Duplication and lack of clarity: That’s most corporations right?

  • Friday, 12 October, 2007
  • By:

A couple of weeks ago the share price of BP plummeted because the CEO “did a Ratner” and criticised the company. Essentially he was criticising his company for being inefficient. “There is massive duplication and lack of clarity of who does what”. Yet is this so uncommon? Spend some time in most FTSE 100 company and I’m sure you’ll soon discover duplication, inefficiency and waste. It seems to be the consequence of scale; a growing company gets organised around business units and these inevitably become inwardly focussed and support a silo mentality. These silos soon cease to have a single minded focus upon the stakeholder that matters most, the customer, and instead focus upon the good of themselves.

For example, the organisation may have a number of different products. These are organised into product lines with each product having its own targets. The product lines then start competing against each other; it is not in the product managers interest to consider anything outside increasing the profitability of her own product line. So if this means cannibalising the market share from other product lines so be it. Her bonus depends upon the success of her products.

Undoubtedly she needs IT support. Here comes more inefficiency. Whilst a similar technology may be used by another part of the business, it does not entirely meet her requirements. So a new product is built. Throw in outsourcing and inefficiencies are abound. It is not in the interests of the vendor to strive for simplicity. (Read PG’s excellent analysis of the problem with outsourcing IT).

Then you’ve got “channel” The Web Team, the Mobile Services team, Telephony, Retail Stores… Again, each has their own P&L and targets, each competing against each other. The talk may be of a seamless cross channel experience, but when the staff in the Stores are remunerated based upon sales they make, what is the incentive to direct the customer to the website to complete the transaction? Better loose the sale than do that.

Once a product has been sold it requires support – another bunch of stakeholders with their own (muffled) agenda. Customer acquisition is more costly than customer retention, yet the focus is usually upon the former, regardless of how wasteful this may be.

And what of the “Gold” team, looking after our “best” (read most profitable) customers. Another bunch of stakeholders with their own priorities, requirements and bottom line. All different parts of the organisation competing against each other. It’s not a team effort with a common goal (maximising customer and shareholder value), it’s a battle lining business unit against business unit with a common enemy of IT.

Is there an answer to organisational inefficiencies? There’s a solution to everything if you’ve got enough time and money. But for a start I’d love to know of a company that has scaled and has maintained a true focus upon the customer. That doesn’t internally compete for their customers share of wallet. That is transparent and shares knowledge effectively, where duplication is unknown. That uses IT strategically to support the business meet its common goals. An organisation that remunerates according to total value earned regardless of where it was fulfilled. An organisation that, regardless of the fluff in the annual report really does deliver value for the shareholder and customer, and waste is the common enemy.

How’s your SEO?

  • Thursday, 4 October, 2007
  • By:

SEO is high on any on-line marketeers agenda. There’s plenty of agencies about that can give advice on how to leapfrog up the google rankings, but before you do that, take a look at Website Grader. A neat tool that grades your site, gives you insight into the search engine world and tips on how you could improve your ranking.

Have you considered what the legal team will say?

  • Wednesday, 12 September, 2007
  • By:

Oh dear. The lawyers are getting involved. So you’ve got this great idea, you want to get closer to your customers, get them talking about you, with you, to you… You are thinking about building out a social networking proposition, leveraging your branding to ensure traction and reason for people to visit. Let customers upload videos and pictures of themselves using your products. Hey! You even decide to let your customers build your taxonomy through tagging. Lots of user generated content all around your product. Your brand.

And then the lawyers get involved.

You discover this is not going to be a uTube or a Wikipedia. It is not going to be the wisdom of the crowd. It’s got to be moderated first. And not any old moderation.

The legal team are insisting that all content be moderated by the Corporation before it goes public. Now that may not sound as bad as all that- some sort of moderation was always going to be inevitable – you want to be able to pull anything that is obviously inappropriate or damaging to the brand. But moderating everything before it goes live? Suddenly the proposition becomes expensive. Who is going to do the moderation? And the customer experience becomes compromised. What sort of social network would it be if it didn’t have immediacy? Any Twitter functionality is clearly going to be out. So before you get too excited about your great web 2.0 idea, think about how those party poopers the lawyers who are going to get rich out of killing you dream.

