Business Information Systems Learning : Going Digital

Showing posts with label Going Digital. Show all posts

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Platform Business Models and Strategy - a few knowledge sources

Several authors and business strategists continue to provide insights, interpreting the emerging web-based business models. This note is not a complete treatise on the various themes taken up by the authors whose remarkable contributions continue to enhance the growing literature around digital platforms. The purpose is to introduce a few authors and their work to enhance the student and novice practitioner's knowledge in the area of digital platforms and ecosystems.

Alexandar Oswalder's "Business Model Generation", A handbook for visionaries, game-changers, and challengers stands out to convey the essentials in a simple visual format with a supporting online community. For starting on the journey of news on new business models, this happened to be a good book at the time of publication. Most of the models discussed are no longer a mystery even for the novice now. Yet, it falls in the must-read category not only for its appeal visually but also for the essential content nailed down early on. The building blocks for business model generation are still the standard, notes on patterns observed at the time continue to take on incumbents as challengers. For design, while the book offers a method to start, there are more options to consider – books and authors who focus on design thinking and methodologies.

Business Model Navigator by Oliver Gassman et al, is a must-read for both academics and practitioners. The focus is on the underlying themes and patterns of business models behind successful companies who stand against all odds. The authors emphasize how Business model innovation is the key to avoid drastic failures and ensure survival. Each of the patterns described comes with historical origins of the pattern establishing the time- tested nature, how it came to limelight in recent years, when and how to apply it followed by questions to ponder. This is a very systematic way of presenting business model knowledge with examples. It is a go-to toolkit to refer to for beginners and matured thinkers to navigate and prepare for tough calls. The other parts form the glue to the knowledge about business models -on how to drive and implement very useful to the business professional. The book is rich with templates, checklists, for initiation (analyzing your ecosystem), ideation (adapting patterns), and integration (shaping the business model).

Amrit Tiwana's Platform Ecosystems Aligning Architecture, Governance, and Strategy is a textbook- style with comprehensive treatment to the three areas. The principles and concepts are covered with such precision, the reader will keep referring back to the book for any vocabulary related to Platforms. The book is rich with several meaningful diagrams and figures for anyone attempting to go in-depth for practice and theory. Prof Tiwana addresses the traps that incumbents – both individuals and businesses can fall into with prior enterprise systems and their life Optionscycles.

The Business of Platforms is the latest book by Annabelle Gawer, Michael Cusumano, and David Yoffie. They command expertise among the academics and practitioners with their papers and earlier books where they treat the subject of platforms with the richness of product platforms of the Tech industry – from the mainframe and Microsoft days. The Business of platforms is a journey they took on with both a thorough understanding of the governing principles and concepts along with words of wisdom and caution on the traps and pitfalls of the complex environments of platforms. Their work is always supported by extensive research data and multi-faceted industry consulting experience. Differentiating innovative and transaction platforms, managerial decision challenges to combat with platform leaders,

Sangeet Chaudary's Platform Scale is a bold venture by a young entrepreneur who placed himself in the forefront of platform thinkers and thought leaders in the digital age. I followed Sangeet's blog mostly out of curiosity about how the young author weaves his thoughts to write a blog on a complex subject. Later, as one of the book reviewers, I have observed what it takes for a new author to form a hub of his own, enable direct and indirect network effects by the new audience of his blog in the Internet platform age. I also noticed the partnerships the author took time to grow and nurture to form a platform and an ecosystem of his own. Exposing myself to this venture reminded me of all the characteristics of the web as a network in structure as well as architecture one has to understand for conducting one's own business. Chaudary's book is an amalgam of current trends, rich with examples, simple to read and grasp the complex environment. Failures and risks come with experience – the author's work lets startups venture into the new green pastures of platforms with their basics in place along with a lot of enthusiasm.

Much of the platform growth lies in its careful orchestration aligning and not losing sight of the core principles and properties of the web as a network. The authors of today have it simple for starters, yet much more to manage to come to limelight. Chaudary is well known in the circles of platforms enthusiasts as well as followers of the platform world literature. His work recently is more focused on the regulatory and governance issues at the level of policymaking for nations in the area of platforms. The world economic forum reports and the United Nations Development programs rely on the ease of building platforms for their producers and consumers of the developing world. Platforms are becoming symbolic in presenting themselves as representatives of cultures and the souls of nations.

