شبکه و مدیریت ارتباط با مشتری: از "اگر" تا "وقتی"؟

The ‘Grid’, an initiative of the distributed computing community, offers unprecedented levels of computing power for organisations to apply to solving their business problems. Uniquely it also offers the communications infrastructure required to overcome the ‘tyranny of distance’ observed by Blainey (The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne: Sun Books) in his analysis of the socio-economic development of Australia. However, recent reports of the ‘death of distance’ and consequent strategies of trans-national companies to centralise their operations are tempered by reports of a growing ‘psychic’ distance with their customers. This paper reports the application of high-performance computing (HPC) to modelling consumer behaviour within a large UK financial services company in order to predict not only ‘if’ a certain type of customer behaviour was likely to occur, but also ‘when’. The resultant impact on their customer relationship management strategy leads to the observation that Grid Computing should offer many new opportunities for managing the problem of ‘psychic’ distance that attends a strategy of revenue growth through widening the geographic scope of operations, and scale efficiencies through physical centralisation.

Geographic distance has been identified as a major factor in social, technical and economic development. In The Tyranny of Distance, Blainey (1966) describes how relative geographic isolation (from Europe) has shaped the course of Australia's development since colonisation. Whether geographical factors continue to mould Australia's future is a subject to debate. The communications revolution and convergence with information technology has diminished the perceived importance of distance, notably in The Death of Distance (Cairncross, 1997) which was inspired by Blainey's earlier work. As international and local communications costs converge, the impact of sender and receiver location is dominated by concerns of access to quality communication channels and time zone differences. Globalisation of markets has also been argued to reduce the historic restrictions of distance through fewer economic and information transfer barriers, enabling international sales and economic growth for countries with small domestic markets (Latham, 2000). As distance becomes less of a competitive barrier, Australian companies may compete more equally in international markets but are also exposed to greater competition both overseas and domestically. This aspect of ‘distance’ has also been observed to have had an impact on industry structure and is referred to by Turnbull (2002) as the Tyranny of Proximity: “if you have a seamless, borderless global business environment with instantaneous telecommunications and cheap fast air travel there is an inevitable tendency, all other things equal, for business and talent to concentrate in the largest, most economically powerful centres. It is our challenge to ensure that Australia is one of those centres. We cannot allow Sydney to become to New York what Adelaide has become to Sydney.” Distance can be manifest in many ways beyond physical geography. Notions of distance may also embody logical, cognitive or cultural dimensions, all of which can affect communication effectiveness (Lundin & Schkade, 1997). For example, cognitive distance has been identified as a challenge for Australia's US market for tourism (Harrison-Hill & Faulkner, 1998). If US customers perceive Australia to be more distant than it actually is, they may choose an alternative, but equally distant, vacation destination in preference—for example Italy.

Grid Computing has been introduced as an emergent technology that may offer opportunities for countries and organisations to overcome both distance in geography and ‘psychic’ distance in markets due to its potential to improve collaboration and align organisation capabilities with market requirements. The focus for this activity has been the challenging task of CRM in markets that are global, highly competitive, and contain highly sophisticated consumers. This potential has been explored in terms of the application of HPC facilities to model consumer behaviour and inform CRM, product design and channel management within a large multinational financial service provider. The use of the resulting models has been discussed in terms of their accuracy at reflecting real consumer behaviour and their applicability within and to existing organisational processes, some of which rely on creativity. Such markets, with complex dematerialised products and sophisticated customers, display a complexity in behaviour that already requires analysis with HPC resources. However, highly sophisticated models built in isolation within a HPC facility may not offer practical applicability due to their construction from large numbers of rules that are incompatible with the established preference of marketing professionals for simpler descriptions of target customers. The efficacy of such models has been demonstrated in terms of their ability to predict both ‘if’ and ‘when’ a target customer behaviour is likely to occur. Restructuring the models has further shown that for a relatively small reduction in accuracy, models that match the requirements of marketing professionals for creative conceptual frameworks that reflect real consumer behaviour can also be derived. Though such models can be described as ‘simple’ and their application requires little computation, their derivation arises from a complex analytical approach that requires both access to HPC facilities and a frequency of iteration that is only possible if model development can involve communication with ‘distant’ market experts. It is here that the grid should provide both the security of communication and the scalability of computational power that is required for rapid model development and evaluation. The impact of the above models on the CRM strategy of the collaborating company leads to the contention that grid computing should offer new opportunities for managing the problem of ‘psychic’ distance that attends a strategy of revenue growth through widening the geographic scope of operations, and scale efficiencies through physical centralisation. However, the effectiveness with which Grid capabilities translate into economic activity will depend on the emerging Grid architecture and its match with the economic geography of the countries it serves. Since research and development of the Grid is currently being led by the US, where most of the world's 50 most powerful computers are located (www.top500.org), its influence on economic geographies like that of Australia requires careful attention, and potentially modification, if the tyranny of distance is not to be replaced by the tyranny of proximity’.