In late 1998 I was working on an e-commerce project just off Union Square in New York City. It was an effort typical of the time. We were building an online store with hopes of taking it live before Christmas. The air was thick with possibility; the project, almost free of planning. Christmas approached and it became clear we would release absolutely nothing. It did not matter. The company doubled down. The Christmas party featured excellent catering and free shiatsu massages. Budgets were renewed and we soared into 1999.
In the middle months of the project, perhaps January or February, a new species of consultant began showing up in the open-plan cubicles and at meetings. They were from “Scient” – an odd, intimidating coinage suggesting both aesthetic flair and methodical precision. The Scient team were unlike the typical web-commerce oddballs who had opportunistically materialized in the mid 90s to give advice about a field that did not yet exist. They were more straight-arrow Big 5 types. They wore jeans and had minor hipster affectations, none of them particularly convincing. They had an ad agency vibe, like upper-middle class kids who had chosen edgy but not-quite-unsafe careers.
On a snowy evening a few weeks after the Scient folks started appearing, I crossed the square, entered a rehabilitated industrial building, and climbed the stairs to peer into their New York City headquarters. It was standard issue dot-com, a loft-like space with Herman Miller chairs and commercial poster art on the walls.
Back at the client, the budget continued to climb while the scope continued to shrink. In midwinter, desperate to release some sort of result to the public, we deployed what we had – which was, as one colleague summarized it, “a $20 million e-card system.” A series of guru-like frauds came and went, each promising to save the project, and then slinking out a couple of months later. I did what any sensible young man would do, and headed off to work for a bank.
I saw a couple of Scient consultants working at the bank, but within a year, they and their brand had disappeared. I wondered if I had hallucinated the whole thing. Within 18 months, 9/11 and the Enron collapse occurred. No one cared about dot-coms anymore. Everyone was talking about terrorism, war, and cybersecurity. The surviving dot-communists with any appreciable skills took corporate jobs, especially at places like Comcast in Philadelphia, where the cable giant built an entire floor of their new building in the familiar loft style, with wood floors, foosball tables, and other informal trappings to keep the structure-hating commies happy.
Scient wasn’t the only e-commerce consultancy that appeared and vanished. There was also Viant, which had the same founder as Scient and a name that, suspiciously, rhymed with it. There was also Sapient (which almost rhymed again), Razorfish, Proxicom, Diamond. Some of these simply collapsed; others were bought; some simply shrank and laid low.
All was quiet on the e-commerce front. It wasn’t until about 2005 that I started hearing about “Web 2.0.” Web 2.0 business plans began duly circulating. A new vocabulary of embarrassing new jargon spread. It looked like the dot-bomb all over again. This time, however, the thing didn’t collapse. It wasn’t precarious or arrogant enough to collapse. It seemed businesses had learned a few things from dot-com mania and were executing their projects more wisely and carefully. Iterative development had replaced the “build it and they will come” approach. Companies seemed determined to “fail small, early, and often,” almost to the point of embracing failure as a fetish. This attitude may have been mildly ridiculous, but in terms of effect, it was far better than the to-the-barricades attitude of high dot-communism.
While the reformed revolutionaries were iterating their way towards Web 2.0, taking their Long March Through the Institutions, I had retreated to the mainstream of management consulting, performing sober activities like program and change management, and providing tender advice to distraught executives. I found myself surrounded by colleagues with a taste for khakis and blue oxfords. And yet, the call of e-commerce, Web 2.0 – or whatever it would be rebranded next – still beckoned. If I’m being honest, I was bored.
At the apex of this boredom, a new generation of edgy, web-ish consultants suddenly appeared in my midst. My firm bought a marketing agency. Overnight, we had a new floor of cool kids at corporate HQ. Moreover, they were doing real things at real companies, riding the new wave of mobile, social, and data analytics. For a couple of years they didn’t really call their specialty anything. About three or four years in, though, they started calling it “digital.”
And so here we are. Look at Accenture, the Big 4, the major strategy firms right now, and you will find that almost all of them have an officially-branded digital practice. From one perspective, you could conclude this is simply one more fad in a series of fads. But I disagree. Instead, I believe we are working through the phases of a giant Internet hype curve. Dot-com mania was the “peak of inflated expectations.” But after the dot-bomb leveled everything, the real work began, and continues apace.
Rob Lawrence 