The edX course on platforms strategy is based on the book Platform Revolution by the Initiatives on Digital Economy (IDE) researchers at MIT Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Chaudary of the Media Labs at MIT. Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne are well-known IDE researchers, teachers, and contributors to the platform world and more. Their presence is felt by anyone venturing into the area of complex digital systems and platforms through their talks, articles, and courses they teach in Boston. They have helped initiate and grow the visibility of the digital platform summits at MIT annually. As an aside, major universities in the USA have executive programs and courses on platform strategies fitting into their respective curricula.

Matchmakers by David Evans makes reading and grasping the insights easier. I would put this book as part of the package for the beginner reader along with the above- mentioned books with an emphasis on market place/ transactional platforms. But the pursuits begin after the course/ or reading these books. They seem to cover quite a lot of the fundamentals, yet one comes away with the urge that-- a lot is missing too. For sure, they are material for introductory courses on Platforms. Also, the perspective is mostly from the consumer side, not much for incumbent platform leadership.

Simone Cicero of Platformdesigntoolkit is an active blogger and platform designer from Europe on platforms. His extensive efforts are focused on the design of platform ecosystems, societal as well as geographical ecosystems. He certainly seems to take the platform world to unlimited boundaries along with much- grounded design tips with his regular workshops and courses around Europe and North America. His work on explaining market networks, innovation, and digital value chains through his extensive blog posts has brought clarity to the digital design thinking and tools for the platform ecosystems world. Cicero's platform design team continues to provide valuable insights and patterns for platform design on their website in addition to their courses and webinars.

Linked by Barabasi makes Network Science research easy to grasp and fun to read. Carefully written by a scientist on the properties of networks highlighting both the seriousness and understanding networks. As a student of computer science, understanding layered architectures and networks has been a part of my academic pursuits. I started reading Linked with the confidence that I knew a bit about networks already. I would think Linked is the best way to reach the semi-educated Business and Computer science students and practitioners as the first book to read about the power of the networks. Without the grasp of hubs and communities, there is not much anyone can venture into the world of platforms.

Michael Wade's Digital Vortex

Velcro hooking is a catch-all used to organize around the architectures of the web. Everything is a link away – appearing to be strong and versatile, yet so fragile. Maneuvering through the links and entanglements of the web is not an easy feat for the frail.
When you decide to get to the digital train of thought, the train would have left the station. The path to digital is neither a line nor is it circular. Getting in and out of the train, at several stations requires buying new tickets and embracing new destinations faster, being aware of the arrival time of the destination. Michael Wade aptly used the term vortex. Vortex reminds us of nature's whirlpools explains Wade where everything is drawn to the center. The digital center of a Digital vortex is where the maximum amount of disruption takes place. While the theme is not about being drained in or engulfed by changes, but to get a grasp of the extent of disruption, navigate along with the chaos, collisions, and combinations that happen to lead to both convergence as well as emergence.

IMD Wade's article on strategies for responding to digital disruption around four themes - harvest, retreat, disrupt, and occupy. This skeletal content is expanded as a chapter in the author's book "Digital Vortex" with case studies, examples and questions for leaders. Emphasis is on the Occupy strategy seeing value vacancies as contested market opportunities. The author's LinkedIn article @https://lnkd.in/gcjUTTB is a good read on this.

Mark Skilton's Building the digital enterprise covers the essentials of thinking digital.
The 25 case studies cross-cutting all industries, the well worked out diagrams and notes give pointers to embark the journey of starting anywhere with a clear compass for digital. In the chapter on techniques for building effective digital business models, useful approaches are provided with the digital workspace model notation that Skilton developed. Skilton discusses the evolution of capabilities and strategies in industry contexts. Exploring mechanisms to derive value with new thinking is the challenge that Skilton takes on with an extensive discussion on industry-wide examples.
A sequel to this book is his work on Building digital ecosystems. I wrote a review of Mark Skilton's Building digital ecosystems architectures here

Here are a few URLs to online courses related to platforms and Digital business ecosystems:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/bcg-uva-darden-digital-transformation

https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-competition-financial-services

A few related and relevant courses to understand the theories behind digital models in depth.

An Introduction to complexity course bridges the discoveries and history of sciences to computing. It is a relevant course to envision the digital capabilities, providing the background to what it is about going digital in any industry. Melanie Mitchell's book titled Complexity, a guided tour is a sincere effort to bring the several core principles behind complex systems in easy to navigate and confront the world of complexity.

