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Articles - Publication Date 9.18.2000
Adding Clicks To Bricks
Designing an Internet strategy? Concentrate on the process opportunities and cultural challenges.
By John Teresko
Mike Cunningham has discovered the truth in the adage that teachers may learn more than their students. As CEO and president of Theoris Inc., Fishers, Ind., Cunningham's Internet consulting career has been focused on helping more than 250 small and midsized companies become Web-enabled -- and found that to do it effectively he had to reinvent his own company. "We started out 16 years ago as a systems integrator operating on the basic premise that the technology challenge was the foremost issue in leveraging the Internet," he says. "What we found was something quite different.
"We learned that technology was only one aspect of the Internet challenge confronting small and medium-sized companies. To fulfill the broader needs of our customers, we found that we would have to reinvent ourselves as an e-business full-service provider. To leverage the Internet our clients need help to align people, processes, and organizational systems with that new paradigm." In Cunningham's view new technology such as the Internet is just a beginning -- a catalyst for organizational and process changes that eventually cascade through companies.
Cunningham cites Curtis Dyna-Fog Ltd. and Aire-Mate Inc., affiliated companies in Westfield, Ind., as examples of two clients at different phases of process change. Curtis Dyna-Fog began its Internet journey in 1996 when it posted its first version of www.dynafog.com. "Our top-most priority was to be the first in our industry to have a Web site," explains Dennis A. Roudebush, vice president, engineering/IT services. That site, developed primarily as a product/application information source, serves as a key tool for Dyna-Fog distributors in 70 countries. It provides access to product literature and market-application information covering more than 16,000 part numbers in its 150 Web pages. "By registering our site in key locations we have been able to steadily grow from 5,000 hits per month in 1996 to over 80,000 hits per month today. The downloaded information has seen an even more dramatic increase in activity exceeding 720 MB per month in June," adds Roudebush.
His Internet implementation at Aire-Mate presented a totally different type of Web-site challenge. Aire-Mate is a manufacturer of industrial cleaning solutions as well as a distributor of Dyna-Fog equipment, says Roudebush. "Unlike Curtis Dyna-Fog, Aire-Mate can sell most of its products directly to the end user. To take advantage of the latest technology, Theoris recommended that www.airemate.com be created based on the true e-business concept using a database structure to relate products and pricing, says Roudebush. His Aire-Mate efforts differ from those at Curtis Dyna-Fog by being focused on integrating the Web page with the company's internal IT structure. He says Aire-Mate's leverage of the Internet strives to maximize the business benefit by completely integrating the e-business activities into the company's internal processes. Roudebush is evolving a strategy for greater integration at Curtis Dyna-Fog. Users of that site soon will be able to connect and interact with the company's intranet, he adds.
More than an online catalog
Sharing Cunningham's view on Internet strategy and organizational impact is IBM Corp.'s Rishi Madabusi, Chicago-based global business development manager in the company's product-life-cycle management unit. "The most common mistake that I usually see is the blind application of technology. Usually a server is purchased -- they want to create a Web page -- then they take their existing catalog stuff and put it on a Web page and proceed to wonder what the payoff will be!"
That wasn't the case for Madabusi's client Solo Golf USA, a family-owned start-up in City of Industry, Calif. An offshoot of the family's 30-year-old aerospace and defense business, Solo Golf came into being in 1994 when the family management team, all avid
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"The greatest difficulty isn't in the technology, it's in changing the corporate culture."
Bill Miller, Krebs Engineers Inc.
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