Meeting the Dot com Challenge
In 1999 – at the height of the dot com boom – a large US-based non-profit was confronting a brand new competitive threat. A new breed of organization was aggressively targeting the membership of traditional professional associations. Using the internet as a core medium, these so-called ‘vertically integrated portals’ offered individually targeted products and services. Well financed with venture capital, they were directly competing with professional associations for their membership’s attention and money. BearingPoint was called in by a leading national association with a membership of over 400,000 to help them ward off this challenge, transforming the way they used technology to offer their membership the kind of customized experience that the portals were enticing them away with.
Assessing how the organization could use technology to enhance its members’ customer experience began with understanding the services that it offered to its membership, and how it delivered them. Based on this analysis, functional requirements for a technology system were developed, detailing the types of technological tools that were required to offer higher quality products and services to the client’s membership. At the same time, Aref worked with the client to streamline their operations, advising on business process changes and organizational re-alignment to support technology-enabled functions and services.
Improved technology tools and re-engineered business processes allowed the client to offer a wide range of services drawn from a variety of functional departments, yet offered in a single transaction. The client’s membership system also allowed the client to track individual members’ service consumption, from advocacy to job placement services, allowing the non-profit to more effectively customize its products and services for its individual members.
In time, the dot com threat faded. Many vertically integrated portals burned through their venture capital but were unable to develop viable businesses around their ideas. However, the client continued to pursue its mission to upgrade its members’ experience, offering the same type and quality of services that the dot coms had initially promised.
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- Aref Adamali works as a regional economist for the World Bank Group, working out of Nairobi and Istanbul. He spent 5 years before this designing and manufacturing furniture. Having previously advised governments and businesses in developing economies on competitiveness and innovation, he applied some of this same advice to his family’s business. He realized that it is harder to implement good advice than to give it. So he is now back to just giving it.
