Hard to shake some old thinking.

For the last three years we have been work­ing on lever­ag­ing new tech­nolo­gies and meth­ods to cre­ate a much more effec­tive model for research and invest­ments in emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy invest­ments.  As one of our col­leagues pointed out, we have an oppor­tu­nity to stand on the shoul­ders of giants.

Inter­net tech­nolo­gies and com­pa­nies like Google, Pay­Pal and Skype are clearly shift­ing the strength to weight ratio of what an online busi­ness.  Com­pa­nies like Face­Book and YouTube can go from zero to $bil­lions very quickly.  But mov­ing from the estab­lished meth­ods to the new plat­form isn’t as sim­ple as push­ing a button.

There are sev­eral rea­sons why it’s tricky to do in a real busi­ness con­text.  Here are the ones we have run into:

1. Some of the new things are just not ready to scale.  We’re using Google Apps and it’s had very mixed results when we try and push it beyond the basic use cases.  It will cer­tainly come along but it’s going to take time.

2. Many clients and busi­ness part­ners are slow movers.  Even if we were ready to move entirely to new tech­nolo­gies many of our cus­tomers are not.  At the same time many of the new tech­nolo­gies do a poor job of inte­grat­ing with the old.  There are some gap-filling tech­nolo­gies that help.  For exam­ple Feed­burner and Feed­blitz can turn blog posts into email, IM mes­sages or even Twit­ter posts.  How­ever many wouldn’t be able to nav­i­gate the sim­ple set up process.

3. A few of the things we thought were core val­ues may not be.  We’ve always believed that high pro­duc­tion val­ues in terms of pub­lished research were impor­tant.  The down­side is that it takes a sub­stan­tial amount of time and cost to pro­duce out­put of this cal­iber.  I’m begin­ning to think that the writ­ten report may be of far less value than I real­ized.  So we will be revamp­ing our deliv­ery meth­ods to reflect this.

4. There are a few things we thought would go away that are really core.  It turns out that the old fash­ioned phone con­ver­sa­tion or meet­ing is less replace­able than we thought.    In fact this may be the only real high value ser­vice left in an increas­ingly noisy and infor­ma­tion crowded online space.  Email is get­ting less and less effec­tive as a medium of distribution.

5. Some­times you for­get to pay atten­tion to Inter­net effects.  We tend to start with an approach of what is “best” when we look at a new tech­nol­ogy choice.  How­ever any choice that doesn’t keep us 100% on the Inter­net curve starts to con­flict with our busi­ness model very quickly.  There are been many cases where we have had to back off from a deci­sion to use a piece of soft­ware, a ser­vice or even a whole approach when it became clear that the choice was not on the Inter­net pro­duc­tiv­ity and cost curve.

6. Sim­ple things get hard, then you learn.  Even a task as easy as keep­ing your back­ground of online CV up to date starts easy and then gets com­pli­cated. So we first wrote a great one for our own site.  But then one needs to keep LinkedIn up to date if you are going to use it (which we do.)  But then there is Face­Book, Xing and so on.  At first it’s all extra work and then con­di­tions become right so you can just use a link to your pub­lic pro­file in LinkedIn and take the brave step of remov­ing it from your web­site.   Then it’s back to easy street.  Hope­fully we’ll get more of this.

Each one of these may seem easy to avoid but taken together it’s hard to do.  It’s easy to for­get Inter­net effects when some of your high­est pay­ing clients depend on a phone and a sec­re­tary for all their inter­ac­tion.  We’ve not done a count but as we start to plot our “core” tech­nol­ogy sup­pli­ers the list is much longer than we real­ized.  Con­sid­er­ing that we’ve cycled through sev­eral in most cat­e­gories, that’s quite a bit of churn.

Of course some of the providers have changed quite a bit over the years.  We started out with Yahoo on Day One for many ser­vices and their plat­form is now years behind what is gen­er­ally avail­able.  So we’ve migrated nearly every­thing from them over time.  Google has a way to go but at least they are mov­ing *for­ward* to deliver more.

The impli­ca­tions for our busi­ness, research and invest­ments in emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy, are easy to see and already hap­pen­ing.  The first is that we are increas­ingly mak­ing more from the direct invest­ment side of our busi­ness than from the pub­lished research and advi­sory side.  The sec­ond is that there will be a smaller (<100) clients that will really be on the inside and close to what we do.   Even the abil­ity to achieve this num­ber depends on the suc­cess­ful deploy­ment of some new tech­nol­ogy and dynamic deliv­ery meth­ods we are still developing.

– Kris Tuttle

Tags: tech­nol­ogy, web 2.0, start­ing up

Tagged as: Research, Technology, Tips