As a consumer, for example, I can create "spies" to watch the various auction sites and let me know when items I want are for sale, or when the status of a particular auction changes. The spy can notify me by e-mail, a custom Web page, PDA, cell phone, instant messenger or pager. For each device or client app, the notification is tailored to the device and my role. If I ask to be notified by cell phone, the spy knows that this is an interruption, and gives me only a headline. ("You've been outbid on Richard Armour's Twisted Tales From Shakespeare.")
Spyonit customers can also use the technology to deepen relationships with their business partners. Morningstar (dossier), the online financial information giant, has embedded spies on its site that lets customers signal how and when they want to be notified of changes to their portfolio. At the end of the day, it can send me an e-mail with the closing prices of all the funds I own; but if, for example, my technology holdings ever go over 30 percent of my total portfolio, I can have Morningstar page me. Each alert provides the company with opportunities to interact with its customers.
This is the first step toward an information architecture in which the "browsing" isn't done by individuals, but by software agents that are delegated to watch a variety of conditions and report any changes. From here, the natural extension is to charge the agents with certain actions beyond notification. For example, in the future I might create a spy that looks to see if Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner is going to be on TV. If it is, it can program my VCR (or my computer, for that matter) to record it.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PLATFORM
In the deconstructed Web, what matters most is not the site design, but the information design. The more your data is structured in abstract forms, stored in standardized formats and built on hardware and software platforms that can scale to large numbers of users and massive amounts of information exchange, the better your chances for a sustainable e-business strategy.
In part, this is because no one really knows what the future applications of Internet technology will be. Often, even application inventors are surprised by the unintended uses that evolve (sometimes quickly) for their creations. It is human nature to start out believing new devices are merely improvements over existing ones (again, the horseless carriage and radio with pictures). With experimentation and serendipity, new applications emerge. The less you embed the old metaphor in your strategies and systems, the easier it will be to respond to new opportunities.
PlanetRx, for example, has given some of its customers handheld bar-code readers from Symbol Technologies (SBL) as an experiment in interactions. Customers scan the bar codes on the things they're running out of to create their shopping list, then zap the list to PlanetRx. PlanetRx fills the order and sends it to the customer.
Consumers should welcome this new way of ordering because it doesn't change the interface they are familiar with; it only reduces a bunch of annoying steps (few people find going to the drugstore fun). Don't write down your shopping list, just point to what you want. Anybody can understand that.
Aside from turning the advantages of physical retailers (location, location, location) on their head, this application has the added power of starting the process of collecting new data in bulk and in standard form. If the platform is properly constructed, PlanetRx can discover and implement new applications as they present themselves.
Maybe the data will flow back up the supply chain, improving product forecasting (from weeks to minutes) or product development (what's not getting used or what is bought with what) or even the ordering of raw materials (make more plastic, make less plastic, print more labels). Eventually the products will just reorder themselves.
The key is to build around the platform itself rather than the devices and their associated roles.
CATCHING THE WAVE
As you think about your e-business strategy (or its next generation), here are a few ways to prevent value from being stuck inside your Web site:
- Understand the different roles users play with different devices and applications, and develop interactions that are appropriate to each one.
- Design information separately from the interface. In fact, start with the overall information architecture, not the look and feel of the first-generation application.
- Build the applications themselves on a hardware and software platform that can scale. Assume that uses that have not yet occurred to you will become strategic sources of competitive advantage.
Larry Downes is an e-business consultant and coauthor of Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Technologies for Market Dominance (Harvard Business School Press).