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/27-introduction-to-complexity-summer-2015

A many model thinker is both wise and practical to set his compass to confront and solve problems of a gigantic scale with unique and robust tools that meet the purpose. Scott Page's "The Model Thinker" provides the theoretical background introducing the models behind complex systems. When taking up complex challenges, systemic and complexity thinking becomes a necessity. Prof Page gives a solid explanation of why we need many models in his introduction to model thinking. To achieve a basis for realistic decisions in the world of business and policy, to be comprehensive in making statements. As models cover a broad spectrum of disciplines, they are useful to predict and act on complex phenomena.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking

Research web sites:

SSRN

ResearchGate

MIT CISR

World wide initiatives, symposiums, and summits are beginning to happen in the platforms and ecosystems world. Stay tuned as the theories and practices evolve.

Thursday, September 26, 2019

A few fundamentals on types of platforms and ecosystems

Ecosystem concept captures the idea of the coming together of firms with shared interests and goals to provide customers with a solution. Business platform ecosystems establish inter-firm relationships with the links for products and the surrounding services or complements. They usually take on the shape of a hub and spoke model of a network. The platform hub (owner, leader, sponsor) is at the center with the array of firms connected via technologies. Few of the members of this model of the ecosystem take on the governance aspects for the members of the ecosystem. Firms in the ecosystem deal with complementarities (essential core and the peripherals for example) in a fashion that seamlessly interoperate. For a short read on the paradigm shifts from a business ecosystem to a digital business system, I suggest reading the research article here.

There are two types of platforms and a few in between. There is scope for innovation on one type of platforms. On the innovative platforms, the base provides the infrastructure to create value thru complementary products by third parties. Google Android, Force.com falls in this category. The Android ecosystem is enabled by developments around the APIs. When engineering and technology building is primary to the culture of the business, the platform definition is explained by centering the infrastructure layer.

The other type of platforms is the transaction type of platforms. Here, there is an exchange of goods and services as in Amazon marketplace, people interactions as on Facebook. Salesforce, Apple, SAP fall in the in-between category where the emphasis is on a combination of product and platform. For a more complete treatise on the platform business models, read the section in chapter one “Platform thinking” in the book Business of Platforms.

Two-sided platforms and multi-sided platforms are yet another way of viewing platforms based on how exchanges happen on the platforms. In a two-sided platform, the exchange happens between two parties – customers and providers. In a multisided platform, providers cater to groups of interdependent consumers. Network effects come into play to grow the platform value.

Characteristics of Ecosystems

Ecosystems definitions highlight the design thinking of purpose behind the formation of hubs and links in a network. When the interactions of partners or complementarities are dominant in the design, the definition takes on as you find in this article here.

Modularity with loosely coupled components and self-organizing/ optimizing capabilities are the dominant characteristics of ecosystems according to the definition of ecosystems here.

Modularity enables the conditions for the complementors of the ecosystem to co-ordinate and emerge with ease creating sub-ecosystems around the hubs. Samsung and Motorola thrive on the Google Android hub. The relationships are unique, governed by standardized roles and rules. The extent of coordination and co-specialization needed among the members of the ecosystems determines how the complementors of the ecosystem are aligned for production and consumption. Open-source software Android, and Nike wearable devices are both ecosystems – the underlying mission is for production in one case, consumption in the other.

These characteristics in the definition of a digital business ecosystem show the open relationships of partners in an ecosystem with changing roles based on the demand. Ideally, the links of relationships are subject to change giving the ecosystem capabilities to organize itself over time releasing from the tensions of authoritative hubs. This is a fundamental shift from the traditional supply-side “pipeline” of resources to meet the customer’s demands.

Dimensions to Ecosystems:

Several dimensions to ecosystems come into play for ensuring engagement and interactions, building relationships with the partners of the ecosystems.

The degree of openness is valuable to determine the strategy for the platform/ ecosystem owner and stakeholders. With many moving parts, openness comes in many flavors. The levels affected can vary from determining choices at the architecture, marketing, standards compliance, IP management, and governance for managing boundary resources. The practices impact the roles and relationships of the various participants of the ecosystems.

For a grasp on how the various dimensions such as the degree of openness, engaging and collaborating with participants, tie strengths and relationships among the participants, read here.

For understanding the glaring differences of the traditional and ecosystem/ platform models and interpretations for management practices, read here.

