Month: February 1999

The Internet and e-Business seem to go hand-in-hand
nowadays. Companies want to know how the Internet can be leveraged for
business, just as their counterparts in the US seem to be using
it. This column explores five key trends which provide the background
for enabling e-Business in the Internet Age.

The Death of Distance

In a landmark Economist survey a few years ago, the author talked
about how geography was becoming irrelevant in telecom. The Net is
making this more so. While voice telephony itself has not much
affected much so far in India, email has made it so much more
convenient to keep in touch and conduct business with customers
worldwide. Internet telephony will speed this process, and will be
beyond regulators. The Net cuts through barriers imposed by space and
time. Businesses in India have to brace up for competition from
everywhere. At the same time, it opens up opportunities for Indian
companies to do business internationally. The world is becoming more
of a village, than ever before.

The Exchange Economy

A recent article in Fortune magazine talks about “infomediaries”,
online exchanges that link buyers and sellers by effectively
distributing market information. It says that infomediaries are a
cross between electronic catalogs, efficient marketplaces that greatly
reduce transaction costs, and content libraries, which help companies
make purchasing decisions. This trend will impact many businesses in
India, as the Net becomes the electronic meeting and trading
place. The combination of content, communications, community and
commerce is the foundation on which an infomediary will be built. This
is a big opportunity area in India: set up infomediaries for vertical
segments.

The Net as your Intranet

In India, as I have mentioned in earlier columns, the killer
application for corporates is e-mail. Limitations on wide area
bandwidth and high costs will make it easier for companies to
interconnect their offices in different locations via the Internet
than through their own network. The Net effectively becomes the
corporate Intranet server, seamlessly merging internal and external
information. Just as portals like Yahoo and Excite offer utility
services like email, chat and calendaring, companies will use these
services within their organisation, but served off the Internet. This
will allow access anytime and from anywhere. All that will be required
is a Web browser on the desktop.

The Powerful Consumer

As information dissemination via the Net becomes easier, more
companies will put up greater information on the Net. The result:
power to the consumer, who will easily compare product/service
features of competing products. One area where this is already
happening is banking, where sites offer comparisons of interest rates
offered from different banks on a single page! There will be an
increase in such comparator sites in India. Combined with the other
trends, it means that the future battles will be based on price and
service, not physical proximity to the customer.

Content meets Distribution

An interesting point was made by management guru CK Prahalad at a
seminar recently. India’s telephone connections may be 15-20 million,
but access to telephony is higher by a factor of 20-30, if not
more. PCOs have succeeded in taking telephony to the masses. Similarly
for the Internet. While abroad the ratio is nearly 1:1 between access
and connections, in India the access multiplier can become as high as
100 if we can set up a network of Internet kiosks (or community
centres) across the country. Cybercafes are the first generation
kiosks. They make Net access available without the need for a PC at
home or in the office. Building up a grassroots distribution system
via a network of kiosks (with, perhaps, a smart card payment system, a
regional-language browser and local content) will make Net access near
ubiquitous across the country within the next 5 years. What is
required: e-Services.

The Internet will have a much bigger impact on India than we can
imagine. We have to create our own business models; just trying to
replicate business models from the US is not the answer. And that is
where the opportunities of tomorrow lie.

The Internet is the flavour of the day. Is your company
Internet-ready? Take this quiz and find out. Score 1 point for every
Yes answer.

E-mail

E-mail is the killer application in today’s context on the
Internet. Email can and should be made critical to your
business. Email does not work if half your company has it, and the
other half doesn’t. If you can use email well, you will find that you
are not only able to communicate better and faster, but that your
communications costs will come down.

1. Do you have an email address of the form name@companyname.com or
name@companyname.co.in?
2. Is your email delivered to your desktop when you are in office?
3. Do you reply to your email personally (i.e., it is not printed
out by your secretary, marked up by you, and replied by your secretary?)
4. When you are out of the office, can you access your email anytime and from anywhere?
5. At all times, wherever you are, does your e-mail address remain the same?
6. Does the e-mail account for every person in the company satisfy the above
conditions, irrespective of their office location?
7. Are your email costs independent of the number of messages and the size of
the messages?

Internet Access

The Internet is today the primary source of news and business
information. Internet access is important for having people exposed to
new ideas and developments. For example, your marketing department can
use it source customers in international markets by visiting their
websites and writing to them.

8. Do all employees in your office have Internet Access from their desktops?
9. Can you monitor the sites people access, i.e., is the access through a Proxy Server?

Website

The website is your public face to the world. It is like being able to
publish your own newspaper. Think of it as being your global
office. Give it as much importance.

10. Does your company have a website?
11. Is the URL of the site independent of the service provider?
12. Was it updated in the past 2 weeks?
13. Do you have the latest developments on your company (e.g. financials,
press releases, new products) on the website?
14. Do you a Webmaster internally co-ordinating the website and its updates?
15. If an inquiry were to come through the website, would the
sender receive a reply within one business day?
16. Do you keep a database of the email addresses that came in via theseinquiries?
17. Does all your promotional material (business cards, letterheads,
brochures, ads) carry the website address?

Intranet/Extranet/E-Commerce

The Net can help you communicate better with your own employees, and a
closed user group (the companies/agencies you deal with on a regular
basis). Business-to-business and business-to-consumer electronic
commerce are rapidly reshaping entire industries in the West. Expect
the same to happen in India — faster than you can imagine. The Net
cuts across geographical barriers — meaning that companies from
anywhere can sell to your clients. It also means that you can sell to
their clients.

18. Do you have an Intranet for your employees?
19. Do you have an Extranet for your customers?
20. Do you have a strategy to sell / do business via the Net?

Scoring

16-20:	Excellent, you are truly an eCorporate and ready for the Internet Economy.
12-15:	Good, but you need to still fix the holes, and move up the ladder.
8-11:	Average. While you have made some progress, there is a need for action on other fronts. Quickly.
< 8:	A lot of work lies ahead for you. You need to put together an Internet strategy first. Success in the past does not guarantee leadership in the future.