Jack Shaw TOPICS: Internet Technology Business Ecommerce Science Future FEE CATEGORY:* 5.0k to 10.0k TRAVELS FROM: Georgia Video Profile Program Outlines Testimonials/Client List Books & Videos Request This Speaker

Jack Shaw: Books & Videos

Surviving the Digital Jungle: What Every Executive Needs to Know About eCommerce and eBusiness(2nd Printing (Revised) May 2000)
by Jack Shaw

"The book does a very good job of clearing away the clutter surrounding this whole issue and, most importantly, provides a plan of action for the reader to follow."
Ray Reynertson, Sturtevant Richmont

"The Digital Jungle can be a cruel and punishing place with survival dependent on your ability to adapt. This book helps to provide an insight into the tools necessary to transform this jungle into a place of beauty and opportunity for those who must enter."
Bob Holinski, DMR Consulting Group, Inc.

With so much information to sift through, with limited resources and limited time to react, how can you chart the best course for your companys future? How can your company survive this technology revolution? The answer can be found in Surviving the Digital Jungle: What Every Executive Needs to Know About eCommerce and eBusiness.

Learn about:
• The impact of eCommerce on the marketplace
• The Current and emerging technologies of eBusiness
• Examples of companies successfully utilizing the technologies
• The steps to take for Digital Business Transformation
  


How to order :
Click here to learn more about this book and to order it securely online from Amazon.com. When the Amazon.com screen comes up, simply click "add it to your shopping cart" to order.



Excerpt from Surviving the Digital Jungle: What Every Executive Needs to Know About eCommerce and eBusiness
Are you positioned to survive in the Digital Jungle? The outcomes of the transition from the industrial economy of the 20th Century to the digital economy of the 21st Century are binary. That is, you will make the transition or you will not. Halfway measures will guarantee failure. Within a few years, surviving businesses will all be eBusinesses. Those who fail to make the transition will be bought up or simply disappear.

If you plan to survive in the emerging digital economy, you need to understand what is happening in our society and in our economy, and you must recognize the implications for your business.

We have entered a new age of civilization -- the Information Age. The Information Age is already proving to be as profoundly different from the Industrial Age in which most of us were born and raised as that age of airplanes and automobiles was different from the primitive agricultural eras that preceded it. Business Week magazine said, "Information technology affects every other industry. It boosts productivity, reduces costs, cuts inventories, facilitates electronic commerce. It is, in short, a transcendent technology -- like railroads in the 19th Century and automobiles in the 20th."

In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, predicted that the processing power of the computer chip would double every 18 months. For over 30 years, that prediction, known as "Moores Law," has held true with no end in sight. Computing power is growing exponentially.

By early 1998, the first gigahertz chip had been tested in laboratories. In late 1998, IBM demonstrated the fastest computer in the world at that time - a machine capable of processing 3.9 trillion instructions per second. Thats 15,000 times faster than a state of the art 1999 personal computer. It also sports over 80,000 times the memory of that same PC. However, at recent rates of advance, most people can expect to own that kind of computing power by the year 2010.

Computing power is not only growing rapidly, the cost is falling equally rapidly. The standard unit of measure for computer speed is the ability to process 1 million instructions per second (or MIPS). As recently as the late 1970s, purchasing the computing power needed to process one MIPS cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. By 1991, the cost of one MIPS computing power had dropped to $230. In 1994, it was down to $50. In 1995 it declined to $16, and by 1997, it was down to $3.42. This trend means we must plan our business models and design our business processes for a future where supercomputing power is virtually as free as the air we breathe and the water we drink.

Data communications capacity, or bandwidth, is also growing exponentially. The speed of dialup modems has increased from 14.4K (thousand bits per second) to 56K over the past few years. However, that is dwarfed by the arrival of cable modems and ADSL telephone lines. These new communications channels will provide data communications capacities of six to 10 megabits per second. That is 100 to 500 times faster than the dialup modems of 1999.

But megabits are just a drop in the bucket compared to what is coming. At Lucent Technologies and MIT, the ability to transmit data at speeds in excess of a terabit per second has already been tested and proven. Thats 1,000 gigabits or a million megabits per second. That is enough data communications capacity to download an entire three-hour long movie, uncompressed, in a fraction of a second.

Perhaps even more than hard-wired communications, wireless digital communications will impact the way we work and live. On November 1, 1998, Motorola officially launched its Iridium satellite communications network. This network of 66 satellites in low Earth orbit provides wireless voice and data communications around the globe. Also in 1998, Teledesic Corporation launched the first of its 268 satellites into low Earth orbit. When this constellation is completed around 2002, it will provide wireless, broadband, multimedia communications and computing capabilities anywhere on the planet. It will be a virtual Internet in the sky.

