VideoWith Internet research firm eMarketer predicting a 27 percent rise in fourth-quarter online sales this year versus last, there's little doubt that consumers will be spending a lot of time visiting a great many Websites. While the increased prevalence of high-speed connections now allows companies to offer much snazzier interfaces, researchers at MIT are developing ways for Websites to not just dazzle, but actually build a sense of trust between a company and its customers.
Collaboration between Intel Corp. and MIT's Sloan Center for eBusiness focuses on how to take the Web experience beyond what Sloan professor of management Glen Urban calls the "must-haves" — namely privacy, security, and an error-free experience — and into the realm of the "trusted adviser." The WebTrust project began with the addition of a logic wizard to help Intel site visitors find the downloadable software they are looking for, then added a "persona," who guides users through their many options.
Interestingly, in this day of computer-animated everything, the persona is based on an actual Intel employee — a woman named Rosa — whose photograph and voice add a human touch. With Rosa helping, measures of the site's effectiveness and users' attitudes toward it and Intel rose substantially.
Urban says the results can be easily adapted by other site designers. "Websites are continually redesigned to add improvements," he says, "but there is still a long way to go. It's similar to the TQM movement: we thought we were good at product quality until the Japanese showed us how much better it could get."
IP Ins and Outs
Companies have high hopes of licensing their intellectual property (IP) to others, but they often fail to see the potential in being licensees themselves. So argue McKinsey consultants Meagan Dietz and Jeff Elton, who found that while 43 percent of the companies they surveyed expect the licensing of their IP to increase (in dollar volume) by 50 percent or more in the next five years, only 11 percent expect to similarly increase the amount they spend to license the IP of other companies.
While it's natural to want to sell your IP rather than buy others', Dietz and Elton argue that when companies do invest in external IP and build it into their products, they can often turn around and license the results at a handsome profit. The not-invented-here syndrome is a hurdle that must be crossed, of course, but so-called in-licensors prove more adept at nearly all phases of IP management, despite the fact that in-licensing generally gets far less attention (and resources) than out-licensing.
So if your own company is short on good ideas (see "How Their Garden Grows"), consider licensing the ideas of others and refining them. It could pay off.
Automation Acclimation
The technological bedrock of most organizations will look substantially different in one to three years, according to a Summit Strategies survey of more than 300 IT managers involved in infrastructure decisions. The big change: a move toward automation and "virtualization," the latter a hazily defined term that generally means moving away from dedicated machines for dedicated uses and toward a system in which fewer boxes can be made to satisfy more needs. It's a close cousin to utility computing, another buzz phrase not short on definitions, but which Summit analyst Mary Johnston-Turner describes as "a transformation from silos of functionality to dynamic resources that can be shared based on business needs," priced by actual usage.
Today, almost two-thirds of the respondents said, the resources that provide an IT infrastructure are generally dedicated to individual applications and the associated technology stacks that make them run. But only 18 percent of respondents believe that will be the case in one to three years. Instead, a host of new technologies — led by Web services but including storage and server virtualization as well as blade systems (modular servers that can be bumped up in power/capacity as needed) — will transform the data center.
Companies that have already started down this road, however, say that the management challenges are many and include improving configuration tracking, capacity planning, and workload-balancing capabilities; allocating the costs of IT resources in a more-equitable manner; retraining staff; and investing in more automation software to make all of this virtualized machinery as efficient and reliable as possible.
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