Has Your Firm Adapted to the Blurred Boundary between the Internet and Your Products and Services?

In late July, our client work had me thinking about the fact that our organizational structures aren’t keeping pace with the speed with which all of our products, services and business processes are becoming Internet-enabled.

Our corporate marketing organizations are working hard to transition to “Web first” content creation, catalog maintenance, and marketing campaigns. They lead with well-tagged and granular e-content and then produce glossy brochures and catalogs, rather than the traditional approach of the other way around.

Our product development groups are incorporating “phone home” features into products for troubleshooting and diagnosis. Many products are now Internet-connectable, from your cell phone to your stock portfolio, from your tractor to your home or office energy management system, from your exercise bike to your blood test equipment. Some products now include Internet-based service updates (book a service appointment), replenishment (order more ink cartridges), and email alerts (your stock just hit a threshold) based on events or on triggers customers can set. Many products offer built-in subscription features (“do you want to download updated tax tables now?) as well as renewals (licenses, maintenance agreements, subscriptions, memberships). Some products now come with electronic dashboards. And many of today’s products and solutions are custom-configurable online.

Our customer support organizations are ramping up customer self-service applications, knowledgebases, and online community self-help groups. Ideally, these self-service and assisted support offerings can be accessed from the product itself, from the Web, or by phone.

Our education and training groups provide interactive learning modules that can be delivered online and just-in-time. These e-learning modules are often accessible from the product itself.

Our Web teams are grappling with tight budgets and technology revolutions to re-architect the online customer experience to provide a full continuum of seamless services (single sign-on, search and navigation, content management, knowledge management) across public anonymous sites, community-of-practice specific sites, and account-specific sites. At the same time, our e-teams are eager to engage customers through customer-contributed content, tagging, blogging, interactive feedback, and social networking.

Our IT organizations are struggling to respond to and/or to proactively anticipate the many service requests from all these online tools and agents; and these requests need access to information and application functionality that resides in back-end systems of record. Many IT organizations are finally embracing service-oriented architectures in order to adapt to this new reality. But most IT SOA groups don’t talk to the R&D product development groups, or to the e-learning team, or to the online community managers.

You find Internet services designers in the product development group. You find them on the Web team. If you’re lucky, you can find them in your IT organization. And maybe they’ll find one another and chat over lunch.

But nowhere do I find a group of Internet services architects that actually straddle all of these functional organizations. Everyone is dealing with the overlaps among these different functional silos as “one offs,” when what’s really happening is that their businesses and their product lines are decomposing themselves into a set of reusable Internet-aware services.

Is It Time for an Internet Services Strategy for Your Business?

Maybe the time is right to begin to pull all these disparate people and services together—not from a command and control point of view, but from a strategic coordination and architectural point of view. I predict that the most profitable businesses in the future will be the ones that have taken a strategic Internet-services approach to business design, rather than a business process approach to business design. They’ll design their businesses from the outside in, focusing on the e-services that are most strategic to customers. Ideally, these services will be understood and leveraged across all of the functional areas in the business.