Perry

Hewitt

Tag: strategy

  • Enabling IT for the digital consumer shift

    laptop collaborationLast week at a Boston-based CIO Summit, I spoke about the challenges facing traditional IT roles in a shifting enterprise technology landscape.

    Consumerization of IT is a foregone conclusion: employees are bringing not only their personal devices (BYOD-sanctioned or otherwise) but more significantly their habits and expectations born of living in a full-on digital world. The proliferation of well-designed, productivity-enhancing, cloud-based software means employees won’t wait. Nimble organizations will rely only on the flavors of enterprise software that, as VC Bijan Sabet said, don’t require sales or installation, rock on mobile, and enable strong network effects. The good news: many C-suite leaders are on board. The challenge is that many of the development processes and practices were created for a more clear-cut, waterfall world. How do we help development teams be successful given their existing legacy system realities, while adding on a very different mandate of creating digital experiences for ever more demanding business employees?

    One way is rethinking training. GE was the first corporation to partner with General Assembly, which offers a range of technical, business, and design courses led by experienced practitioners, not corporate trainers. From CodeAcademy to Skillshare, there are myriad learning options at varying pricepoints for enterprise to beta. Another way to support this shift is to put business employees and developers on co-funded projects, so that potentially competing concerns like mobility and security are shared. As a colleague likes to remark, “nothing drives project collaboration like an exchange of hostages.”

    As media report ever-growing CMO technology budgets, closer collaboration between business and IT is a requirement for advancing enterprise digital initiatives. Figuring it all out can’t be achieved solely through a strategy deck — the best way to chart the course is to get started on a near-term project, measure, and repeat.

  • 7 tips for digital and social event strategy

    eventThere’s a lot of apt criticism of social media snake oil salesmen — including this terrific Onion video (embedded in a good sendup of TED). But social media does deliver news, shape opinion, and forge connections in important ways.

    In the forging connections department, in-person events remain vital. As much as digital platforms enable you to listen to and share ideas, the value of face-to-face connections has not been eradicated. Facebook was supposed to kill reunions — in many cases, social networking has whetted appetites for the in-person kind.

    So, how do you set the stage for online social media to support a well-orchestrated offline event? A few thoughts:

    1. Clarify the ground rules. Is your event on the record, or off the record? If it’s not specifically stated to be the former, some would-be tweeters or instagrammers might think keyboarding or holding up a camera are out-of-bounds.
    2. Form your social strategy based on your event goals (and yes, that means clarifying your event goals). Is it networking? Then you’re going to make your attendee list public early, and shout out to as many people as possible. Thought leadership? Then you’ll select and link to as many relevant resources (in-house and third party) to put whatever content you’re serving up into context.
    3. Create a concise and relevant hashtag. Character counts are tight, so don’t insert your organizational brand if it doesn’t make sense.
    4. Define your non-attendee strategy. What can or should the experience be for those who are interested in the event, but who can’t attend?
    5. Before: communicate the hashtag to registered attendees and seed it with content. A week or so prior, thank registered attendees, remind people of speaker bios, and point to related news items as appropriate.
    6. During: provide additional value — and this requires a quick and content-savvy resource on the ground. Did your speaker just mention the marshmallow experiment? Make sure attendees get the reference. Where possible, get advance copies of prepared remarks, and pre-select supplemental content.
    7. After: follow up with any wrap-ups (generated by you or any prolific attendees), and any photos/video from the event. Find ways to aggregate and publish the content created by attendees (tweets, posts, photos, video – maybe a Storify?). Thank guests for attending.
    There’s nothing like hosting an in-person event that makes you appreciate the hard work that goes into one. The digital and social elements are now a core component — and an increasingly important competency for event planners and managers.

    Photo credit: Zach Hamed

  • On the web, what is the job to be done?

    While the overall economy haltingly recovers, web and mobile development have resumed at full tilt. Maintenance on digital properties deferred since the 2008 financial crisis is now critical to perform. The growth in mobile device adoption and the proliferation of tablets in multiple form factors are forcing even the desktop-devoted to accelerate mobile development. Vendors are busy, RFPs are everywhere, and clients are eager to get started.

    But when clients undertake a web project, what is really the job to be done? Back in the 2000s, Clay Christensen pointed out that “every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension.” The customer’s articulation of the job, which he offers up in his popular milkshake example, is not always the job that needs to be done.

