Consumers of health care constitute a highly diverse market, but the idea that companies might segment customers and profit by addressing their varied needs seems almost foreign to the health industry. You can tap hidden value by making use of patterns in the demand for health products and services, especially if you segment consumers according to health and wealth at the same time.
To exploit your product's platform potential, say consultants John Sviokla and Anthony J. Paoni, you need creativity--and good intellectual property protection.
It's fashionable to talk of being "customer oriented." But regardless of how companies attempt to flatten their organizations or empower frontline workers, the simple truth is that every customer's experience is determined by the order management cycle (OMC): the 10 steps, from planning to postsales service, that define a company's business system. Every time the order is handled, the customer is handled. And every time the order sits unattended, the customer sits unattended. To find the gaps in an OMC--those places where a customer's order is dropped or shunted to the wrong department--managers should try what authors Benson Shapiro, V. Kasturi Rangan, and John Sviokla did in their research. They "stapled" themselves to an order in the 18 companies they studied, literally following it through every stage of the OMC. Based on this practical approach, the authors point out potential gaps throughout the OMC. For example, marketing and production battles can erupt even during order planning, and some of the fiercest fighting can break out during scheduling, when the sales force may want quick turnarounds that are unrealistic for manufacturing. Most companies don't see the OMC as a whole system, especially because each phase may require a bewildering overlap of functional responsibilities. However, when managers take the time to track each step of the OMC, they'll come into contact with customer service representatives, production schedulers, shipping clerks, and other critically important people. In this article, first published in 1992, the authors contend that managers who "staple themselves to an order" will not only move horizontally across their own organizations, charting gaps and building information bridges; they'll also see the company from the customer's perspective.
Conor O'Toole, Internet business executive, must consider how to take the Bank of Ireland on-line. The bank, and Ireland, and most of continental Europe, lagedlagged behind the United States in adopting Internet techologytechnology. O'Toole wondered how he should prioritize the limited resources he had to invest in Internet initiatives. He thought that the bank, established in 1783, was missing opportunities that competitors were captureingcapturing. He needed to decide what financial products to move successfully to the Internet and in what order. He wondered how he could justify the broad-ranging investments to build a new online infrastructure, a new selling context, and new product content simultaneously. Finally, he contemplated how to convey the Internet challenges and and the opportunities to senior management.
Edmund's publishes an automobile price guide in books (600,000 units per year) and over the Internet (16,000 users a day and growing). The site can be visited at www.edmunds.com. In the marketplace, it makes money selling books. In the marketspace, they make their money on referrals--referring customers to Auto-By-Tel, a car-shopping service, and GEICO, an auto insurer, among others.
Tells the story of the China Internet Corp. (CIC), which was founded to serve both businesses wishing to conduct electronic commerce within China and those intending to trade with companies within China. The company provides access and advertising to companies; it does not offer Internet services to the public. Details CIC's major concerns: expansion, compensation, funding, and human resource issues.
Every business today competes in two worlds; a physical world of resources that managers can see and touch and a virtual world made of information. Executives must pay attention to how their companies create value in both arenas--the marketplace and the marketspace. But the processes for accomplishing this are not the same in the two worlds. Managers who understand how to master both can create and extract value in the most efficient and effective manner. Creating value in any stage of a virtual value chain involves a sequence of five activities: gathering, organizing, selecting, synthesizing, and distributing information. Just as someone takes raw material and refines it into someting useful, so a manager today collects raw information and adds value through these five steps.
One of the profound consequences of the ongoing information revolution is its influence on how economic value is created and extracted. Specifically, when buyer-seller transactions occur in an information-defined arena, that information is more easily accessed and absorbed, and arranged and priced in different ways. Most important, the information about a product or service can be separated from the product or service itself. In some cases, the information can become as critical as the actual product or service in terms of its effect on a company's profits. As a result, information-defined transactions--or value creation and extraction in the marketspace--create new ways of thinking about making money and thus a new value proposition. Today both marketplace and marketspace transactions are occurring. The authors have researched how companies work marketplace and marketspace to their best advantage. These companies' experiences provide a useful backdrop for thinking about the marketspace and suggest a strategic model for maximizing opportunities in this emerging area.
Baxter Healthcare is heir to the fabled ASAP ordering system, one of the best-known examples of the use of technology to provide strategic marketing advantage. By 1994, the proprietary ASAP system is well established. Baxter is beginning to launch On-Call EDI, which is an open platform, multiple vendor (including Kodak, Bergen Brunswick & Boise Cascade) system to help hospitals order. The case focuses on whether Baxter is meeting the new needs of the customer in a way which will help them compete, or whether they are giving away the keys to the kingdom by opening up their strategic advantage to others, including their competition.
When BellSouth Enterprises decided to aggressively pursue the international cellular market, it needed new software in order to cope with the complexities of cellular billing and the country-specific variations in the international cellular market. BellSouth made the decision to enter into a strategic alliance with TeleSciences. This case explores why it made this decision and what the ramifications of this decision were for BellSouth and TeleSciences.
This case series describes a company grappling with organizational change through information technology. National Mutual Life Association vies for Australian insurance industry leadership with its long-time competitor. It has purchased an expert system called Client Profiling, developed in the United States, that will allow its extensive field force to perform financial planning. The system should aid agents in making multiple and increased dollar-value sales. Its use will require more time from agents and clients and will change traditional modes of selling. This case describes National Mutual and the Australian insurance industry, and details its decision to purchase the expert system and the formulation of its implementation strategy.
Introduces a framework for identifying and analyzing the ethical and policy issues triggered by the various capabilities of information technology (IT). Ten IT capabilities are defined (access, capture, speed, permanence/storage. duplication, tracking, monitoring, data recombination, job redesign, and supplier power) and mapped against five managerial issues they can trigger (privacy, ownership, control, accuracy, and security). These five issues are then mapped against four policy areas that might address them (data policy, intellectual property rights, worker's rights, and competitiveness). Key questions are raised and various examples of IT's impact on managerial decision making are presented. Finally, four models of ethical analysis are suggested as possible tools for approaching these managerial choices: stakeholder analysis, utilitarian goal-based analysis, rights-based analysis, and duty-based analysis. Useful in an introduction to the management of IT, as well as in a business ethics course.
Describes Du Pont's attempt to follow a "small is beautiful" type approach toward implementing expert systems technology. Intended to illustrate that there is no "one right way" to implement expert systems and that the small systems approach can be a viable strategy provided that it fits the organization's culture, knowledge profile, and resource structure. Can also be used to illustrate the more general issues associated with end user adoption of new technology.