Keeping up with technological changes

When buying stock for the costume jewellery counter, the usual practice for the weekly buying was to have a quick look around to see what the various wholesalers in Berwick Street were stocking. Then, I'd make a mental list of those that seemed to have the kind of items my Hyper Hyper customers had been asking for . Having made this list, and putting it in some order of preference, the procedure would be to work through this list until the week's buying money had run out.

Effectively, this selection of wholesalers was equivalent to creating a "virtual design team" on the fly each week: made up of the wholesalers who were currently right on the ball with what my customers were wanting.

I didn't have to know much about any manufacturing techniques; I didn't have to worry about team spirit; arrange training; deal with conflicting egos or provide a variety of rewards, incentives and inducements. My virtual team of designer/suppliers simply supplied whatever goods my customers wanted: on demand, hassle free and whenever I wanted them

In the fashion business, as in digital technology, fashion trends tend to come and go quickly and unpredictably. This constant flux I could easily cope with by using this strategy of varying the wholesalers I bought from. I bought from six or seven of them each week, but, it was never the same wholesalers every time.

What would happen is that as trends or fashions changed, the wholesalers would vie with each other to get new designs from their manufacturing contacts to correspond with the changes. Some wholesalers would be quicker at spotting a trend than others and would usually have the lion's share of the new business for the time that fashion lasted.

The way the dynamics of the system worked was that the wholesalers who were benefiting from a current trend or fashion were too involved with their busy trading to be ready to take advantage of the next change of fashion when it came along; their buying money would be committed and they'd be locked into manufacturers who were geared up for the currently popular fashion.

This invariably meant that any change in trend or fashion was catered for by other wholesalers who weren't so busy. These less busy wholesalers and their manufacturing contacts would have had the time and resources available to explore other possibilities and would be in a better position to act when the fashion changed.

This made it easy for me to keep up with new trends and sudden fashion changes because, in the parlance of the time, I would only need to find the wholesalers who were "hot" and buy from them. In this way, my virtual team was constantly changing as the wholesalers were engaged in a continuous cycle of leap frogging over each other as they vied with each other to be the first to bring out any new fashion trends.

Such versatility just wasn't available to the other retailers in Hyper Hyper. They had managed teams that had limited knowledge and capabilities. Changes in fashions and trends often presented them with lengthy and expensive redesign procedures in order to catch up.

Mapping this across to e-business and e-commerce solutions, the parallels between the changing fashions in costume jewellery and the changing trends in technological developments are quite obvious. In such a changing environment it makes a great deal of sense to have virtual teams of specialists that can be put together on the fly to deal with any technological issues. Only in this way can the emergent changes due to technological developments be handled efficiently

Experts and specialist in technology, like the costume jewellery wholesalers and manufacturers, can easily become locked into areas of speciality while their expertise is hot. This makes it likely they will be unprepared when trends change. Experts and specialists need a learning curve and explorative time before they can properly leap onto the next bandwagon. They can't do this if their time is fully taken up with contracts using the passing technology. It does seam reasonable therefore, to suppose that expertise of all specialists will run hot and cold and it will be up to the skill of the people who hire their services to spot which state they are in.

Looking at e-business and e-commerce in the light of this model, it would seem that the best strategy is to go for virtual teams rather than permanent teams, they are more flexible, can rapidly adjust to changing trends and emergent situations, and there will be no need to manage or to worry about people problems. The overheads will be practically zero. This then makes a strong case for conventional managers to be replaced by specialist communicators who will be able to keep track on a pool of expert services and choose from them according to how hot they are at the time they are needed.