entire business. And sometimes giving away products for free along with a paid service is the way to re-engineer a business. Overall, however, the lessons we can learn from the 'dotcom' craziness is the fact that people need to test our products and experience our services. And as people experience quality and real service they are then willing to pay a premium. To make money, discounting is not the game. Charging a premium for quality and high levels of service even in a commodity market is the aim. Consider Starbucks who charge a very high premium for a commodity that can be obtained in most any restaurant or coffee house.

Let us though put our technology hats on here and understand a thing or two about making money in this high-technology world:

Money is to be made by leveraging common technology that people already have - a new download, distribution of a device to be attached to a computer, modification of people's hardware - these are all disincentives to people adopting your service or purchasing your product.
Money is to be made through provision of services that can be used daily or weekly and for which a small and recurring fee can be charged automatically.
Money is to be made through simplifying people's lives and/or providing automated services that people can trust.

This subject is so expansive and could be expanded to beyond an introductory article such as this. There are important businesses to invest in and/or turn you current business into that we can identify simply through consider these few principles. For example, where you have a new twist on financial services that can be simplified, the service made available through ordinary computers on the Internet and that can form a basic function for people, you have a winner. Then, the only problem is to ensure that you can leverage a range of networks and you have a money making proposition.

This age of technology provides opportunities, in addition, to reduce costs in purchasing, manufacturing, distribution, and sales and thus making money. So leveraging the 'Internet' may not be a simple matter of hiring a web-developer so much as hiring someone who has the ability to think beyond current business practices to create new practices centred on technology and ultimately that will make money through reducing costs.

There are however some technology issues to raise in connection with making money, particularly as we consider moving services onto Internet applications and endeavouring to simplify people's lives. Rarely in the complex world of building online applications does this come inexpensively. To make money as the complexities increase you need to spend money. Often to arrive at the absolutely simplest of applications it costs millions to achieve that simplicity. The more intellectual property involved, and the more automation involved leads to simpler solutions for the end user but the higher the cost in attaining that.

Care needs to be taken, however, in embarking on a huge development. Development done in isolation of end users rarely works. Rather, it is better to get a first attempt online and being used by a subset of your end-users as development takes place. This often leads to massive changes in thinking about the design and use of your application as users test it with daily activity.

To make money in large-scale developments it is better to take small chunks at a time, get users onto the system, begin use of the service, start money flowing, use savings to invest in further refinements and so on. The best money saving projects I have seen have used this principle - but the most notable thing about this is that in all of the cases where I have seen this implemented, development never stops! Development is self-sustaining reducing costs, improving usability, adding greater sales or improved speed to market or improved reductions in staffing to bring about greater profitability.

The network changes everything

We have now heard the adage so often, that the network changes everything, that we have almost become numbed to what it means. The revolution in business is not the pure Internet plays. That was a neat thing to do and a cool way to get headlines, but pure plays are not where it is at. Re-engineering old businesses is not where it is at either, although there are many things to do here. Where it is at is doing business where technology implementation is normal and every resource whether it is physical and/or online is brought to bear on building and sustaining that business.

Technology has changed the way we do things and now it is time to normalize that technology and think about what it is we do to run our businesses. Yes, technology is an integral part of that and a part that can help us make money. But the business we are embarked upon must take the focus. Technology enables, that is why the business-person needs to be a 'business technologist' and business is the endeavor. This is another way of saying, every executive must now be technate in order to do her/his business well. Electronic Language is now the predominant means of making meaning in our society and just as we needed to be literate in a reading and writing society, we now must be technate in a society that communicates predominantly with screens connected to the Internet.