A Window on WESTMOUNT Ville-Marie
... writings for a better World

DTN:- "Chris you called for a 50cent dollar over a year ago!... They say it true value is 72 cents? but not true if you can buy it at much less."

Chris Goodfellow's answer:-

I think I tease you too much on this... but remember something is only worth what the next sucker standing in line is willing to pay for it...nothing more...nothing less.

This country has so many issues to deal with before it can get back on track. Number one is the depth and breadth of featherbedding off the public purse. Little has changed and until we realize we cannot afford the size of government we have to run 30 million souls we continue down the same avenue...Second, Each private sector working Canadian in the work force cannot support $340,000 plus of public debt because that's what it works out to. Three...no inflation??? are they crazy. Taxes have goneup, service fees have exploded on everything...$600 to fly r-T to Toronto and back in a day. Buy a new car lately??

Good God David...I could go on and on... the trouble is they have come to believe their own lies and therein lies the problem!

Canada has been flirting with financial disaster for a long time and the politicians have convinced a lot of people that they have it "managed" but I don't believe for a minute the true reality has been faced and the worst is ahead in the sense that Canadians are going to be impoverished by a declining currency for many years to come.

Raising the bank rate=disaster...it will only slow the economy here...tax revenues decline...no we are behind the power curve here...you have to crash and burn before you can make it better...a restructuring in other words...

From: (Chris Goodfellow)

We recently received the following from our good friend Chris Goodfellow, Webmaster of Laurentian.com Although we have taken the liberty of editing it somewhat and dividing it in two parts, there is so much good meat in it that we have left most for westweb friends to chew on.

VP of the Internet and Other Musings

PART I - The role of the municipality in developing community internet services You are doing (with westweb) what a true community internet service provider should do... it takes a full time interest in just getting the info posted in a timely manner... I'm absolutely convinced that people want that "local" connection to "local" information...as I tell people here LaurentianWeb is nothing but a local community paper for the english in the laurentians. We have no more local papers and this will supplant it. It is simply a publishing business and info has to be relevant, interesting, changing.

But there has to be a much BIGGER vision. Everyone is moving off a paper-based management to electronic management. Thus leaders in the municipal governments must understand that it is really happening...most don't get it yet! Things like all municipal information must and should be online...why go to Town Hall to consult your tax file...it should be online to you the same way I can get my bank accounts now. Moving a community's government from a paper-based orientation to an electronic-based orientation will happen sooner or later, bringing enormous cost savings in management.

Community also = local business. This must all be included in the vision. If a community is to thrive commercially, it must link all the residents to the local businesses in an attempt to get them to retain the dollars spent within the community.

Community also = citizens. They have to be linked in the matrix not only by the commonality of living in their city and interacting with the administration, security, library, recreational services but also to each other in their own commonality of interests... golden agers, youth, community and political organizations, business.

It has to be a BIG vision to do this and only the Municipal governments can make it happen. Competing private internet providers will make competitive alliances for one reason or another with some businesses and not others...maybe I put my pages on your system and someone puts them on another. No one, - least of all the local citizen,- knows where all this information is unless there is some comprehensive way of organizing it and making it easily and quickly available.

If municipalities (or groups of the smaller regional municipalities) were to install their own servers and systems it would be dynamite in terms of bringing everyone together in the community. The funny thing is that I really believe there are things private enterprise can do better but some things like this can best be done by the community (read Municipal government). No one is going to build a municipal intranet except the City itself...no one else has, in a sense, the authority to legitimize it and bring everyone in.

PART II

ATTENTION: Investor Relations, Public Relations, Media, Business writers and critics,Shareholders and particularly clients of Banks and other "service" companies

"Vice President of the Internet". I coined this idea for organizations trying to use the Internet or integrate their operations with the Internet. Chances are the President of the company is computer illiterate. He panics because he perceives something is REALLY happening out there ...doesn't understand it...but has TO DO something! Panic Button 101. Usually he gets someone in the MIS Department who very likely has spent his life PROTECTING his turf behind a cloud of nonsensical techno-babble that the President could never understand and was fearful of.
Crisis management 101...delegate the crisis to someone else...usually the wrong person in the organization.

This MIS type has absolutely no overall global view of the situation as he's kept his nose in the technical operations and been isolated,- not the answer to get an organization truly wired,- but most of the time he's the one chosen!

Enter the V.P. of the Internet.... the idea here is that an organization has to make the COMMITMENT at the highest level to make this transition we will all go through the next 10 years. A V.P. with the appropriate authority will RESTRUCTURE the entire organization to take advantage of what is happening. It affects administration (gotta get everyone on e-mail my goodness!), operations and manufacturing (gotta get all that info in the organization circulating in an intranet so it makes sense and everyone knows what is going on) and marketing ( God! we have to build a whole new customer interface!)

From a management point of view it means a tremendous loss of control in a way and empowerment o fthe lowliest in the organization to have access to information, but the result is a tremendous synergy that most organizations never take advantage of.

Any organization of some size will need a VP of the Internet, someone who can reach across all the vertical or pyramidal lines of authority in an organization and align these into an effective matrix that really clicks!But it requires that top management accept the vision of what is happening,and give the slack to knowledgable people to get it done.