Try to finish the following sentence correctly: "There are more telephones in Tokyo than..." As of this writing the answer is "...in the entire continent of Africa." Africa may never have as many hard-wired telephones as Tokyo, but, in a few decades, it will probably have every bit as good an information technology infrastructure. Wireless digital communications will bring the Information Age to parts of the world where lack of a communications infrastructure and economic resources have held back progress over the past century. By the middle of the 21st Century, wireless digital communication will have helped to make obsolete the phrase "Third World."

The combination of the data processing and data communications explosions is bringing unprecedented capabilities to humankind. For example, we shall soon see telephone switches and other devices that provide real-time translation between people conversing in different languages. Digital highways into the home already offer instant access to the worldÕs store of knowledge and information.

Virtual meeting rooms save people the wear and tear of air travel. Satellite-based personal communicators allow individuals to phone home from anywhere on the planet. And machines capable of emotion, inference, and learning are interacting with human beings in new ways. It appears that Star Wars C3PO and Star Treks Mr. Data may not be so far off after all!

How do you plan for the extraordinary changes taking place in our society and our economy? How do you more effectively manage your organization to ensure that it will survive such dramatic change as well as take full advantage of it? To begin with, you must answer the question, "How will the future of our industry be different?" Specifically, you must look five years out and ask:

• In what end product or service markets will we participate?
• Who will our customers be?
• How will we reach them?
• Who will our competitors be?
• What will our competitive advantage be?
• Where will our margins come from?
• What capabilities will make us unique?
  

To answer such questions requires more than just industry forecasting, it requires industry foresight. The distinction is a key one. Forecasting starts with what is today and attempts to project what might happen tomorrow. Foresight starts by identifying what could be tomorrow and then determines what must happen in the interim to accomplish the desired result.

Industry foresight requires deep insight into key trends in technology, demographics, life style, and regulation in order to rewrite industry rules. Only then can you create the new competitive space that will ensure that your organization can survive and thrive in the digital economy of the 21st Century.

A study published in the Harvard Business Review discussed what it takes for companies to survive and succeed in the emerging digital economy. It pointed out that those companies which are most successful are those that exceed their competitors in three critical dimensions of management. Those dimensions are quality, speed, and cost.

Quality is no longer a competitive advantage, it is a competitive necessity. At leading-edge companies, the quality of their products and services is unsurpassed. In addition, they do things faster than the competition, whether that is filling a customerÕs order or bringing a new product to market. And finally, the delivered cost of their products is the lowest in the market.

Companies that excel in all three critical dimensions of management dominate their markets. Those that fall short in any one of these three critical dimensions, no matter how well they do in the other two, fall into the great majority of businesses simply struggling to survive in the market.

How can you simultaneously maximize the quality of your products and services, minimize your business process cycle times, and cut costs? The answer, at most businesses today, is that you cant do it. That is the challenge that management faces. It is impossible to simultaneously maintain quality, reduce business process cycle times, and cut costs given todays paperbound, people intensive business processes. The only way to make the changes needed to ensure that our organizations survive the transition from the industrial economy of the 20th Century to the digital economy of the 21st is to digitally transform our business models and business processes -- to become eBusinesses.

eBusinesses use digital technologies as enablers to transform their business models and business processes in ways not possible with traditional paper-bound communications.

A business process is a group of related activities that produces a result of value to the customer. Process redesign is best defined in the book Reengineering the Corporation, by Mike Hammer and James Champy, as "the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of businesses to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as costs, quality, service, and speed."

A business model represents the combination of business processes that comprise your enterprise. Typically, an enterprise business model will consist of 5-10 business processes. An eBusiness results from the total digital transformation of your business. Transformation of business models and processes is necessary for several reasons.

First, customers are demanding individualized treatment. Second, competition is getting tougher. Were in a global marketspace now, and it only takes one global competitor to raise the bar for everyone else. Third, technological change has accelerated. It's not only changing the nature of the products and services that we offer, but information technology is also increasingly being used as a strategic competitive weapon. Fourth, most organizations have fragmented processes. Our processes are built into industrial era organizational structures where stovepiped organizations allow information to flow vertically, but make it difficult for information to flow horizontally through processes that cross our traditional departmental boundaries. All this must change as we enter the 21st Centurys Digital Economy.

How to order :
Click here to learn more about this book and to order it securely online from Amazon.com. When the Amazon.com screen comes up, simply click "add it to your shopping cart" to order.

Articles by Jack Shaw:

• Electronic Commerce, A Business Strategy Checklist
  
• Succeeding in the Brave New World of E-Commerce
  

* Please note that while this speaker's specific fee falls within the range posted at the top of this page (for Continental U.S. based events), fees are subject to change without notice. Also note that most celebrity keynotes begin in the $25,000 and up range (most list "Contact for Fee Schedule"). For current fee information or international event fees, please contact your Speakers Platform representative.