Innovating Your Business Model

Mark Johnson, Innosight chairman, on how you can seize the white space. See also the book "Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal," more information can be found here.

Designing for Acceptance: Exchange Design for Electronic Intermediaries

My PhD research was on designing electronic intermediaries. I published my PhD thesis in November 2006. Below is a short summary.

Electronic business has brought many success stories as well as failures. Intermediaries are a particularly interesting application domain: on the one hand, they are given opportunities by electronic business to reinvent their value logic, while on the other they are threatened by opportunities for customers and suppliers to deploy electronic business to do business directly. Designing for Acceptance addresses the acceptance of electronic intermediaries by studying the design of the exchange. For example, should a web catalogue provide price information and should it consider an extension with transaction functionality?

Developing the right exchange design is a complex undertaking because of the many design options and the interests of multiple actors that need to be taken into account. Four cases were studied: Tapestria (interior fabrics), SeaQuipment (maritime products), Meetingpoint (insurances) and Voogd & Voogd (insurances). The results are an exchange design model and patterns that are derived from numerous case lessons and are supported by insights from theories on electronic intermediaries, acceptance and business design.

The exchange design model offers a systematic insight into generic exchange design themes that are relevant to the interests of customers, intermediary and suppliers. Exchange design patterns discuss specific trade-offs with respect to one or more themes. This study contributes to current knowledge by providing support for balancing interests in exchange design beyond simple prescriptions like ‘creating win-win situations.’ The exchange design themes and patterns are convenient instruments that offer constructive support for developing a vague electronic business idea into a concrete service concept.

Book reading: Benefits Management

Currently I am reading 'Benefits Management: Delivering Value from IS & IT Investments' by Ward and Daniel. They argue that a successful investment in IT requires a process for organizing and managing the actual realization of potential benefits. They draw specific attention to the changes in organizational processes and relationships and the roles and working practices of individuals and teams inside, and in some cases, outside the organization.

Next to providing an analysis of the benefits problem and an understanding of how to tackle it, they also provide a benefit management approach with support for the activities. The benefits dependency network has a central role in this approach (search for examples). An important guideline is, for example, to check whether the people responsible for the changes are also the onces who receive the benefits.

In my opinion benefits management is not only relevant for IT projects of practitioners, but also for IT research projects. I will write a review when I finished reading the book.