InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
April 26, 1999
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Hiring several consulting firms to build a site requires more work than picking one company to do it all, but the skills the smaller Web consulting firms offer can make the extra effort worthwhile, according to analysts and companies that have used them. In general, these firms know Web technologies and how to use them appropriately. "They're able to give you fairly well-thought-out analysis of when you should use Java and when you shouldn't," Sekar says. "You don't get that from traditional consultants."
Hear Music Inc., a San Francisco music retailer with 14 outlets in the United States and Canada, is launching a Web site this summer and eventually plans to put Internet kiosks in its stores. The company hired Fort Point Partners to design and built the site's back-end systems. Al Farmer, Hear Music's chief technology officer, says going with a boutique consulting firm was clearly the best option."EDS flew us down to Texas and gave us the dog-and-pony show," Farmer says. "But as big as EDS is, they don't have E-commerce sites out there we can look at and say, `Yeah, there's lots of people using that site.'"
Fort Point had done work for big companies, including Nike Inc. and E-Trade Group Inc. By outsourcing work it couldn't handle to other companies, it was able to offer Hear Music all the services it wanted, including designing the system, helping purchase the hardware and software, and introducing the retailer to a hosting company, Frontier Global Center, where the Web store will be based. "We're taking their expertise and visualizing what we want our customers to see," Farmer says.
Rapid Deployment
In addition to their understanding of the uses of Web technologies, Internet consulting boutiques also tend to deliver applications more quickly than bigger firms, which is a key factor cited by clients that have chosen to use them. "Inventa's design methodology was very much in tune to the rapid deployment of our payroll applications," says ADP's Miller, adding that Inventa was able to meet his tight deadlines for deployment.
Hewlett-Packard's Internet imaging division, which sells OpenPix software for managing high-resolution images for product catalogs on the Internet, had a Web site that presented product information, but it needed to add quickly the ability to conduct transactions online. "We had to build a site that could stand on its own and also link into legacy systems," says Jim Christensen, director of marketing programs for imaging software. The unit turned to Fort Point because the consulting firm could meet the unit's deadline.
"We had an extremely tight time frame, and they were the ones that could commit to helping us pull this off," Christensen says. "They took us from a noncommerce site to a commerce site that would not only be able to sell through U.S. currencies but also to expand to international currencies."
It took First Union Corp. of Charlotte, N.C., just three months to co-develop and deploy with Alta Software Inc. a new application that recognizes when there is a problem with legacy systems running the bank's integrated voice-response systems and moves transactions to a stand-in server based on Java. The bank created caches with the most popular customer inquiries between its mainframes and its Interactive Voice Response system, so the inquiries could be handled quickly, even when the system experiences problems. That way, people would not flood the bank's call centers with basic questions about their accounts.
Since an inquiry handled by a service representative costs about $3, compared with about 40 cents for an IVR, the bank is expecting significant savings from the backup system, says Oleh Procinsky, First Union's senior VP of IT services. The same architecture will be used to back up the bank's Web site. "What they've built in the middle is designed to be a stand-in system for all online channels," Procinsky says.
Despite their advantages, small Web consulting firms also have some unique disadvantages. One is that a lot of people are calling themselves Web consultants, but some don't have all the skills they advertise. "One of the difficulties we had early on was some firms said they were experts, but they weren't," says ADP's Miller. "Some of the early projects used outfits that probably weren't suited in terms of tools and techniques, but also in terms of their ability to rapidly deploy applications on the Internet."
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Photo of Farmer by Robert Hauser
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