Today I listened to Andy Lark compare big corporate ecommerce sites to space stations. Andy is Dell’s Global VP of PR & Communications and also heads up dell.com. His point was that space stations are very difficult to handle once they are in space, and that they inevitably get old.
“At some point you just cannot keep on sticking satellite dishes on to them… you need a whole new station” said Andy.
I am no expert of the infrastructure behind dell.com, amazon.com or ebay.com. But with the MIR space station in mind I guess there are some very interesting implications for us that do business on these space stations.
1) Treat your infrastructure like a finite private equity fund closing in 10 years: never invest in new apps & functionality unless you are certain that it gives you a positive ROI within the remaining life time.
2) Think in terms of modules – maybe the mother module is soon to be obsolete, but can additions to your space station be transferred to future stations? Plan for the future.
3) Allocate a decent amount of your resources to plan for the next station and remember to constantly invest in process excellence (care, payment, order fulfilment etc) as the needs, and processes involved in serving needs, tend to remain similar when technology and tools change.
Putting this to practice you will end up less surprised than David Bowie’s infamous Major Tom who ended up “floating round my tin can, far above the moon,
Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do”.
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