Not ‘dot-com’ likely

By Mike Mikkelsen FBCI , MTMA – Managing Director of Redan International Limited and Chairman of the TMA’s Business Continuity Management Group.

The ebb and flow of ‘dot-com’ popularity has been centre stage over the last six months. Led by the short termism demands of the financial institutions and the new breed of ‘on-line’ investors to make a fast buck, coupled with the technologists creating new products and services, this method of doing business is seen as the future. It’s here. It’s now. It’s a revolution. And that’s notwithstanding the spats between enthusiasts, cynics and traditionalists during the current shake-outs.

Any new initiative spawns a raft of new TLA’s (Three Letter Abbreviations) and e-commerce is no different. TLA’s such as WAP, ISP and ASP now trip lightly off the tongue with B2B and B2C equally being banded around as though in common use for years. It’s easy for busy communications people to get carried along but, if you had five minutes to sit quietly in ‘the snug’ and take stock of the frenetic activity, you might get to ask what are the real implications.

OK, e-commerce is here to stay. But, as with the development of the digital watch, there will be winners and losers in the creation of its full potential. Business is currently in a cycle of ‘big is beautiful’. Just look at all those mergers, acquisitions and alliances in the Telecommunications, Media and Technology sector. A new one everyday. So when it comes to e-commerce, a consolidation of the number of service providers will take place along with natural attrition.

Who will these winners and losers be? As I see it, e-commerce is the ‘Miss Martini Service’ Any time. Any place. Anywhere. Well, that is the marketing message that is driving the applications and apparent need for e-commerce. If that’s a description that is acceptable to you, drill down a little more into the drivers for the services.

Knowledge is and always has been the fundamental requirement of business. (The second key requirement for business is the ‘interpreter of that knowledge’ which is largely still human). The real drivers now are speed and access. The ability to manage knowledge quickly is essential to success. However, to realise the full potential of that knowledge the real key is availability. In an e-commerce environment that availability demands the assembly of a number of technological skills. Additionally, the knowledge content itself constitutes a further layer of technology. Commercially it’s the most critical.

Let me give you a couple of examples. First the hotel bedroom . If this is not sold in a day you can never sell that slot again – simply, if you cannot gain access to this hotel to book the room you will go to the next available hotel and the original hotel carries the revenue loss.

Second example is the Voice-mail loop. The sheer frustration of pressing another set of keys to self steer to the appropriate part of the business to ‘provide the service’ you require is becoming the bane of all our lives. Service? You must be joking. More like anti-service.

If you put those two examples together you have created an e-commerce nightmare, the inhibitor to growth and development of the full potential. And yet today that is in many instances just what happens.

Why should I get Busy Tone from my ISP – I am constantly told that demand is exceeding expectations. That demonstrates to me that once again we have another example from the telecommunications environment of ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’.

A similar example of that approach, from the telecommunications environment again, comes from the Mobile Network Services Providers (Guess what 3G means to us users over the next 12/15months!). The introduction of WAP, if the Japanese experience can be used as a yardstick, will warm us all up nicely for the 3G experiences.

None of the current classic telecoms service providers have created a portfolio of services that truly support the aims and objectives of - ecommerce. I call this ‘dot-connectivity’. How can e-commerce fully mature with the best availability of their connectivity layer being 99.995 per cent. The users’ ASP’s and ISP’s will expect Martini availability, 100 per cent any time, any place, anywhere, as the dependency on e-commerce grows.

Yes, you can argue, by appropriate resilience design such Martini availability can be achieved. I suggest that currently this is not the case. The introduction of DSL technology is seen as the next step to opening up e-commerce. Great. Bandwidth by the yard. But what about the availability, my best bet is an availability of only 99.9etc.

Why not provide a high availability service for the local loop? How? Simple, just hook-up a radio link or keep the ISDN service and integrate at the interface of the DSL. The cost, if presented correctly will not be a barrier, in fact this approach could provide revenues for the telecommunications service providers.

Moving on to the ASP’s and ISP’s, what are they doing to ensure availability of their aspects of the e-commerce services? A very recent survey of the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery market in the UK has identified that only 22% of all UK ISP’s have undertaken any form of Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity planning. That’s alarming, or it should be.

It is a further example of the current ‘never mind the quality – feel the width’

e-commerce approach. The reason given, as ever, is that Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning will come later. That’s because the current priority is to take the services to market. A total load of ‘not dot-com likely’! Mikkelsen’s Law states that e-connectivity and e-continuity must be fundamental to e-commerce, that is to say ‘ec +ec = ec’.

How can so many companies blindly follow the trend without being fully aware of the implications and shortfalls? Is it not time that some real consideration is given to creating a Miss Martini e-commerce service?

Very shortly the public offerings of Voice over IP will be available to the market place and this will very quickly re-dimension network availability and continuity. Are we as telecommunications professionals ready for this challenge because all the evidence from previous introduction of new services indicates to me that we are not.

The processed management of any risk in new business and technology environments is paramount. Including structured business continuity management and disaster recovery planning at Stage One is no longer ‘an option’. Our mission, should we choose to accept, is to ensure that business continuity management and disaster recovery knowledge is elevated and placed to the forefront of service and product development.

Miss Martini-like. Everytime. Every place. Everywhere.

More details of TMA’s Business Continuity Special Interest Group at www.tma.org.uk or contact Sylvia Griffiths on 01372 362134, email sgriffiths@tma.org.uk