What's Biznology?

Biznology is the place where business and technology come together to form a winning customer experience. Technical marvels are, well, marvelous, but they don't ring the cash register by themselves. And the hottest business idea is a lot of hot air unless the technology works—works for your business and works for your customer.

Why is Biznology Important?

Most companies learn a painful lesson when they create their Web sites: you can't hide your problems. You know what a pain your three incompatible ordering systems are for your sales reps—they need to enter orders for your high-end products in a different way than your cheaper product line. And then they use yet another system to get parts. Well, when you bring up your Web site, your customer will see that problem. Your customer will be unable to place one order for everything needed. And unable to get a single order status. You get the idea.

The Web exposes every seam in your back-end processes. Every time you have different processes for each product line. Every time you have different systems across countries. Every time you have manual procedures that call centers and face-to-face salespeople use to paper over the things that just don't work.

When these seams are exposed, two things happen. First, you find out that fixing them will cost a lot of money—your IT team will shake its collective head and moan about how these systems were never designed to work together. Second, no one will be able to quantify the damage being done to your business by continuing to frustrate your customers.

The solution to these dilemmas is biznology. Because this problem can't be solved by taking just a technical approach or just a business approach to a solution. You need to use both.

In this case, you probably need a business model that shows the value of your Web site and a cheap technical architecture (perhaps a service-oriented architecture) that keeps the legacy systems in place. That way you can justify some investment in fixing the problem, but you keep the technology costs to a minimum. That's biznology.

Mike Moran's Biznology Newsletter

Each month, the Biznology Newsletter takes on a topic where technology and business intersect. Topics that require both business acumen and technical smarts to go in the right direction, such as:

• Search marketing
• Web personalization
• IT business cases
• Web metrics
• and many more

Check out past issues or just sign up today. It's free.

Mike Moran's Biznology Blog

If you can't wait for the newsletter each month, check out the Biznology Blog, available several times each month. It's free, too.