Web as platform, your website an application

  • Thursday, 6 September, 2007
  • By:

The web is changing. The words of the Cluetrain Manifesto are being realised – “Markets are Conversations”, driven by this thing called “Web 2.0” a mish-mash of ideas around digital strategy, experience and technology. For the mainstream the web is moving away from being solely a provider of content with primarily a “push” experience with crude journeys to purchase and fulfilment to being the platform. It is becoming an increasingly interactive experience; web sites are becoming applications, social in their nature.

There are the obvious candidates; Google docs and spreadsheets, these are web applications that challenge their desktop brethren. What they offer in addition is the ability to collaborate on documents – real time. Look at Kayak and the experience it offers for selecting flights. The experience is more like an application, entering and manipulating data in the same place (rather than the old web linear experience: enter data -> hit enter key -> wait -> “Result: Sorry, nothing suitable matches your criteria” -> start again). Social networking sites are also more akin to applications than websites – Facebook even calls its widgets “applications”. Wesabe is a social Microsoft money – it strives to replace an application.

Where does that leave you if you want to harness the new interactive potential and more fulfilling customer experience of ‘web as platform’, ‘your site an application’? In the old world (old world in this space being a couple of years ago), you would probably have engaged a technology firm to build / configure your content management system with a more creative “new media” firm building the on-line brand giving you the look and feel. Any interactive components (such as calculators, quotation engines) would probably be built and owned by IT, with minimal input from the creative agency. Take a look at many large institutional websites and you will see evidence of this. The static content managed brochureware side of the site will be polished; it will have been built by interface developers with experience of building excellent front ends. Yet the parts that were built by technology, by Java developers (for example) who are excellent in back end stuff but not so experienced in the front end stuff will usually be sloppy in their execution. (Sloppy to a pedantic UI guy’s eye – not to the customer!)

So, if the web is a platform and your site is to be an application, who do you turn to? I’d suggest take care. If you are going to engage a new media agency make sure they have the experience and can demonstrate delivery on time and on budget. Indeed, are they really the right people for the job – interestingly, the most successful new propositions on the web (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc) go easy on the creative design (if at all) focussing upon the customer interaction. Alternatively you could choose an organisation whose pedigree in application design and build (ahem, like ThoughtWorks for example) and insert some sort of measure of aesthetic quality as a non-functional requirement. Want an example of this in practice? Take a look at the new ThoughtWorks Studios product Mingle. To the uninitiated it is a website – hey! it is in a browser. But this is nothing short of an application. A rather good one at that. Has your New Media Agency built anything like that?

Rude users

  • Tuesday, 4 September, 2007
  • By:

Have you thought about what your users can call themselves when they register? Particulalry if you are building any social networking where users can identify themselves to one another user nicknames, do you have a restricted list of names that are inappropriate or offensive? Urban Dictionary provides a pretty exhustive list of words to consider…

Does content need a home?

  • Wednesday, 22 August, 2007
  • By:

We like to classify things, put them in homes. Information Architects design controlled vocabularies and taxonomies; ultimately labeling where things should go. Things may live in more than one place; we may use a faceted classification, but essentially that is a roadmap to the same unique, indivisible place. On the web this typically means an unintelligible URL with lots of random characters rather than something that is human readable. And that is just not nice. So you want a Robbie Williams CD (not that I’m sure why you’d want such a thing) – your journey may take you down any route:

Adult contemporary > Male Vocalists
Popular artists > Q-T
Pop > Dance Pop
British acts > Male Vocalists
Award winners > Brits > 2005

Whatever the route, chances are they’ll take you to the same page; “robbiewilliams.htm” with a unique URL (more likely than not it will be a dogs dinner of characters and symbols thrown up by the content management system).

The drawback of each journey terminating at the same place is that it lacks context. For example, a music store might have a campaign around specific artists. They may choose a different flavour to the branding in the campaign, a different look and feel. The “Brits” pages are different to the “Dance pop” pages. But as soon as the user is directed to a specific record they will served up the standard artist page. Any context of the journey in a breadcrumb will be lost (or in Amazon repeated to show where the product “lives” according to the different classification hierarchies).

Yet what if the product’s classification was truly faceted, was not indivisible, but lived wherever it was sought? Should the URL of “Robbie Williams” not be how the user has found it, the URL becoming the breadcrumb?

store.com/popular artists/Q-T/robbie.htm
store.com/britishacts/solo/male/robbie.htm
store.com/awardwinners/brits/robbie.htm
Store.com/search/robbie.htm
store.com/tags/robbie/robbie.htm

The page may be (almost) the same, served up (mashed /meshed up) with the context in which it was sought. Related links would be specific to the URL rather than generic (other Brits awards winner in the Brits context, other male vocalists in that context). Yes, there maybe multiple versions of the same page on the site, but from a findability perspective this is little different to a conventional faceted classification system.

