Hawaii’s Businesses could be in a great place
Hawaii is in such a great place at this time with the opportunities created by world events.
Ideal climate, great broadband connectivity due to the military presence based here, our proximity to large, new, emerging markets, our population diversity, multi lingual citizens and many other reasons. We are able to work across cultures and time-zones in a seamless global network
Today, customers worldwide demand more involvement and more customization from companies they buy from, something Hawaii Businesses know something about. No single firm is big enough in scope and size to satisfy the experiences of one consumer at a time. The larger the companies the more focus is on access to resources and large markets.
To successfully compete in the 21st-century business, we must reinvent the processes and culture in order to sustain competitive, innovative solutions.
Many companies in various industries will succeed because they are able to change, or fail because they can’t keep up with changes.
There are changes in customer demands today, in the pace of business, in the use of technology, new economic powers, new affluent consumers and new consumer needs. The window of opportunity is no longer what it was and the shelf life of a success story is much shorter. These new customer demands and trends are going to be with us for a long, long time. What is your company prepared to do about it?
There are over 2 billion new consumers developing in India and China right now, staggering numbers? Can your company afford to take its time, when competitors are going after these new markets and consumers, accelerating customer engagement, product development, and cementing relationships?
There are many solutions and services Hawaii based Companies are able to offer through quality service, innovation, knowledge of hospitality, CRM and client services. This is how we built our “Tourism Niche’” with the “Aloha Spirit”.
ING Direct, a new service being located in Waikiki at the old Local Motion location, ING DIRECT will open an Internet cafe on the ground floor of the building at 1958 Kalakaua Ave., where customers will be able to purchase coffee access the Internet and learn about the online bank’s investment tools, services, and deposit and loan products. Educational investment programs to assist people in their investment needs. Maybe this will fail; maybe it will be a huge success. Credit must be given to ING for creativity, trying and innovation.
On line learning centers world wide are offering great, quality educational services and products tailored to meet the demands of students needs and desires on demand. Many of these centers are managed by world class universities, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford as well as thousands of business and language schools. Instructors in China teaching Mandarin and Chinese Cooking, instructors in India teaching media and video courses, instructors in Japan teaching Japanese, Ikebana and making sushi. Technology helps make this possible, on demand for a fee, MIT offering classes on line free of charge.
Amazon Web Services and Facebook are teaming up to help developers build instantly scalable applications for Facebook users. Build your Facebook app on AWS to ensure reliability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness as your application grows in popularity. You Tube video allows you to make audio/visual presentations from your web site on your products and services foe a minimal investment of time and money.
With 55 million active members worldwide, as of November 2007, Facebook’s social / business networking site allows you to create and share your applications with a massive and growing community of users. Amazon Web Services enables you to quickly implement your ideas for Facebook applications by providing an inexpensive, scalable computing platform. Using these infrastructure web services, your Facebook application is able to reach “web-scale” by scaling up and down seamlessly as demand dictates — with pay-as-you-go pricing and no upfront costs. This allows companies and individuals to market and promote their products and services worldwide in any language.
Many International firms do not like to hire large numbers of people and let them go after six months when the project is done. It costs them money as well as the security issues that allow their competitors to have insight into their business. Many would rather outsource to vendors, as they work for a large number of firms, these vendors can afford to focus a large number of talented people for short periods of time. These outsourcing companies can allocate staff from 10 to 300 or more from one location to another or one project to another in a week, a month for whatever period of time needed. Like “Temp Help Services” they offer varied skill levels and industry qualifications. They recruit internationally as well as from the US and fill positions worldwide where needed.
Staggering numbers, aren’t they? But the key point being this is happening in a short period of time, like now. Can your company afford to take its time, when competitors might be leveraging some of these vast sets of global resources to accelerate customer engagement, product development, and all-around decision making?
Many of these examples are outside the box and will seem strange however they are an example of opportunity. Opportunities within our ability that will allow us not to get locked into a set of processes and models that are not stimulating new business, not increasing profits create a depressing, unexciting, and uninspiring future for our Hawaii businesses.
DJ Halcro
www.hawaiipacificexportcouncil.org
www.hawaiiscore.org