Capturing Value:

It should be clear where the main or blended value is rooted in the business model. Cost, Experience, Platform values are often thought when it comes to considering value. Each of these value types is dependent on the type of business model adopted. Successful businesses adopt a variety of value deriving models combining with their business models.

Low cost/ No cost provisions are a norm when the business model enables producing one or many with no cost differences. Often, the customer owns a huge chunk of the product with very low or cost-free.

Customer experience has often been associated with retail – chasing the customer all through the journey. An entire customer relationship management system is often associated with ensuring customer empowerment, recommendation systems, and personalization of products and services.

Platform value-driven business models are quite varied. Communities are often the channel for distribution, communication or executing for a specific cause. Think Twitter, Facebook, Reddit here. Connecting and enabling group/ peer to peer dynamics is the strength of Digital market places. Transactional value is exchanged for buyers, sellers for a specific purpose in a market place. Airbnb, Etsy are good examples of digital market places. Ecosystems enable inter-connected firms to co-specialize, co-market, or co-create by leveraging resources. Think Google Android and Apple iOS for ecosystem value. Data orchestrators operate with real-time data to obtain analytics and recognize patterns for decision making. Think companies like GE, Cisco here.

Strategies for thriving with new value creation, discarding the old.

Ben Thompson’s Aggregation theory throws light on how disruptive business models take the internet advantage while designing for value. Fundamental shifts in capturing value have happened in the internet age. This is due to the ability to modularize components of the system of suppliers and buyers resources to provide consumers the best experience. Distribution of digital goods has found a free medium through the internet. There is direct access to the large numbers of consumers for personalized experience and value delivery. The value is delivered free via the internet by aggregating the modularized resources to the consumers.

For competitive advantage, think how your business models can seize value, fill the existing gaps in value delivery and keep it for a slightly longer time. Sounds harsh while diving deep on digital disruptors when considering competitive strategy. DBT's Prof Michael Wade defines value vampires and value vacancies. Value vampires squeeze and drain the value out of the incumbents. Filling value vacancies to exploit the digital opportunities sound kinder than the vampires. Beware incumbents on the aggressive pursuits of the disruptors who wipe away traces of the incumbents to the past! For more on this, read the post here.

Conclusions:

There are plenty of resources to define and interpret what goes into platforms and ecosystems design thinking. Organizing the thoughts and workings of your business units and stakeholders is a major part of the understanding behind ecosystems/ platforms. No one’s views can be neglected, not a single point of view can be insisted. The journey is experimental and focused on the short and long term strategy for winning and meeting the customer expectations of your business.

Friday, August 16, 2019

Explaining Platforms

Platform means different interpretations in different contexts. Adding the digital context is part of addressing the questions that arise on what platforms mean for businesses. While beginning to figure out what platforms mean in the context of the business, several challenges arise. Practitioners come up with at least a couple of perspectives for drafting platform strategy for business – A business model perspective and technology infrastructure perspective.

News on platforms goes with mega-success stories and impact at the global level. Such stories inspire aspiring business professionals to take on the journey in whatever capacity they think feasible. The impact of the rapid development of technologies that support the platforms dreams increases the tendencies to have ambitious goals around the new approaches to growth, achieve scale, and find new avenues for value creation.

In established businesses, the challenges are two-fold to the professionals involved in making a plan for embarking the platform journey. First, the leaders may not be well prepared to lead people with the initial plethora of questions that arise. For this, the leaders must understand that expertise and research in this area is evolving. There are many experimental approaches which can prove a success/ failure in their specific context. Second, the challenge for the aspiring professional is not to be overwhelmed on the abundant success stories as well as the lack of models to fit their business context.

Look for unifying frameworks while paying attention to the glaring and subtle differences. Get a grasp on the fit for the context. A social platform can be a Facebook as well as YouTube or Twitter – completely different business models. A development platform like Android operating system, Salesforce along with its market place is quite different with its traditional counterparts of open-source Linux or Windows Operating systems. Both Uber and Airbnb are market place platforms bringing new options to consumers affecting their day to day lifestyles, but their community-building approaches are totally different. What is common among these is all these platforms have an “Interaction first” theme around their design. They are connecting producers and consumers in new ways using digital capabilities with little initial investment. They are plug and play business models with highly modular artifacts enabling the quick evolution and scale with less hierarchical intervention.

