spatial networks | location leverage

“My way of explaining our support and service role to the marketing department was that:

1. Sales is the sharp end of the stick, and marketing at best, is the stick.
2. But while the sales team works for commission, the rest of the employees have equity (stock) in the company.
3. If sales revenue and profits are high enough, we could take the company public or sell it, and the stock would be worth more than the paper it was printed on.
4. In exchange for being the “point” organization, performance of a salesperson is measured continuously and individuals who fail to deliver quota are removed.
5. If sales as an organization failed to deliver revenue to plan then all we had were worthless shares.
6. In reality the sales team was working for the rest of the company to make all of our stock valuable.”

(an excerpt from a blog article titled “The Sharp End of the Stick”: http://steveblank.com/2009/05/04/the-sharp-end-of-the-stick/ )

I agree that it is the Marketing department’s job to:

• Provide the sales tools (ROI, collateral, branding, corporate credibility, etc.) • Provide the messaging (who do we want to buy from us, and why would they do it?) • Insulate the company, through product lifecycle management, from commoditization • Set the price(s) to fit the strategy / buyer behavior / product value tiers / establish fences, etc. • Work w/ product development to put customer and prospect feedback into action in a prioritized and thoughtful way, and to anticipate the next wave of demand for features / functionality • Synthesize market data (so the sales team knows what they’re up against, and provide the appropriate “canned” response, vis a vie market research) • Bring attention to the brand / product / company through web media, campaigns, PR, etc. • Identify & create channel & partner strategies & relationships (I think people used to throw “ecosystem” around, but suddenly it seems passé) • Provide 1st level technical support to sales on RFPs, bids, customer support, etc. • Be tirelessly motivated to make stuff people like, and get it into their hands

Give sales people something to sell, a reason to do it, the means to do it, and a soft place to land if, while being wildly successful, they get stuck or tripped up.

I speak softly, and I AM a big stick.

Much to my initial chagrin, the talk was actually well-attended. Yikes. Suffice it to say, everyone in the room knew more about the actual circumstances in play than I did. Than I do. Than I ever will. I’m not a practitioner. At first I was merely suspicious that that was the case; but about 10 minutes prior to mic time, “Dave” came to the podium to ask me about some legal battle in Santa Barbara… Huh? As it turns out, a case had recently been decided that prohibited the county from withholding map data, whether for financial or security reasons. The case set far-reaching legal precedent against both arguments. I managed to work it into my talk at a surprisingly appropriate place [insert horn-tooting here]. [While I’m at it, here’s a toot for Dave too!!]

I think that not-being-a-practitioner thing worked to my advantage, because I was able to work with the pragmatic details and not get embroiled in legitimate daily work-related frustration about where to source data that I know exists but that is - for whatever reason - unavailable, or unusable. (‘I pay my taxes, so what gives?’)

That said, I couldn’t be less concerned at the end of the day with the pricing structure of government-provided map data - or the absence of one - or even if the data is made available at all. What I do find fascinating (and worth celebrating) is Capitalism at work, effectively removing the government from the equation. People are resolving map data sourcing obstacles, because their government has not (cannot, will not, should not… whatever the case may be).

When asked at the end of the talk, what do I think people should do when the government does not provide map data for free (implying astronomical pricing that, for all intents and purposes, shuts small business and independent consultants out of the commercial marketplace for adding value to such data), I simply said: wait and see.

The marketing professional in me realizes that there are business models for deriving revenue streams from the provision of map data that are entirely inappropriate for a government entity in the digital age - but perfectly suitable for a business entity. And, I may not be a geographer, but I did muddle through econ501 in grad school, so I’m pretty confident in saying that demand will ultimately be met by supply, and the price will be dictated by the market. (Not by a ‘cost-recovery’ pricing scheme that, insofar as one measures incremental costs, generates 99% margin, or - as is the case for the OS in the UK - a profitability mandate to justify partial taxpayer funding…). And all of that other chart-and-graph stuff.

It’s only a matter of time.

I’m not talking about some fancy temporal cone either, because it occurred to me (again, this morning, as I sat on the parking lot that is I-4W through downtown Tampa), that my current and future locations were slowly but surely merging. I need to know what traffic is like right now, where I’m going to be 10 minutes from now, so I can actually reroute before I get totally hosed. I don’t really care what it’s like right now, where I am (I kind of already know). Have yet to find a really great, mobile application that will do this for me proactively… (suggestions welcome!!)

In all seriousness, someone’s going to crack this code someday - despite significant start-up fall-out, and no shortage of tongue-in-cheek accounts of some boring conference presentation or other on the subject [guilty shuffling of feet]. Someone’s going to figure out what it is about Location that makes people stop cringing about privacy and start putting it to use. Maybe it’s SNI. We have a couple of ideas…

The most obvious, to me, is collecting and displaying location-based data about everything. It’s crowd-sourced, and the results are displayed in an aggregated way on a web-based platform.

Everything you want to know about anywhere you want to go. Of course it’s a service! And it’s everywhere, like dead people in an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

What does this have to do with Geodexy? It’s simple: the paradigm of status quo entails doing things in traditional ways; such that the processes, in and of themselves, of getting things done in those ways is ingrained in the routine, mentality, the very fiber of the person’s or the organization’s being. Like using a clipboard and a pencil to scribble information all over a form, and employing a data entry clerk to decipher it and type it up on the back end. These processes are labor- and time-intensive and prevent people from doing anything more useful. That data entry clerk is probably not daydreaming about going home and initiating the 12-step process of rubbing the laundry across a soapy, bumpy surface (see http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081111010031AAfOrXg for Ask Yahoo’s instructions for doing laundry sans machine). You can’t even buy a ‘bumpy surface’ specifically made for this process anymore. Just try to Google it.

Breaking the paradigm means adopting modern ways of doing things that reduces or even eliminates unneccessary processes. Modern methods sometimes go so far as to change the entire socio-economic landscape in ways that were probably never imagined, and certainly not planned - but that are, arguably, better. There’s a woman on the Board of Directors at Whirlpool - it’s a start. Ain’t technology grand?

No one is suggesting that Geodexy will empower a whole faction of people to do something more intriguing with their spare time (although it’s certainly possible). The parallel is that field workers and data entry clerks around the world CAN do something more productive with their WORK time.