The first inklings of a strategy

Too often, people are rushing into e-commerce on the assumption that business and commerce will work on the Internet in exactly the same way as it works in their familiar Industrial Age world. They will set up magnificent Web sites, full of technological sophistication and then be surprised when nothing turns out as expected.

In one sense, there is some justification for assuming e-commerce should be the same as Industrial Age commerce: business is business and it should not matter what kind of environment you do it in. Fundamental values do not change; certain tenets, common sense rules, codes of conduct and ethical considerations remain the same whatever situation you are in.

The problem is, too often, otherwise sensible businessmen are so taken up with the technological issues involved in e-commerce that they completely forget the basic common sense rules upon which business and commerce are founded. They seem so blinded by the complexity they find that they stumble around, becoming so involved in discovering and exploring the new that they lose sight of fundamental values.

This gives rise to yet another paradox: the ways of the Industrial Age don't work in the Information Age, but, success in the Information Age must be based on the fundamental concepts of the Industrial Age.

In the last chapter, we saw how complexity was approached by the developers of applications for the Apple Macintosh computer. They ignored the complexity of the whole and concentrated upon the components. One by one, they assembled individual functions into a self designed, interacting framework: creating a dynamic combination which lives happily within the complex environment of a Macintosh operating system.

Similarly, with young children learning a natural language; they create their own word constructs and are oblivious to the complexity of the language as a whole. They build up a personal understanding and organisation, one component (word) at a time. Children, like the developers, create their own individual interface and build into the complexity; not to understand it but to interact with it. The individuality of this process is evidenced by the many different vocabularies and choices of words and phrases used by different people to communicate with one another, even when they speak the same language.

In both cases, the problem of dealing with complexity is solved by ignoring the whole and piecing together parts: integrating the combinations into a self made complexity built from the bottom upwards. The strategy seems to be that of identifying modular units and putting them into custom built structures: off the shelf components, assembled together for a purpose. Doesn't it make sense to apply this strategy to e-business and e-commerce?

Let's start by broadening the paradigm to include not just business thinking, but, thinking in general. The human brain is a dynamic and complex system, so, we ought to be able apply the paradigm to our thinking processes.

Consider for a moment the proposition that human thought and thinking consists of an assembly of related concepts and rules. Although thoughts and thinking processes themselves may not be fathomable, the isolated modules of concepts and rules, of which they consist, are usually quite distinct and can be dealt with in isolation. Thoughts and thinking can then be considered as personal selections of suitable modules. These we combine together in an interactive way; giving rise to the vast complexity that we know as thinking, understanding and knowledge.

This gives us a way of understanding how we use the brain as a tool without having to comprehend the whole of its complexity. We can view the brain as a collection of modules that can be put together for specific purposes. This modularity allows thinking strategies to be highly versatile and adaptive: constructs that can be consciously modified by adding or deleting different rules and concepts. It allows us to rapidly adjust our thinking on the fly, simply by recombining modules: the rules and the concepts. This is how we normally cope with a changing environment.

We don't have to know anything at all about how the brain works, we simply present it with different modules consisting of ideas and rules and the brain produces conclusions for us. If the conclusions turn out to be right, we retain the knowledge of the combination of modules that produced those conclusions. If the conclusions prove to be wrong, we can feed in some more information and re-configure the modules to enable the brain to produce other conclusions.

Applying this modular thinking to Information Age problems, we can think in terms of reconfiguring basic rules and concepts rather than having to start from scratch. This will involve isolating some of the key fundamental components of traditional business strategies and applying them in new ways to e-business and e-commerce.

This is what we shall be doing in this second half of the book, diving into various specialist areas of the industrial age and picking out the building blocks so that we can use them in a different context. This can be likened to children playing with Lego. Most of the Lego my children obtained came as small presents that consisted of small pre-assembled Lego structures: a helicopter, a boat, a castle, etc. After a short while they will disassemble these readymade structures, cannibalising them for making something new.

This is what we have to do now to adjust our thinking for e-business and e-commerce. We have to cannibalise the techniques and methods used in the Industrial Age to extract key elements that that can be used to create new strategies for the Information Age.

There is no particular order to these universal fundamentals, so, I'll describe them as I first came across them and then we can see how they now relate to the new age of information.