THIS week in Riyadh there will be many lofty statements made about e-commerce and its importance to this nation. So before the conference even kicks off I will make one statement of greatest importance. If the Kingdom’s bandwidth and Internet access problems are not going to be solved in the next six months then the entire effort in Riyadh is useless.
Don’t start shouting, or perhaps even worse – laughing, at the impossibility of such a goal. Companies do not make five-year plans anymore. At most, profitable firms make rolling plans that cover the next 18 months and now some CEOs think that even this is too long. Vision is different. Companies and governments might have a vision that lasts three years or more. But even that vision will change as market conditions evolve. In this new global age there is no business plan that is written in stone. The best plans are the ones that have built in methodologies that can be used to modify them on-the-fly so the latest developments are incorporated.
I do not believe that the average businessman in Saudi Arabia understands how far we have fallen behind in our business processes. Our offices are overwhelmed with paper and green hanging file folders are still the vehicles for document movement. I meet many Western businessmen coming to the Kingdom for brief work-related visits. Operations that they take for granted in their home nations like downloading contracts or synchronizing notebooks are impossible here due to the difficulties posed by our network. When we tell them it will take us months to make a decision on purchasing a new technology the international sales reps are at first horrified and then delighted. You see, they were already worried that they were offering us technologies that were almost past their “use by dates” and now they find that we might be happy to buy technologies that are considered obsolete elsewhere.
The private sector is in desperate need of education on new global business strategies. With the start of the dotcom crash early last year I heard many local businessmen crowing about how “lucky” it was that the Kingdom had not participated strongly in this short lived “gimmick.” Trust me. Luck had nothing to do with it. Inertia was the more likely reason. Because we did not participate we did not learn, we did not experience and we did not grow.
After electricity, the telephone, and indoor plumbing were invented people never went back to their old ways of functioning. The Internet is not going away. I tell you now that e-commerce is nothing more than an improved form of commerce. Competitors in the marketplace are no longer the companies in your city, country or even region. They could be on the other side of the world.
Take this example. Here in the Kingdom we pay some of the highest fees in the world for our credit cards. In many other countries these same cards are offered free, covered by insurance and other means of consumer protection. With the birth of e-commerce many local consumers wanted to try purchasing online but due to the lack of protection against the misuse of their credit cards they hesitated. Did our banks step up to the line and offer local consumers insurance and enhanced security to encourage them to use their cards online? Of course not! Instead they created e-cards with restricted credit limits and additional yearly usage fees to be utilized for online purchases and customers had to make personal visits to their banks to request the cards. Can anyone tell me that this is ideal customer relationship management? Banking is already available online and more and more traditional brick-and-mortar banks are working to expand their global reach. These banks are using the most sophisticated tools and incentives to attract and hold new customers. How do you think Saudi banks will measure up against such operations? Many Saudi companies have a poor history of sensitivity to their customer’s needs. In the past, low price or exclusivity of product was enough to hold a customer. Those days are gone. E-commerce allows for easy price comparison from a variety of sources. To hold customers in such a market, businesses must enhance their services in order to survive.
So to all the attendees at the conference in Riyadh I will tell you that the only thing you can be sure of in this business climate is that change is constant and it must be looked upon as an opportunity. Forget about 50-page implementation plans. Come up with five goals that you can work on immediately which will help your company become more profitable in the long term. Return on investment should not be measured exclusively on a short-term basis unless corporate extinction is the desired outcome. The key to profitability in a global market is to stop focusing on who your company knows but instead on who out in that big wide world knows you.