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For example, if you're selling electronic components, who is your customer? Is it the purchasing agent or the design engineer? Analog Devices, a manufacturer of electronic components, recognized its real customer and just went live with its e-commerce site. The folks at Analog Devices recognized the problem engineers faced trying to find components when they had only been given the sketchiest of requirements, so they leveraged Open Market's LiveCommerce catalog software to create a compelling discovery engine. It takes advantage of a parametric search capability that lets an engineer search through thousands of components based on ad hoc design criteria, such as input current, megahertz and temperature range. This alone has generated enough commitment to encourage Analog Devices to extend the site behind the firewall to codevelop and comarket products.
Whoever your customers are, determine h
ow your processes--marketing, customer interaction, professional interaction, product development, internal support or market research--can help them get the job done. Analysis, tools to facilitate searches, comparisons and what-if scenarios will build demand for your site by providing assistance any time customers need it.
You will have succeeded when your site becomes part of their group. Provide a workspace for collaboration and your site will have traffic regardless of the stage of your customers' projects. Your customers will come to your site when they're researching a future purchase, and they will come when they are finally ready to buy.
It's About Trust
Business payments tend to be asynchronous--they tend not to happen at the actual moment of purchase. That's what net 30 days is all about. The basis for all currency-related business transactions is trust. If you don't get paid on time, you won't maintain a business relationship. Currency-related relationships on the Internet are no diff
erent.
So, in addition to considering your customer's projects and processes, think about the intersection of the law (at least the uniform commercial code) with ongoing business processes. Also consider the security infrastructure that reinforces that trust. The greatest information and cool collaborative tools won't make a bit of difference if the customer is uneasy about security. Authentication and encryption prevent eavesdropping and protect delivery, especially with digital products.
The catch-22 with security on the Internet is that you don't control both ends--you are often unable to influence factors and factions at your customer's site. For example, you want to use a certificate authority that needs to open a port on your customer's firewall for LDAP information and another for encrypted certificates, and you want to get it done in a timely fashion (good luck to you). As a result, security is often dependent on the lowest-common denominator--of what is widely deployed in browsers--and for tod
ay that's SSL (Secure Sockets Layer).
But what about tomorrow? On a scale from informal to intimate, we start with the basic transaction: the actual transfer of title and payment. For this most basic business relationship we rely on commercial standards like SET and EDI (electronic data interchange). At the next level we want to bring the customer into our corporate network for information sharing, but only on our terms. At this point the tools include SSL and X.509.
Finally, we enter an intimate relationship, a joined-at-the-hip partnership with access to a variety of systems both Web- and legacy-based that provide private networks. Eventually IPSec, PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) and L2F (Layer 2 Forwarding) tunnels combined with user rights and privileges driven from LDAP directories should allow this type of close relationship in a timely and fine-tuned fashion. So plan for the future today--check out the Socks VPN (virtual private network) firewall traversal protocols (RFC 1928), which p
romise secure transparent access via negotiated, user-based authentication and encrypted channels across the Internet.
Evan Kaplan, CEO of Aventail, describes this continuum as a theory of reasonableness. "If you depend on security on the application level, you are paralyzed. And if you depend on network level security, you're vulnerable. The firewall is really an artificial boundary. The solution is to secure an individual's traffic by building user-centric proxies that enable policy enforcement for particular individuals to specific resources at a defined time."
It's About Results
What awaits us at the end of this process? A way to establish business relationships without lengthy negotiation, development and integration cycles with each partner prior to actually doing business. Ideally you will integrate all the platforms, applications and databases scattered throughout your organization into a Web presence where your customers and partners can cut through the red tape and get their jobs done.
And along the way, they will almost certainly find themselves buying your product or services.
Brian Walsh is the founder of bwalsh.com, Portland, Ore., a networking and communications consulting firm specializing in Internet and client/server product strategies, development and testing. He can be reached at www.bwalsh.com.
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