What makes a good solution provider?

If we now take a look at the effective functioning of an e-commerce solution provider in an object oriented environment. What kind of person should it be? Should it be somebody who is an expert in all the niche areas used in the solutions? Should it be someone who is expert at managing and motivating people? I think not.

It seems more likely that the most effective solution provider will be someone who has a firm grasp on the required strategic aims of a solution. A strategist who can co-ordinate ideas and people to create and guide an evolving system. The solution provider will need to be thinking mostly in the area of the results side and consider their main role as having to communicate the results and discrepancies back to the experts who can contribute to a correction or a solution.

In other words, the solution provider shouldn't be the designer of a solution, but, the feedback loop to a self-organising system that contains all kinds of novel possibilities for achieving stated goals. In this role as a feedback functionary, the solution provider would need to be an expert e-mail communicator who has many contacts with middlemen and can gather together a large variety of expertise, opinions and recommendations to bring to bear on the problems.

This raises the question as to how you can decide what makes a good solution provider. What would you look for in their CV if you wanted to hire one? It soon becomes obvious that their is no way that anyone can accurately determine who would make a good solution provider until the results of their efforts are proven. Even then, there may be so many unknown factors that a choice between different solution providers becomes almost arbitrary.

This is a very real problem in e-commerce. The choice of a solution provider may not only involve the risk of wasting investment funding, it also has a large bearing on the ability of a company to trade and compete successfully in the e-commerce market place. Having a solution provider who is biased towards employing inappropriate technology can result in the loss of millions of dollars. The World Wide Web is full of examples of solution providers having the wrong set of priorities to produce novel and attractive sites that are totally useless for their designated purpose of satisfying specific customer or client needs.

Seeing the choice of a solution provider and the people who advise them and the experts that are selected to work on a solution as all being risk elements, it seems appropriate to use the strategies of investment managers. They offset risk by spreading it. Using these strategies to safeguard against risk, it makes no sense at all to gamble on any single solution provider, or, any single solution. Any sensible strategy must be able to break up the the risks into different independent compartments and spread the decision making between several solution providers. This will minimise the effect of any errors of choice or judgment, so they can cause only slight setbacks and not fatal disasters.

In the world of object oriented design, this is not a problem because you can split up all solutions into separate and independent modules. Any error in one, need have minimal effects on the others. This situation was described in the virtual house building scenario covered in a previous chapter. Similarly, the risk of a solution provider having incomplete knowledge or not having a sufficiently large range of specialist contacts could be minimised by using a virtual team of solution providers rather than a single one.

Such a group of solution providers would not be in the form of an organised managed team, but, more like the virtual teams created when a group of wholesalers were combined to provide a buying solution for costume jewellery. In other words, a single solution provider is replaced by a virtual team where the members of the team are not permanently employed and are not managed or motivated.

With an Industrial Age mind set this makes no sense at all, but,in the object oriented world of the Information Age it is a highly appropriate solution. The trick is to think of the solution provider as not being a manager of a project, but, as the representative a particular virtual team. In this way you can bring several solution providers together to have the combined power and expertise of all their contacts . If the responsibility of making the right choice of niche specialists to provide a solution is spread among several solution providers, so will be the risks. Also, the weaknesses or deficiencies of one solution provider can be compensated for by another.

In this way, it will be more effective and efficient if several solution providers are combined together to bring about a solution between them; each providing their individual interpreted feedback to their own pool of niche specialist contacts. In this way they would not be competing with each other to provide a solution but competing with each other to make improvements.

In the Industrial Age, such a system would be unworkable unless every one of the solution providers had the same conceptual model for the solution. In the Information Age, it is the only system that is workable because there are too many possibilities for anyone to be able to decide or agree upon what the optimum solution should be. Using several solution providers acts as a safeguard against the dangers of limited knowledge. There may be disagreements but in an object oriented system, a module in the solution can be duplicated if there is genuine doubt as to the best type of module to use.

In effect, each solution provider initiates part of the overall solution, but, their is considerable overlap. This makes each of them expendable. As they are effectively the representatives of a virtual team of niche specialists, they can also be employed on the same temporary basis as the specialists they represent. Again, this may seem preposterous with an Industrial Age mind set, but, in the object oriented world of the Information Age it makes sense because it will also be beneficial to the solution providers themselves.

In the same way that a niche expert can specialise in a favoured area of speciality and a middleman can specialise in a type of expert, so, a solution provider can specialise in a favoured niche of an e-commerce solution. This allows a virtual group of solution providers to have complementary inputs as well as providing substantial overlap. This provides a similar solution to the problems of doubt and unknown reliability that the newsagent employs with the newspaper delivery children; using people well within their capacity and allowing overlap to make up for any deficiencies or unreliability.

It might be thought that solution providers would be unhappy with this arrangement, but, why should they be if they have a powerful selection of capable specialist contacts. If they have a good pool of specialists to draw upon and are effectively able to bring all this expertise to the table then they will be in demand. And like the experts and the middlemen, there is no reason for them to work full time for the same clients.

In the bricks and mortar world it is normal to hire a team leader, a consultant or a main contractor on an exclusive full time basis. This needn't be the case in the object oriented environment of the Information Age because there is no main structural plan and all the components of the system are built up of interacting modules. It needn't be necessary to have either full time or permanent involvement of solution providers, middlemen or experts.

For the e-commerce client, paying only for part time involvement, would mean being able to utilise the expertise of several solution providers for the cost of a single one. All would be able to add their ideas and experience to the creation of the solution, plus make available the full range of their expert and specialist contacts. The employer would truly be getting the value of many: for the price of one.

For the solution provider this is also an advantageous arrangement. It will provide more security because each individual employer would represent a part of their income. Also, by working for several employers at the same time will offer a greater range of opportunities for the solution provider's expert contacts. This would strengthen his or her relationship with them.

Although this may seem utterly bizarre to the Industrial Age Mind set, it is completely practical due to the ease of connectivity and communication.. The model of the employers, employing several solution providers to share in the design of a solution and combining resources is virtually identical to the situation of going into Berwick Street and using the combined resources of the different wholesalers to provide a weekly costume jewellery buying solution.

In Berwick Street all the wholesalers represented all their contacts. Their combined resources were better than any individual wholesaler. They provided overlap. They were all employed simultaneously. They were employed on a temporary basis when their contacts were hot. At an abstract level there is no difference whatsoever and that system works perfectly well in satisfying customer demands in a chaotic world of unpredictable change.