When I lived in Morocco, I developed a small business consulting project for Catholic Relief Services. The small companies we worked with were generally established by skilled tradesmen who were very good at a particular skill and had managed to build up a team around them. Often, these tradesmen wanted to bring on partners to handle the customer relationship. We always counseled against this, since the partner would own the relationship and therefore the business. I think similar advice may hold for building a business with web services.
If you are building a business with web services provided by others, they should not form a key component of your customer interface. If they do, you are in trouble. Your value proposition may be obscured, and your ability to deliver critical services may be hijacked.
Some practical steps you might take to avoid these problems are as follows. First, if you are going to outsource a component of the services you offer via web services, make sure you have more than one provider. Second, make sure you understand the differences between the different provider offerings and then build your webservice outsourcing strategy so that you can easily exchange partners. That way you have leverage.
Finally, carefully consider how your customer is going to perceive your value proposition. Will the customer see it as essentially provided by what your outsourcing partner is doing? If so, think of yourself as providing advertising for your partner's future sales as your own sales decline.
Leave a comment