Leveraging ICT in Entrepreneurial Ventures III:Business Intelligence

As your business begins to grow, you will need to carefully keep track of key information relating to sales, your customer and business contacts. ICT offers many tools to help you with this, from simple contact managers like Microsoft Outlook and Gnome Evolution to sophisticated Customer Relationship Management software like SugarCRM. When you venture has been able to run for about two years, you need to know the answers to the following questions:
• What is the profile of my typical customer? (sex, age, income etc)
• Which industries give me the most patronage?
• What products or services sell most in what geographical locations?
• What products or services sell most in what seasons?
• What products or services sell most in which industries?
• What products or services sell most in what organizations?
• Of your product/service mix, which one brings in the highest margins?
• What are the worst performing products or services?
• What are the relationships between the performance of a product/service with respect to time of the year? season? etc?
• Who is my most profitable customer?
• Which customer do we need to focus more|less on?
• Breakdown of product or service performance per quarter.
All these are questions that except for the most trivial business, will rely on data analysis to answer – hence IT applications to the rescue. The answers to the above question can help with marketing strategy, product strategy and consumer targeting.

Leveraging ICT in Entrepreneurial Ventures II: ICT as the Product or Service of the Venture

ICT is particularly attractive for new entrepreneurial ventures because of the proliferation of the web and the increasingly complex things people have to do. The product options run from manufacturing to software services.

Here are a few of the opportunities that exist in the Nigerian and developing country market. Even though most of these are already crowded, with some creativity and innovativeness, an entrepreneur can find ways to cut down the price even further or even come up with high value products that they can sell at even higher prices to niche markets.

1. Provision of affordable computers: Even though the price of computers has fallen dramatically in recent years, there is still a large demand for computers especially by students and institutions of education. Businesses are also now using computers by default rather than typewriters. The secret is to find out how to make these computers even cheaper than most of the big manufacturers can.
2. Computer peripherals to help people get more value out of their computers. These include not just common printers and scanners but more specialized input devices like digitizing tables tablets for architects and artists, larger than ordinary printers and scanners, plotters etc.
3. Device Repair and maintenance: A lot of money lies in people’s offices in the form of equipment that is bad and cannot be repaired. These equipment can not be repaired either because there is no one competent to do the repairs and/or the parts needed for replacement are not available. This presents an opportunity for a technical services venture that helps people save money by repairing their bad equipment.
4. Re-furbished equipment: This builds on the last idea … you buy broken-down equipment from people and give-away prices (after all they haven’t been able to fix them), repair them and by cleaning them well, you could sell them at good margins.
5. Mobile IT Support – this would probably work best in middle-class and higher neighbourhoods – people with computer issues can call a number and have a technician be on ground within the hour to fix the problem.
6. Up-to-date demographic data for business intelligence. Suppose I want to start a new business or expand an existing business into a new geographical area. Wouldn’t it be helpful if I had some kind of data related to the demographics of the target market that would help me plan my strategy? But the reality is that such business data – demographics, updated directories etc.

Obviously, these ideas have not been explored deeply in developing countries as they have been in developed countries. So long ….

Leveraging ICT in Entrepreneurial Ventures I – Introduction

The ability to make use get business information from raw data in order to support business decisions is a critical ability of the information age. And the old saying in management that says …’what gets measured gets improved’ is still correct.
The value proposition of ICT to business can practically preach its own sermon: computers are at another level of speed, efficiency, accuracy and aesthetic quality above typewriters. The Internet provides via the world wide web, email, chat and newsgroups a means of communication that is richer, faster and more interactive than could ever be dreamed of via traditional snail-mail, printed brochures and whatever means of communication were available before the Information Age. In the same vein accounting software are another level of functionality and capability above traditional ledgers and so are databases with respect to paper files and filling cabinets. In a more central role, ICT supplies tools for decision analysis, market intelligence, sales and service support as well as operational excellence that lead to great savings in operational expenditure. However [and this is where the plot thickens] no single solution fits all – every business doesn’t need ALL of these technologies; they only need a subset of them and even then to different degrees. Thus while there are certain generic solutions for all organizations (- like the need for word-processing and communications via email), because every organization is unique, each one’s ICT solutions must also reflect this uniqueness for the solution to be effective.
For the entrepreneurial venture, ICT can either be the main product or service around which the venture hopes to create value or it could simply be the means to an end – in order words offer operational support for a different service or product.