It is now the beginning of November, Year 2000. Just have heard some bad news--many staff laid off in another big dotcom company.  

What have gone wrong? All the optimistic forecasts were made by the rich and famous and people with at least one PhD! Whom shall the general public follow if even these elite people see things wrongly?

I always believe that information society success needs the market pull. This order is more logical  to me--needs of the community satisfied, critical mass reached, information society picks up, dotcoms boom.

I wonder how effectively can end users and consumers learn from seminars of E-commerce, E-business, E-shopping, etc. that are full of technical jargon that only technical experts can understand and glorify  themselves through them. We can't just tell people how great dotcom and IT are, with the use of fashionable buzzwords, to get their fancy automatically.

We need to go back to the fundamentals to pull up dotcoms from the doom; good concepts and models of, e.g. Marketing, MIS and Organisational Change in the last few decades are never too old to be useful in the dotcom era. The following important areas are suggested to revisit first:

how to identify end user/consumer needs; examples of needs are
-human communications
-knowledge
-entertainment/relaxation
-execution of functions

how to satisfy end user/consumer needs
-after understanding cause-effect relationships e.g. after one executes an e-function, what can one accomplish? and what basic need can he/she satisfy? These objectives and needs may form a hierarchy.
-the use of box-arrow and other diagrams to show relationships

how to find out
-relationships between the past, present and the future
-tangible and intangible costs and benefits
-a way to work out Return On Investment (ROI)
-impacts of change and ways to reinforce positive ones and overcome negative ones. Not only economic impacts, but psycho-social ones should be considered

how to integrate
-different types of flows within and between organisations
-thoughts of different levels, functional organs, disciplines of knowledge
-innovators of technologies with the strategic thoughts of good business managers
-'hard' and 'soft' concepts of networks and networking

how to communicate
-visions and missions
-management philosophies
-goals and objectives
-action plans
-with people in the organisation and its stakeholders
-using proper communications tools

Please come back to this website from time to time. I shall share with you my thoughts in these and other related areas through short articles, each with a focus.
 

Charles Lam
email: clam@kamching.com
Early November 2000