Helping people to do it for themselves

One of the commonest mistakes made by e-businesses is to think from a bricks and mortar perspective and try to build an Internet presence based upon the the notion of providing a fully comprehensive and efficient service for customers or clients. Such an approach to doing business is so universally accepted that it is seldom even considered that there might be a better way. After all, what could be better than using all possible means to find out what customers want and then make every effort to give it to them?

However, the environment of the Internet is not the same as that of the world of bricks and mortar. It is possible to go one better than provide customers with what they want - it is possible to enable customers to provide for themselves.

A service to provide information of cancer treatments is a case in point, where to think solely from the provider's view point clearly highlights the limitations of the quality of service that it is possible to provide. Conventional business thinking would conclude that it is not commercially viable to fully satisfy a customer's need for complete information about available cancer treatments.

However, because of the uniqueness of the communication environment of the Internet, it is possible to do things that wouldn't even be considered in the conventional bricks and mortar world. For example, you wouldn't expect an old economy business to tell their customers they can't help them, but, if the customers got together they could help each other. Yet, this is exactly the kind of thinking that is appropriate in many areas of e-business.

Take this problem of supplying cancer treatment information to patients: a conventional approach to supplying such a service would assume that such a service is impractical because there is too much knowledge to be recorded and even if it could be recorded it would rapidly become outdated. Yet, it must be a fact that all current, up-to-date information must be known somewhere in the world by someone. Isn't it possible to find a way to connect together those who know with those who need to know?

Structural organization, formal rules and procedures are not appropriate for solutions to this kind of problem. It will need an informal, dynamic system that is self building and self maintaining. Such a system might be possible to arrange if natural human motivations can be harnessed to create and drive a self organizing process.

In the world of the Internet, such systems are appearing all the time, as the need for specialty information cause special interest e-mail discussion forums to form spontaneously. It is such just such a natural consequence of mass connectivity that can be called into service to create a database for cancer treatment.

The trick is to provide a suitable framework for this self organisation process to take place. To this end, we can use the abstraction of the system used to extract 1920's and 1930's garments from the mass of garments discarded every week in England.

The reader might want to pause again here, to contemplate how this model might be applied to the problem of making patients aware of available cancer treatments. It is a useful exercise in applying abstractions to seemingly intractable real world problems.