OK, this is all well and good, but doesn’t it hinder search engine optimisation? Well no, Google handles duplicate content quite nicely thank you very much. So bring on the tidy URLs and content living nowhere and everywhere.

Accesibility is a distraction

  • Tuesday, 21 August, 2007
  • By:

A while ago Jeff Veen wrote that he “[didn’t] care about accessibility”.

It is exhilarating working with ThoughtWorkers who have a similar approach. It is not unusual for them to state blankly when the client starts talking about DDA. “Arrrrr” they will say when the acronym is explained. Disability discrimination Act- make it accessible? It is what we do. If what we build is not accessible we have not written good code – we have failed. Accesibility is a distraction – it should be a by-product of good development practices. They’ll wax lyrical about progressive enhancement and well structured mark-up and not only will it be inherently accessible but will work on mobile devices or any devices and off they go on a roll….

Is there anything wrong with my attachment to Saffron?

  • Monday, 13 August, 2007
  • By:

A funny thing happened today. We’ve had up on the wall our personas – boards showing the key users of the site we are developing; their photos and mood imagary visually describing them. These were stuck on top of earlier, crude descriptions of the personas with their names the same but different photographs and less detail.  A seperate workshop was held in another room and the boards were taken down for it, leaving the earlier versions behind.

Suddenly our key user who we are calling Saffron had gone. Her photograph had changed. Her “type” was the same, but her personification was different…

I was kinda attatched to the old Saffron. Who is this imposter?

In a while the boards will be put back up again and my Saffron will return…

Now whilst I am a keen advocate of personas to bring a user type to life, clearly there is a danger of getting overly attached to that persona, and that feels like a smell.

What is your business

  • Tuesday, 31 July, 2007
  • By:

Should “the business” care about IT? Should an investment bank trader know anything about XML, or a marketer know anything about SQL? Probably not. Even less so should they be talking to their IT colleagues of their requirements in these terms. The business should speak to IT in a language of value driven requirements rather than implementation detail. What is the outcome you need or want, not how you think IT should deliver or implement it.

Yet in many organisations (especially where IT has historically had a track record of failure), the business has taken a greater interest in IT delivery. They start talking the language of the techie. When this starts to happen business operations no longer see the clarity of their business. They see systems. In an investment bank setting: the trade is booked in Zeus, settlements are handled by Minotaur, payments by Socrates. Corporate actions are handled in Hades. Depending upon the geographic region, client management might be handled by Tomsys, Dicksys or Harrysys. You ask a business person what do they do and they talk in terms of systems. Getting down to the underlying requirements of what they actually want to do is hard. Innovation and creative thinking are hard because they always return to what the limitations of the current systems are. They focus upon the requirement for a Reconciliation System rather than asking why there needs to be any reconciliation in the first place.

So here’s a suggestion. Act dumb. Forget everything you know about the way you do things and go back to first principles. How would things be if we were starting from scratch? How would you describe your business intent (not the what you do now, rather what outcomes you really want to achieve) in simple terms to a complete novice. I doubt the word “system” would come into the description.

Meosphere. The Next Big Thing?

  • Thursday, 26 July, 2007
  • By:

Michael Klynstra writes enthusiastically about Meosphere. My first impression is that I’m not so sure. It may be a cool and compelling proposition but it is not obvious to the visitor what it is all about. Needing a large call to action “Click here to see how it works” should set the alarm bells ringing. The target audience (I assume) are typically time poor and have limited patience or attention span. Why should they invest time into learning how to use the site, let alone actually interacting with it? This is where Facebook is so good. Blindingly simple home page:

Facebook is a social utility that connects
you with the people around you.

Clearly expressing the site’s value proposition from the outset…

It’ll be interersting to see how Meosphere get on. Good luck to them, but I wonder if they could have made the home page slightly more compelling and inviting to an unitiated user… Having said that, once they’ve got a community and people are emailing links, is that so important after all? When I signed up to Facebook, it was on the basis of an invitation rather than a visit to the homepage. So maybe if Meosphere get critical mass of community then homepage design isn’t so important and indeed Michael’s words will come true; web 2.0 at its best.

(Oh, and I drove a 1967 Volkswagen Microbus at “highschool”).

20 of 38
161718192021222324