A cafe as a guidance device

A conceptual jump can now be made to see how the cafe´ can be used as a guidance system that steers a cafe owner towards a goal, or - using the gold prospecting simile - to follow the specs of gold up a river. Again we'll use the guided missile metaphor, but, when this metaphor was used previously, a vital factor was missing: the question of uncertainty. In the previous metaphor, the missile was seen as homing in on a single identifiable target. In the world of e-business, goals are not so easily identifiable. Uncertainty and unknowns have the same effect on a person seeking an e-business solution as a missile seeking to lock onto a target when there are a large number of possible targets and these are in the midst of a cloud of decoys. This greatly increases the complexity of the problem.

A guided missile handles this problem by tracking a number of targets simultaneously. It will approach them as a group, carrying out tests on each to try to eliminate the decoys. When it is near to the group it will have to choose just one of them to pursue. It will probably be the nearest.

This is virtually the same strategy of the businessman compared to the surfer waiting on a beach for the right wave to come along. There are many possible business niches to exploit, just as a surfer might see many waves and the missile might see many targets and decoys.The businessman will be tracking many possible niches and trying to eliminate the red herrings and dead-ends in exactly the same way the surfer will be looking for the largest waves and the missile will be eliminating the decoys. Businessman, surfer and missile will all have to make a single final choice: the businessman will go for the most viable; the surfer will go for the largest and the missile will go for the nearest.

What they all have in common is a necessity to discriminate between the possible targets and avoid the decoys. It is in solving these problems that the cafe´can be called into use. The modified missile metaphor is illustrated in figure 17.1

In figure 17.1, the guided missile metaphor is showing how the cafe is used as a device to discriminate between possible goals and avoid dead-ends and red herrings. It shows how a cafe might be used by an auteur to create a business solution with the aid of a cafe. However, as an abstraction, it is difficult to relate this to a real world situation without an example.

For this example, we can continue with the way the author wrote this book. It was written under the guidance of a representaive group of potential future readers: customers who were included as an essential part of the design process. They were the river and specs of gold that led to the conclusion of this book. It is not a pure e-business, because the product that evolves - the book - is sold mostly through outlets in the bricks and mortart world. But, most e-business product are like this: hybrids that make use of the environment of the Internet for real world needs.