In Sangeet Choudary’s platform stack , there are three layers to explain platform – the infrastructure, market place, and data. Each of the platforms we hear about has invested in at least one of these layers differentiating themselves with new and often disruptive designs to create value. Some practitioners explain platforms around their journey towards building platforms from their current business models and content distribution mechanisms. This approach is more common with the incumbents who are facing the trends of platform businesses.

The disruption is clear when we hear the need for regulation when the impact is on the health of the societies. Caution with governance mechanisms is required to avoid competitor’s exploitation in the name of competitive advantage. Governance and regulation must be meaningful for the platforms. Platform designs take advantage of the presence of competition. There are several instances of how traditional boundaries are crossed in the virtual, digital world of platforms – often discovering traps and pitfalls leading to better orchestration of the boundary resources as a remedial strategy.

Significant academic and market research contributed to design choices and frameworks around the basic questions on design and strategies for platforms. The fundamentals of design frameworks include topics about architecture, value creation, governance mechanisms, and competition. For starters, read here. The authors bring to the table several easily available resources, mostly research articles to chart out the design issues around an established design framework. A crucial requirement is to get the sponsorship preparing for distributed leadership. Everything on the web is public and open, backed with steps toward building trust and reliability in the digital networks. What works on the ground is traditional. Much needs to be thought ahead on reputation building on the web.

There are a few significant principles around networks that successful platform makers achieve. These principles are the DNA of the platform makers themes in everything they do whether it is carefully evolving the designs or preparing for the emergence of their platforms. For thinking in networks, read Linked carefully. On the author’s website, there are downloadable chapters too. This book helps understand how to envision the seemingly random phenomena around major events that happen due to the nature of the web-based frameworks. The impact of web-based networks is borderless, spread across societies and businesses. Complexity leading to chaos is an inherent property of large networks if not managed and strategized well. For many professionals, careers and contributions seem to take the “red queen effect”. To avoid stagnation and cautiously embark the journey, the new rules of the business games can be understood with an eye on the happenings on networks around.

Platforms and ecosystems are often associated with the digitization initiatives in the company. The Digital is often associated with all the newly evolving technologies in the Internet era and also their convergence – Social, mobile, cloud models built around networks using big data, AI, machine learning, collaborative applications. Disruption and transformation are the big themes around digital. Going Digital includes preparation and building capabilities for the internet age. incumbent businesses must be clear about the impact of the newly evolving technologies and business models on their business value proposition to make the right decisions at every step of the journey.

Finding a place in the more complete ecosystem dynamics is associated with their business models and several early decisions. We will discuss a few fundamentals about ecosystems in the write up on Ecosystems

Thursday, August 15, 2019

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and what followed

Two and half decades since the arrival of world wide web, most businesses are continuously experiencing the profound impact of new, digital web entrants. The new may not have become equals or counterparts to the old, but their positioning in the web-based business world seems to be quite unique and challenging. Notice the business models behind them that make this kind of entry possible. It would be a grave mistake to view the new, similar, yet thriving businesses in your industry and try to become one without undergoing the experiments and strategy exercises in your own context. Appearances from far can be deceptive.

Popular business models described by experts since the early web days support the above statements. Some of you reading this post may be recalling your own journey with the expert insights and the interpretation of the business models.

I think it was in the early 2000s, Prof Michael Rappa in his open course, Managing the Digital Enterprise, consolidated the new digital business models, coming to light by then. I guess at this time, E-commerce and Internet commerce did not make much of a difference yet in people's lives. Web-based businesses seemed to provide a channel for transactions with a focus on presence and reaching out using the web as another window for the business to serve customers from a distance.

Prof Rappa stated that internet commerce is sure to give rise to new business models. Amazon made it to his business models list as a Brokerage model and was described as a hosting service, a virtual mall, or a market place. Amazon also appeared as a virtual merchant in the merchant model. PayPal and eBay appeared as transaction and auction brokers respectively.

In the Advertising model, Google took the place of both query-based paid placement and content-targeted advertising. Craigslist was discussed as an easy to list (listing service) alternative to existing yellow pages/ penny saver/ even newspaper advertising.

Apple iTunes Music Store duly took its place as a Bit vendor under the merchant model category.

Wikipedia (open content) and Open source (software development) made it to the community models. Flickr was part of the social network service model. Netflix was the rising subscription service model.

In the university classrooms, online courses started out as replacements to distance education, scaling up their existing offerings. MIT open courseware became the pioneer in opening up world-class educational content reaching out to millions of aspiring students and life- long learners across the globe. Online learning systems resembled the uploaded versions of on-ground classroom-based learning. The e-mail was getting popular with people outside the business intranet mail systems.

