Here is a list begun at the Welcome to IBM all hands meetings of things each of which I think represents an opportunity for IBM to create and provide a service to the Small Business Enterprise customer, or to improve its process for doing so. I've fleshed out a few using my own judgement as to the time worth expending, will be happy to continue this process given management direction.
IBM already has in hand several products, services, and capabilities that can be turned to focus on the Small Business Enterprise. In doing this, we want to integrate the IT solutions we offer into the full business solution for the customer. We want to solve the whole problem, provide the total solution. We just don't want to intimidate the IBM services Small Business Enterprise customer into fleeing in panic in the process.
Both in the sense of making IT work for the business and in the larger sense of making the business work at all, Small Business Enterprises need a lot of help. This is demonstrated by the high failure rate of startups. This is caused in part by the lack of experience of the entrepeneur creating and running the startup. Properly packaged, "handholding for the Small Business Enterprise" can be sold as a product and as a service.
IBM has been into the premises of lots of medium and large businesses as an IT services provider, and has a long experience with things that work well and things that do not work well at all. This is not merely the things we were hired to do for the businesses, but the things we saw them doing themselves. If we have "taken good notes", or if we begin to do so now, and continue to do so in the future, and if we also begin to reconstruct what we have seen in the past, then we have a product to package and sell that would be both valuable and well accepted.
Visualize this product as a configurable "Small Business Processes Cookbook".
The realization of that cookbook should involve an ongoing and evolutionary relationship with the customer, not a one time "here it is" relationship. We want the customer to have access to a list of our offerings, but the customer will need time to digest and implement them one by one or a few at a time. Receiving them all in a chunk would be too intimidating, so the mode of marketing should involve more pull by the customer than push by us, and our push, once begun, should be related to phases of business success the customer has already achieved with our help.
The product could be packaged both by the area of operations on which it focuses, by the depth of detail into which it goes, and by the level of maturity and experience with success at the next lower level, or other preconditions, the Small Business Enterprise must have achieved to go forward successfully with the current level.
In the complex process of accumulating business process wisdom, we want to motivate the customer, with the IBM reputation and with an on-customer-site history of demonstrated incremental levels of success, to make the buy decision, the decision to purchase business processes wisdom like any other product or service, as superior to the build decision, the decision to evolve business processes wisdom in the expensive and failure prone "school of hard knocks".
Every Small Business person complains about the high difficulty and high cost of complying with a rats' nest of regulations from governments at all levels. IBM can market the service of building or finding and tailoring compliance tools for the Small Business, and of putting a process in place to make compliance work for the Small Business with minimal pain.
From the announcement of a recently given Bay Area talk, we glean that web sites on the Interjet that have multi-lingual and other multi-locale features might be a product valuable to the small business enterprise. This is some of the motivational material from the conference announcement.
Speaker: Howard Schwartz (Uniscape.com)
Until recently, the content of the Internet was English only. But this situation is rapidly changing. Today more than 50% of Internet users are located outside the US. According to IDC, that number is expected to approach 70% by year 2003.
In response to these changes, companies are seriously revisiting their e-business strategies. No longer is it sufficient to publish their web content in English only. Companies that take this US-centric stance risk losing their market share to upstart companies that offer the same products or services in other languages.
This session explores the way companies are responding to these challenges, exploring the challenges of web site globalization and the impact of the Internet on the globalization process.
Howard Schwartz is VP of Marketing at Uniscape.com, the first E-Services Translation Portal on the Internet and recently winner of Internet World Best of Show. Mr. Schwartz is a marketing strategist who has helped numerous software companies develop their communications strategies, brand identity, market positioning, business models and marketing plans. He has taught at Stanford and Indiana Universities, and holds a Ph.D. from Brown University and a B.A. from Duke University.
These are not so much direct service opportunities, but chances for IBM to improve its own processes via the WWW to enhance our offerings to Small Businesses Enterprise.
Unlike other media advertising, the WWW offers IBM the chance cheaply and easily to create advertising tailored to each cluster of similarly situated Small Business customers, without the usual high cost of delivering the ads to the customers through broadcast means, in the case of publically accessable, web page style ads, and without the need for postage and other high price mechanisms for delivering largely redundant ads in hopes of hitting a match, in the case of direct to the individual customer advertising.
Getting a foot in the door is usually the biggest problem in marketing, and in creating an ongoing services relationship between IBM and the Small Business customer. The WWW makes it easier to have the customer invite us into their shop, by letting us focus advertising of more immediate interest to the customer on customers coming to our focused freebie web pages, and to contact us on impulse with clickable methods provided beside the advertising.
