Tom Anthony Personal Blog

Tom Walker, President of Web Teks asked me to write a column for the upcoming January 2008 company newsletter. I really like the way it came out so I wanted to share it with you here on my personal blog.

The Dream

When I woke up this morning I was still thinking – how did it get to be 2008 already? Yet here we are reflecting on the past year and ever refining our respective visualization of what lies ahead.

An observation of the immediate future is to report on a movement in the world of commerce toward a more interconnected technological infrastructure. Most of our clients, regardless of the size of their company, already understand how the business process itself now physically extends to the public network through email and the World Wide Web. In a word, eBusiness. O.K. – that is not new.

What may be new to you is how evolving shopping patterns at brick and mortar locations and the increased technological participation of many major distributors and manufacturers is changing the landscape. Hold on – we are not talking about a bunch of new technology here – and by no means are we saying technology itself is the path to increase business. Jim Collins, author of the Book “Good to Great” says it this way; “Technology cannot make or break a company’s level of greatness, but only serves as an accelerator of greatness or demise already in progress”.

What we want to point out is that the maturing process of gathering and sharing data online is having a profound effect on the kind of projects we are asked to engage. Here is a case in point:

An automotive site we designed and maintain starts with data from Arkona, Inc. a company which provides a well known computer program that tracks, maintains, and reports on vehicle inventory. With some help from Web Teks this program feeds another service by Chrome Systems, Inc which provides extensive Manufacturer New Vehicle Data. Now combine what is actually on the lot with how it’s equipped and how much it costs. Our programming goes to the next level and pulls out all the option and pricing logic needed to resolve option conflicts and package codes to manufacturer specifications and requirements.

Before your eyes glaze over – what you end up with is not the technology that makes it all work. Honestly – beside the guys who actually do the programming, who cares? What the customer gets in this case is their absolute dream car. They find exactly what they want – very quickly on the local car dealer’s website, and just as importantly, on the local car dealer’s lot, and all in real time. The result: an exponential increase in local sales from folks shopping on the internet. Like many of you, they know you don’t have to be an engineer to recognize that people shop on the internet before they visit your business location – no matter how many locations you have. So regardless of how it’s done, what the business owner can focus on is making the sale, not how the web site works.

That’s where Web Teks finds itself going in 2008. We don’t build web sites. We help our customers develop strategies to increase sales or decrease expenses. Then we build the technology to make it happen. We don’t make the dream car – we make it easier to have the dream.