VP's of the Internet are probably the hardest guys to find today.They must have enough seasoned general business experience to grasp the WHOLE organization and mission. A combination of generalist and specialist. Real decision making experience and bottom line decision making is a must! He's got to have enough in-depth technical knowledge to really understand what's going on out there on the leading edge. Detailed programming knowledge isn't necessary, but he must be hands-on in understanding all the ways the Net works AND internal MIS requirements as well... He's got to have a fine tuned sense of marketing...an ability to "vision forward" 10 years and understand where this shift is taking the particular business he's in and where it will impact the organization. He's got to have the personal authority to force the top management within an organization to "get with it" and set the example in the organization to get off paper-based into total electronic communication and service delivery.

Whole businesses will go out of business in a wink if they don't adapt quickly enough!

On LaurentianWeb you'll notice on the left border a clickable link directly to the sign-in page for Royal Bank Internet banking. Follow me for a second here.... I put this link here for selfish reasons. I use it daily as do some of my clients. So I'm sitting here one day and I say to myself "the Royal Bank's Logo would look nice there". So I write an e-mail to the address on their web page just saying I'd like to put their logo there and I just wanted to advise them I was going to do it and I'd like their yay or nay as I know their logo is their property and I don't really want to use it unless they have agreed....
A week later I get a reply saying my request had been "forwarded" on to the "internet banking group" in Toronto.After another week, I get an e-mail back asking ME to provide them with all sorts of information about my business and who would draw up the legal contract...!!!

1. The Internet is supremely a COOPERATIVE organization and the SYNERGY derives from that premise!
2. It's no big deal ... I could have put their logo there anyway and never asked.
3. Don't look a gifthorse in the mouth! The more links you get for your pages or services the more likely the hits!

"POLICY ON LINKS" from the VP Internet.

All links offered, as long as they are to sites that are not detrimental to the company's image (read XXXXX lucious sex), should be supported and encouraged. Inquiries for links should be IMMEDIATELY responded to.

Use of Company logo on other pages? BY ALL MEANS ... Coca Cola got where it is by giving free signs to everyone. GIVING FREE SIGNS (read logos) on the Internet COSTS YOU ZIP. 10,000 hits a month come my way to that index page...that's FREE ADVERTISING BIG TIME!

YOOHOO! Are you there, Mr. Cleghorn?

The VP of the Internet should slay the obstructions in these ossified organizations of self-importance.Legal contracts to use the logo on the Net, Indeed! Just keep that up and you'll find no one will give YOU anything.

Do you think any of the banks ever send clients a letter asking if they have a PC at home and whether they are, or would like to be on line?
No, they don't appear to conduct cutomer studies or surveys even though they send out a monthly statement (fixed cost of mailing) and could have made a detailed survey to get those clients who are most likely to get online...online!
NO, they bought HUGE & EXPENSIVE newspaper ads that I'd bet got very little response!

God! I could retire on what MBanx spent on advertsing, fancy pamphlets etc...but did they target the real potential customer in all of this? Did they really study which customers were capable of using the service and then make a concerted effort to get them online by PASSING ALONG some of the cost savings that the bank gets by getting them completely paperless? NO!

Maybe Hydro Quebec should have a VP of the Internet and maybe in one of their monthly billings they might enquire of me if I have a computer and if I'm connected to the Net and if I need that paper-based invoice anymore and perhaps they will give me a credit of $2.00 per month if I take an electronically mailed invoice? After all, if 10% of their customers...let's just say 100,000 have computers and could take an electronic invoice... talk about paper/ink/stamps and handling...SAVED!

Bell? Likewise.

Some classic - and all-too-frequent errors

• ---Soliciting online e-mail without being prepared to handle the responses... Write us and wait 10 days for a reply by e-mail. You have to set up infobots to handle all this to let the customer know you are working on (for) him!
• ---Companies put their website on a server without even enquiring how much bandwidth is guaranteed to them.
• ---Companies who never ask the ISP if he can provide a detailed hit analysis by file, by packet request origin, by time of day...etc. Is the customer looking at the pretty pictures or the text? Give,him more of what interests him.You can only study the customer by having his profile at your fingertips.
• ---Companies who have no conception of the security of their e-mail. Would they mail all those letters to suppliers/clients through Canada Post without sealing the envelope?
• ---Companies who buy large ads in newspapers and have a web site but becasue no one talks to each other ACROSS the organization they omit to put their web address in the ad!
• ---Companies that have a fascinating story, spend tens of thousands on a website and then tell you nothing.

Try going to www.wedgwood.co.uk, the renowned porcelain company. If you wanted to check old historical patterns and know something of the values (people collect poorcelain for these reasons, don't they?) ... well it's not there! Yes..modern patterns....a smidgen of corporate history when there could be 25 pages of intriguing information and interesting history.I'd love to run a company 250 years old!

There are clients to be better served, there is money to be saved, there are glorious opportunities out there. Things are happening and will continue to happen. A good VP of the Internet would organize the organization beforehand to avoid the pot holes on the Information Highway and to take advantage of all the benefits of the new technology. I'd say the VP of the Internet will be the single most valuable human resource in an organization for the next ten years!

As I say to everyone ... "ideas are free and circulate them! Respectfully I ask you to attribute them to me if you didn't think of them first!"

Signed: First Vice President of the Internet

Chris...