One service the InterJet can provide of benefit to both our customer, and the businesses including us trying to motivate the buy now decision, is low pain mechanisms and standard, pre-populated forms for supplying contact me data from customer to supplier with just a few button clicks. Use of XML markups will facilitate creating such a mechanism.
It becomes very easy to treat WWW mediated interactions as interactions with the machine in front of the user, rather than with the recipient at the other end of the communications link. Services to re-personalize this link are marketable entities.
The phenomenon is well known and widely documented: email communications and other WWW interactions lack the gestures, intonations, and immediate interactivity of face to face communications, and poorly used, can promote misunderstanding, anger, hostility, and even open vendetta. Solving this problem as it is seen by our customers in their shops is a marketable service.
This is a guaranteed recipe for disaster, yet it was seriously proposed, without objection from the audience, at one of the Welcome to IBM all hands meetings for Whistle employees. Facilitating face to face interactions initiated via the web is a marketable service.
The visibility of doing business on the WWW makes the methods easier to imitate, the cherished customers easier to find for competitors. IBM is a big company, with lots of clout, but it cannot withstand a wholesale, focused one customer by one customer, attempt by lots of different businesses to steal our Small Business services customers. Our only real defense here is true and recognized excellence. Facilitating ways to "keep ahead of the competition" is a marketable service.
Each of these can become a service IBM sells to the Small Business Enterprise customer, or a way IBM attracts new customers to IBM representations of services. IBM can choose to provide these services, to provide category by category focused access to others who do provide these services for use by our Small Business customers, or can provide means and mechanisms for our customers to create ad hoc easy access to clusters of these services, itself a service.
Sheer information is the most wildly popular attribute of the web, and IBM can bring Small Business Enterprise readers to web pages also, by coincidence <grin> promoting IBM products and services, most readily by becoming a widely recognized provider of some high quality, free, databases of high quality information of direct, focused, and immediate value to the Small Business Enterprise operator.
For one easy example, not necessarily a valuable market example, to bring the eyes of farmers to the IBM advertising of use of computers to support the farmer as a Small Business Enterprise operator, wrap those ads around free information about weather, futures markets, links to agriculture supplies and their suppliers, farm cooperative meeting announcements, regulatory information notices, product recall notices, and other information that make the pages a daily must see for the farmer.
Make sure to solicit and accept target customer base suggestion inputs for expanding the freebie parts of these combined services and advertising pages.
This is one of the WWW's big wins, and lots of portal and other service providers are already getting revenue indirectly from providing discussion focus groups; there is every chance for IBM to provide similar services with a Small Business focus via the NOC.
Setting up and helping administer standards committees, especially ones mediated by the WWW, is a slick services marketing opportunity for IBM. Helping the user community move from standards committees financed by pay through the nose priced paper standards sales to cheap to operate standards committees that can publish freely distributed and freely redistributed standards is a service IBM can do to keep the standards creating process functional, and is probably a service IBM can sell or use as a sales tool.
Unlike most standards bodies, the ones for the WWW itself are cheap and easy to access to both the interested Small Business and the interested individual. There is a Small Business services opportunity for IBM in helping set up and administer Small Business standards committees with the same characteristics.
The web page or browser is becoming the access mechanism of choice, almost to the exclusion of any other mechanism, to the web and all its services, and to internal data, software tools, and business operations and flows as well.
There is lots of room for IBM to offer web page integration services for all these web page capabilities to the Small Business Enterprise, and the Small Business Enterprise proprietors already see this opportunity and are eager to "get on board". They just need our help to make it happen.
Helping our Small Business Enterprise operator customers avoid the effects of these risks is a marketable service.
Enhancing and easing access to these services, and providing ways for the employee to perceive these services as an employer provided benefit rather than merely as a WWW benefit, is a service to the Small Business employer and can be marketed as such. For many of these, implementing and integrating them also provides more direct benefit to IBM's Small Business customer.
There are several service marketing opportunities here; helping the Small Business avoid injury to employees by the risks, and helping the Small Business demonstrate to the employee that these risks are recognized and are being ameliorated, for two.
From sexual harrassment, to character assassination, to revealing business proprietary information, to illegal price fixing, to hacking into competitors' business data files, the WWW provides lots of splendid new ways to cause mischief. Helping the Small Business operator recognize, plan for, and avoid these risks is a service IBM can market.
Contact me for further discussion.
Kent Paul Dolan
Whistle Communications, an IBM Company
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