[LINK] RFI: Net Business - Working On-line - Beyond E-commerce

[Tom Worthington]

This is to request topics for me to talk about this year in the general area
of electronic business.

This would be something similar to "Electronic Futures, Three months on the
InfoBahn looking for the on-line future", from 1996:
http://www.acs.org.au/president/1996/epubs/efuture.htm

>... I am booked to talk at several events in the next three months around
the world. 
>Rather than just give the same talk many times, or try to write several
independent 
>talks, I propose to develop a theme over that time and  present progress
reports 
>along the way...

Ideally material from this years talks at conferences, seminars and courses
would be assembled into a small book for publication in 2001. This would be
about 250 pages (20 chapters each of about 12 A5 pages of 1660 words), under
the working title of "Net Business - Working On-line - Beyond E-commerce".
This would include travelogue items and be similar in format to "Net
Traveller: http://www.tomw.net.au/nt

The topic "Net Business" is a reaction against the fad for e-commerce and
for a narrow definition of e-commerce at that. Goaded by the mass media,
business (and the general public) are being encouraged to concentrate on
just one aspect of using the Internet for business: on-line sales. Earlier
points in the business process are forgotten and later points are lumped
under the heading of "fulfillment". This is as if running the business,
producing and delivering the product was a trivial exercise and all that
mattered was packaged retail sales.

There is a general assumption that a company just has to get an Internet
connection to become an on-line company. Many have been disappointed when a
web site does't bring instant success and turns out to be difficult to do
right. Many are likely to find to their cost that having an Internet
connection doesn't provide instant productivity and may need to be worked
at. Most who bought shares in e-companies will find the profits virtual.

The current e-commerce approach is based on a mail order model unique to the
USA. It is not clear if this will work for similar goods in other parts of
the world, let alone other goods and services. The artificial barriers to
trade hidden in the current model also need to be addressed. As an example,
while Amazon.com boast about being a global online bookstore, they only buy
books from North American distributors.

As with my previous work, advice and assistance will be sought on-line and
drafts posted. The resulting material will be available free on-line.

POSSIBLE CONTENTS (with some starting points):

1  Introduction (based on the above)
2  E-mail for business (adapted from "How to Read and Write E-mail" in Net
Traveller)
3  Designing and Launching Your Web Site - Check list (based on the "How to
Judge Student Web Sites for EdNA Online Australia?" posting to Link in
September 1999).
4  Building Project Team for Web Development (from the talk for Government
Online 99, 10 November 1999: http://www.tomw.net.au/papers/bpt.html
5  Delivery of Services via the Internet (based on "Outsourcing the
management of information systems", 16 June, 1999:
http://www.tomw.net.au/papers/outint.html)
6  Balancing information provision with security (based on "Defence and
Government on the Web - Balancing public information provision with
security", for Optimising Open Source Information, Australian Defence Force
Academy, 7 October 1998: http://www.acs.org.au/president/1998/past/websec.htm
7  Electronic Document Knowledge Management (based on "World Wide Web
Warriors - Knowledge Management at The Australian Department of Defence",
AIC Electronic Document Management 1998 Conference, 21 July 1998 - Auckland:
http://www.acs.org.au/president/1998/past/edm98nz.htm)
8  The Politics of Bandwidth (from: The Politics of Bandwidth, Community
Networking 99: Engaging Regionalism Conference, 29 September 1999:
http://www.tomw.net.au/papers/pb.html
9  Robots for Defence . Based on Visit to Aerosonde, 9 September 1999:
http://www.tomw.net.au/travel/ara
10 Arcadia - IT references in Tom Stoppard's play examined (expanded from
the introduction to: "From Arcadia to Zeus: my first year on the Web- The
twentieth century's cultural landscape", http://www.tomw.net.au/conf95cl.html
11 The One Voice Campaign - The Web for Politics. Inspired by "The One Voice
Campaign", 6 June 1999: http://www.tomw.net.au/onevoice/
12 Visit to an overseas research establishment (similar format to "Cambridge
live from a Double Decker Bus": http://www.tomw.net.au/nt/uk.html
13 Visit to an on-line business
14 Visit to an on-line government
15 Overview of Australian government on-line policies
16 Overview of US on-line policies
17 Non-ecommerce models for net business
18 Digital TV - technical success but business failure
19 Overcoming Government impediments to net business
20 Overcoming commercial impediments to net business
21 ABN for fast-tracking e-commerce
22 Adapting Corporate Culture to E-culture
23 Internet Open Source Intelligence: Finding Information on the Web
24 The Web in Abstract - Cataloging, Rendering
25 Legal equirements for web and e-mail
26 Internet concepts applied to conventional business
27 On-line Reference matrial and Services for Running a Business
28 Net Traveller: How to Write and Sell a Book On-line 
29 How to run a conference on-line
29 The art of on-line persuasion: government Internet policy

Tom Worthington FACS     tom.worthington@tomw.net.au  Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd              A.C.N. 088 714 309
http://www.tomw.net.au                  PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617
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