Why the Internet Front Office

There’s probably more interpretations of the term Front Office than we can shake a stick at.

Of course it depends on the type of business we’re in, and where we see our competitive advantage. No two businesses are the same, even if they’re competitors. My value proposition will always be slightly different to yours. Not necessarily better, just different.

When we use the term Front Office that’s what we’re talking about. Ultimately it’s not about the ways we run our own operations. It’s about ways we interface with other businesses – customers, partners, suppliers, regulators, external services.

So, for the sake of the discussion, let me explain our philosophy.

In our view every business has two types of processes – Internal and External.

Internal processes are the ways we run our own businesses – inventory, accounting, reporting. It’s our business, we can do it whichever way we want.

External processes are very different. These operate at the point we interface with other people’s processes – customers, suppliers, partners etc. Here we need to be flexible. The banks, telcos, governments, can dictate how others interface with them, but we small businesses can’t. We have to find ways of fitting in with them.

That’s what we call the Front Office. Internal processes are Back office.

As more businesses use the Internet to deliver services our external processes need to interface with them in that dimension.

Building our own external processes using proprietary, internal systems doesn’t work. Somewhere we have to get connected.

Building our external processes on the Internet opens a whole world of opportunity. And it costs less and delivers more.

That’s why we believe our Front Office needs to be the Internet.

Quite how we do it for ourselves is the subject of later posts.

More later.

Startups: Provide a Killer Executive Summary (startupprofessionals.com)

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