This month we bring you an interview with Charlie Crouch, who was a faculty member at BUB and now lives in Australia and works as the Executive Advisor at EMF - The Forum of e-Excellence.
Charlie, thanks for sitting down with us. I say sitting down, but you and I are 17 time zones apart as we conduct this interview. You've lived in all over the world- from San Francisco to Belgium and now Australia. Many of our students live an international life as well. Did you follow opportunity or was it wanderlust?
It was an opportunity to do something different. We had been living in Europe, London and then Brussels, for some time, and this is a chance to see another part of the world. Australia has a long cultural relationship with the West but is geographically located closer to the East. This gives the country an interesting outlook as the two swirl and mix together here.
You spent some time as an instructor at BUB. Do you still currently teach?
Teaching at BUB was a great experience. Teachers do indeed learn as much as the students. I am not currently teaching, but I am looking for something similar here in Melbourne. In the meantime I have spoken and moderated sessions at a number of local conferences about doing business online. Going to them as a "lecturer in e-business from BUB" is a big plus, it differentiates me from the others on the program.
I understand you're in the final phases of publishing a book: How to Manage Your Website Project;What inspired you to write it?
While teaching is important to me, I do spend a lot of my time consulting, helping companies improve their online performance. Typically these companies have a website, and it just isn't working. I have led a number of projects to build and rehabilitate websites, and I see the same issues coming up again and again. This book is a non-technical guide to help people who are running a website project, showing them what is different and offering tips and tools to better manage their project.
You mention in the introduction that assumptions one makes about a company, technology, and even customer behavior are different online. Why does this seemingly small shift (offering goods and services online) change so many aspects of doing business?
Going online may appear to be a small, simple shift, but it is not. Setting up an online store is easy, today many services offer online stores, ready-to-go. But the online world operates by different rules, and not knowing or understanding these rules trips up many online ventures. For example, customers behave differently online, becoming more demanding and specific, but also willing to engage in conversations with companies that either infatuate or infuriate them. If one does not take these differences into account when setting up the store, then it will have problems.
Do you see the explosion of online retailing as a more of a challenge or an opportunity for businesses? Would the answer be different for large businesses than for small ones?
Online retailing is both a challenge and an opportunity. Going online exposes a business to new issues such as worldwide competition, different customer behaviors, and a reliance on complicated technology. On the other hand, the online marketplace is global, and your store is now open 24 hours a day for shopping. Most important, in the online world value for customers can be produced in new, different ways. Often the value is not the products or services, rather they are being offered for sale in a new and different manner which customers find valuable for themselves.
When I lived in Brussels I felt that many online offerings such as banking, insurance, and other services were extremely inconvenient compared to what I was used to in the US. In some cases it was easier to walk to the bank in person (even not speaking the language!) than to try to figure out their website. Do you notice a difference in how businesses approach the online platform in different parts of the world?
Yes, here in Australia they are behind in selling online by a couple of years. This is in part due to Australia's geographic isolation, smaller market, and local dominance by some big players. However the Internet has arrived, especially mobile, and foreign companies see Australia as a place for expansion and market share growth. Many foreign companies are setting up online stores especially for Australia, and the shipping companies are making it easy to deliver goods here. The local retail market is currently undergoing a great upheaval.
Your book touches on the subject of project management- do you have any advice for our project management students about to head out into the job market?
BUB gives you a great foundation of skills and knowledge. As you advance in your career, you will be presented with opportunities to learn new things and gain new experience, sometimes seemingly not related to project management. Do not pass these up, take advantage of them. Project management works across a wide range of disciplines, and you never know when something will be useful.
See also: http://www.charlescrouch.com
and http://www.charlescrouch.com/how-to-manage-your-website-project.html for his book.
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