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ManagementSpeak: Is there a cloud-based solution that would fix the problem?

Translation: I have no idea what’s involved or how to actually fix this. But the Cloud can do everything, can’t it?

There’s no cloud-based solution for spotting new ManagementSpeaks. It’s up to you to send them in.

Last week, as I paid for my lunch, the cashier asked me, “Didn’t you co-author a book on the Internet?”

Celebrity is where you find it. My cashier friend is in rarified company, since the marketing for Selling on the ‘Net (NTC, 1996) has been, shall we say, spotty.

Nonetheless, since I wrote a book I must be an expert, which means I’ve had occasion to talk to business and IT leaders about the Web. Although almost everyone has a Web presence by now, many tell me they “… need to develop an Internet strategy.”

Strategy is good. Substitute any other tool for “Internet,” though, and you’ll immediately spot the problem (“We need a circular saw strategy”). “We need a strategy” is a defensive statement. The last two words of this sentence – “I guess” – remain unvoiced, but they come through loud and clear.

Even though the World Wide Web has been visible to business for about five years — and has been the focus of an extraordinary outpouring of creative energy, not to mention some cash — business leaders still don’t understand how to think about it. And while few dispute the future success of Internet commerce, we have to survive until the future gets here.

Businesses succeed on the Internet the same way they succeed in any other area: By deciding to succeed and understanding what success means. It’s a matter of clear, realistic thinking and deliberate planning. And as with most aspects of business planning there’s no tensor calculus involved.

Creating a Web site has more in common with publishing than with any other mundane endeavor. Like any publication, successful Web sites start with a clear focus and purpose, because if you confuse visitors to your site they’ll leave. Creating clarity takes hard work.

You’ll be in the middle of this discussion, so be prepared to lead it if the conversation gets squishy. Here’s an approach you can use if you decide to take charge:

Step 1 – Establish your business model: A business model states a cause-and-effect relationship in specific terms. Right now, the most successful model is enhancing customer relationships by improving service. Another good model: Suggesting new uses for your products to increase consumption by current customers.

Step 2 – Profile your target audience: An audience profile describes who you want to attract and what they want when they visit. Reading Web demographics and figuring out how to attract “that kind of person” is a trap. You want prospects and customers, not visitors. If you sell office furniture, you may want to attract architects and facilities planners who want advice on office design – teenage surfers are a distraction. If you sell acne medicine, architects and facilities planners are the distraction, unless they have pimples.

Step 3 – Define measures of success: Good measures come from your business model. Although not every cause-and-effect relationship lends itself to direct measurement, avoid simply falling back on measuring what is convenient, such as hits. Measure what’s important, not what’s easy to measure. Anything that doesn’t test your business model is pointless.

Step 4 – Perform a reality check: Is your target audience really going to exhibit the behavior you need? This may come down to arguing or it may involve market research. Just watch out for the we’ve-reached-consensus-so-we-must-be-right fallacy. Automobile makers did this successfully, rejecting online purchasing and instead helping buyers research car purchases.

Now comes all the real work – these four steps are just the start, and don’t ensure success.

In a competitive marketplace, nothing can.

Time for a logic puzzle: How are the following two pairs of statements the same, and how are they different?

First pair: IT has to be business-driven. We have to stop buying technology for technology’s sake.

Second pair: A stitch in time saves nine. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Got the answer? Here’s mine:

They’re the same in that both pairs are trite. They’re different in that the second pair provides good, if cliched, advice, where the first pair are like bad baloney — there’s not enough real meat in ’em.

I have yet to find an IT organization that buys technology for its own sake. I have run into quite a few whose leaders and staff had insufficient business acumen and poorly developed bunk detectors, falling for stories about the amazing business improvements to be had from one technology or another. But that’s different. Bad judgment isn’t the same thing as purchasing toys.

As for IT being driven by the business, it’s one of those half-truths that’s more dangerous than ignorance. It’s also a “truth” that’s contradicted by another truism — that IT should be proactive, not reactive. Would someone care to explain how IT can be both proactive and externally driven?

The optimal solution is more complicated, as optimal solutions usually are. Let’s start with this: In the absence of technological change, business practices stabilize and eventually stagnate. Look at every new business model that’s appeared over the past fifty years or so. You’ll have a hard time finding any that weren’t enabled by new or improved technologies, often information technologies. Whether the new business model was “big-box” retailing, direct marketing, the shift from grocers to supermarkets, or the broad trend toward product diversification, all appeared after some technological innovation made possible what was previously impractical.

An obvious example was the Internet. Imagine you were the CIO of a major travel agency in the early 1990s. Because you understood IT is supposed to be business-driven, you waited patiently (and in vain) for someone to ask you to put the company’s services on-line.

Bad call.

A less-well-known example: During the early days of computer telephony integration (CTI), a survey showed that telecommunications managers were the least-likely CTI advocates in most companies. How depressing: The individuals most likely to run across a business opportunity saw it as just another headache instead, and Somebody Else’s Problem.

One of the standard tools of strategic planning is SWOT analysis, for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. (It’s spelled backward, by the way: The analysis should start with threats and opportunities, reserving weaknesses and strengths for later.) When the business looks for threats and opportunities — for external trends with the potential to change your industry — where are you? In your office, waiting for the telephone to ring, or in the thick of the discussion?

Now about those strengths and weaknesses. Most of these will focus on internal businesses processes. Unless the process owners are simply incompetent, chances are good your internal processes are as good as they’re likely to get without the addition of some new, enabling information technologies, which you’re supposed to know more about than any business leader.

So what’s your role, whether you spell it SWOT or TOWS? You could wait at your desk, secure that your responsibility is to be driven by the business. If that’s your decision, when the most important threats and opportunities are the result of technological change, I have just one question:

If not you, then whom?