One internet job survives the bust
reprinted from The Boston Globe,June 26, 2001
By W. David Stephenson
More than 100,00 Internet jobs have been eliminated since December 1999, but one new category is expanding: the corporate “i-manager.”
Charged with coordinating company-wide internal and external Internet initiatives, the mere creation of this position shows that a few leading companies such as DuPont, General Mills, and Daimler-Chrysler now regard their Internet activities as an integral part of every aspect of daily operations.
Examining I-managers’ responsibilities give important clues as to how mainstream companies view the Internet now that the dot.com bubble has burst and the Internet is receiving the same scrutiny that other corporate functions must survive.
First, i-managers have clout — because the Internet is delivering bottom-line results.
According to a recent Inter@active Week survey, 26% (the second-largest group of i-managers) report directly to the CEO. This shows their importance to the company and how they can be most effective when given company-wide, not simply departmental, authority. That’s because an i-manager’s most important responsibility is to meld all of a company’s Internet initiatives (the internal
intranet, public Web site, and extranet linking suppliers and customers) into an integrated whole. Given this year’s pressure on every department to justify its investments, an i-manager’s ability to visualize comprehensive solutions is even more important, minimizing the number of Internet projects needed while maximizing their benefits.
The potential of an integrated company-wide Internet strategy is great. However, companies have only begun to realize it. That is because few realize the most essential and unprecedented aspect of the Internet as an agent of fundamental change: the opportunity to seamlessly link everything a company does, from product design through customer service. Digital information gathered in one area can flow automatically to another, triggering processes and creating valuable databases to improve customer relationships, among other things. For example, Dell’s Web-integrated system lets customers design their own computers. Customers’ choices, when aggregated, trigger orders to suppliers to replenish components on a just-in-time basis. This integrated system even extends to the factory. It made possible Dell’s innovative “Metric 12″ system, which eliminated the assembly line and instead empowered small teams of workers to completely assemble an entire computer. Metric 12’s benefits range from better quality to lower absenteeism and greater worker satisfaction. This integrated system, from order taking through assembly and benefiting everyone from customers through workers, simply could not exist without the Internet as its digital circulatory system.
Someday, the understanding that the Internet can link all of a corporation’s activities and processes will be commonplace. However, it is alien to managers reared on the old system’s linear approach (extract materials, refine them, convert them into products, package those products, and finally deliver them to the customer).
I-managers, by contrast, specialize in systems thinking (pioneered at MIT by Jay
Forrester and Peter Senge). It looks at whole systems, such as the manufacturing process, as cycles, with feedback loops that can be used to continually fine-tune the systems.
The second clue i-managers give us about evolving corporate Internet use is that they don’t always come from a technology background.
That reflects the trend toward empowering every employee company-wide to use - and even contribute content to — the Internet daily, instead of depending on a few experts who can code HTML. The Inter@active Week survey reported that two-thirds of i-managers come from non-computer backgrounds such as manufacturing, customer service, marketing, or sales. Similarly, a recent Industry Week article stressed that the need to make every employee comfortable with using the Internet results in companies looking for individuals with some uncommon attributes, including patience and even evangelism, to be i-managers. The i-manager is particularly important in overcoming the fears of older workers and those who aren’t familiar with the Internet.
Finally, perhaps the most interesting clue to future corporate Internet use found in i-managers’ job descriptions is that that it looks like a short-term assignment.
DuPont’s e-commerce VP, Jeffrey Peterson, told Industry Week, “My job is to put myself out of a job,” by insinuating the Internet into every aspect of corporate operations so every employee will automatically think in terms of how the Internet can make their work quicker and less expensive.
So far, the number of I-managers is small. As more companies begin to revamp every aspect of their operations to be Internet-centric, watch for i-managers to be more common - and then perhaps to vanish.