Tim Oreilly came up with the article, what is web 2.0 along with comparisons of web 1.0 and web 2.0 businesses. The article is more than comparisons. He brought clarity to some powerful concepts, a few core principles and practices around web 2.0 technologies and business models, strategically positioned as a platform, gravitating towards some core competencies "forming a veritable solar system, global brain (with the mental chatter as the blogosphere)". Next, he mentioned "hyperlinking is the foundation of the web". The lesson from collective intelligence is that “network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the network era”.

Talking about blogging, he highlighted the importance of the RSS technology that is significantly behind the database-backed web/ “incremental web” / “live web”. This technology allows for subscribing to changing the content (syndication) giving way to the weblog, not just a webpage. The fundamental framework of web 2.0 (see web 2.0 meme map) is listed in this article – covering the data-centric nature (raising debates on who owns the data, the new types of databases), end of the software release cycle (leading to software as a service, perpetual beta), loosely coupled lightweight programming models (think user participation), software adaptable on multiple devices, anytime, anywhere user interaction model and leveraging long tail, a global phenomenon (masses contributing with their own content) , adoption of RIA (rich internet applications) with dynamic content. These principles backed by the Web 2.0 based technologies were shaping the new web, which have now become a common practice in modern enterprises.

Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee emphasized the value of Emergent Social Software Platforms along with varying tie strengths among people. While listing all the benefits of making use of the collaborative, social, aspects of software (a big shift from web 1.0 to web 2.0) McAfee highlighted self -organization of the social networks shaped by its participants with the ability to build large communities without a central authority or guidance. The self-organization ability is paving the way to large business ecosystems in today’s digital world. Several of nature’s laws are penetrating into large enterprises requiring better and relevant ways of managing the ecosystems. Dion Hinchcliffe made significant contributions to the writing on the web and business models. My favorites are all of his diagrams with such clarity, enhancing the visual appeal, not missing the detail.

Several researchers and practitioners continue to predict and write about the evolving web trying to fit into a few paradigms (semantic web, mobile web, cognitive web, web 3.0 and even web 4.0), compared with the previous (?) more popular trend. This approach may lead to an understanding of a few, specific, characteristics of the web and drivers that enable those characteristics, but they can only hit the self- imposed barriers and limitations of the larger view of discussions sooner or later.

It is getting clear that there is no stopping to the continuous revolution the web is weaving. Yet, some of the trends seem to be taking back seat compared to some others. Interpreting the trends has become a relevant and serious practice to predict which trend would overtake the other.

Convergence, disruption, and innovation to create a parallel virtual world have become the norm with the backing of ever-growing technologies, business models, and strategies. The major themes of technology-based innovations are around Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Analytics, Internet of things, and Cloud computing. The business models in the limelight are around social networks and web-based platforms. Platform strategies are framed from perspectives from engineering and economics by researchers and practitioners. To try to contain the web world in a few themes is something similar to containing the magic of the genie world figuring who is touched and not yet touched by the magic wand and what they became after...

Mary Meeker’s internet trends, IDC report (s), World Economic Forums Reports on Platforms and Ecosystems, and writings of the several, world-wide consulting firms have become resource libraries to get a handle on the business practices on the web. The web trends are giving way to clear vision of aligning with the omniscient, omnipresent web for each and every country, business, and the active, individual participants forming several universes.
Forming hubs and communities has become a goal for anyone associated with the trends of the web in the all-pervading social media and networks. This could manifest as an attention-drawing, self-promoting scheme for an individual who can ride the tide the social activities demand. Social media activities require time and skills to become the genuine master of the new and trendy social media skills that the web era demands. This trend can also be viewed as a positive force for those who would not have voiced their opinions and make a presence for themselves along with sharing their views. Still, more importantly, trying to name a trend and getting on the bandwagon is not the approach for serious business practitioners.

Full of paradoxes, the web has come a long way, far from the times when Nicholas Carr’s IT doesn’t matter(2003) debates on the Information technologies were causing concerns. The programmers and professionals of the early Y2K’s may have disappeared into the oblivion or morphed to creations of their own making, but the web world has not been stopping for anyone.

There will be a follow-up post to highlight the significant contributions of authors and researchers in bringing clarity to the ever-growing business models of the web.