    Christensen’s findings ring especially true today during this renewed digital development boom. Clients say, “I need a web refresh/mobile app,” as a statement of their perceived functional need. But often what they are looking for is a strategy that guides them through:

    • Walk me through my audiences in the digital realm
    • Help me understand how digital technology will change my core business processes
    • Show me where my company fits in a new competitive landscape in a disrupted environment
    • Teach me about social media, and how to use it

    Large management consulting firms have the chops to tackle many of these questions, but often without a strong delivery arm for the quick prototyping and execution required for digital. Conversely, web and mobile development shops want to solve a technology problem, ideally with a reusable product, and may be ill-equipped to take on the strategy component. The right blend of digital firm does exist, but may not be on the clients’ radar if they are beginning with the functional end in mind. What’s the solution? Re-focus your team on the higher level of problem — the complete social, emotional, and functional job to be done by your web presence.

  • Getting to scale: advancing platforms for online content

    These days Software as a Service (SaaS) is ubiquitous. Project management? Got Basecamp for that. Bulk email at scale? See Constant Contact or Mailchimp. And say goodbye to your server logs — Google Analytics has been widely adopted for understanding website performance. The move to SaaS has long been the case for bloggers, who from the early days migrated to solutions like TypePad. Today, many would rather have a Tumblr instance or a site on WordPress.com than be in the business of building and updating an application.

    Currently I’m involved in two projects, one as part of a team implementing and promoting a multi-tenant Drupal instance, and the other as a client for migrating the server side of an open source mobile application to a SaaS platform. In both cases, moving to a platform will enable updating and scale at lower cost — but it’s highly instructive to sit on both sides of the table simultaneously and see transition pain points. A few observations on ways to drive platform adoption:

    • Give people control of their pixels. Enabling admin users to make small tweaks for brand or preference make an organization feel more ownership of the process and the CMS.
    • Invest in admin UX. The boring “killer app” behind adoption is often a clean admin user interface. If the person charged with updating the content doesn’t feel confident in the user interface, updates occur less frequently.
    • Create systems that enable adaptive content. Karen McGrane speaks persuasively about why we need to stop the madness of systems that cram print layouts into ever-smaller screens. Systems that enable authoring the right content types and metadata are essential — they help publishers reach users on the proliferation of devices today, as well as the ones not even created yet.
    • Meet the need for speed. Content publishers, especially for news sites, live in the admin interface. A system that lags on the backend will fail to impress, especially in today’s environment where 400 milliseconds (the blink of an eye) is now considered too long to wait.
    • Be explicit about ways platforms remove pain points. Custom online publishing platforms for web or mobile rarely calculate total cost of ownership at a level that includes both feature enhancements and maintenance updates. Open source systems update frequently, and even in a cleanly-coded site where the Drupal core is untouched, these updates require time and testing.
    • Expose and sell the roadmap. Platforms need a product roadmap informed by both articulated user needs and emerging trends. Too much on the former, and you lose a coherent product. Too much of the latter and you slow adoption. Find the right blend collaboratively with content creators and designers, and iterate.
    • Integrate social services. We’re no longer building independent publishing systems, we’re integrating them into an ecosystem of always-on channels of social applications like Facebook. Make sure the content types enable compelling and clean sharing to social.

    For those making a move to a platform, remember that feature set alone is rarely the differentiator for a great online presence. A thoughtful investment in content and social strategy drives effective digital communications, particularly for those in the information business — whether that’s an educational institution, a news organization, or a consulting firm. Find the right platform to provide a solid underpinning, and focus on a strategy that delivers what matters for your online audiences.

  • Forget luck — focus on the final 10%

    Digital projects, like all software endeavors, are easily derailed. Developing a site or application is initially seductive — the discovery phase presents a green field where all frustrations about your existing or missing capabilities can be magically erased by the New Thing. The early vision is grand — the stakeholders are picturing the end result not against a platform or service they have seen, but against a perfect unicorn. Spirits are high; people are engaged.

    Requirements are the painful beginning of a process of understanding what’s possible. There’s what’s technically possible, and what’s possible given business owners’ goals, budget, and realistic maintenance capability. Tough compromises are made — in a best case scenario, rapid prototyping can improve the result. Content strategy may or may not come up, and let’s hope it does. It’s a discipline helpful for curtailing impassioned pleas for six-minute welcome videos and for preventing people without the bandwidth to update a Twitter feed from signing on for weekly 500-word blog posts.

    Then a full design phase kicks in, and stakeholder engage fully in imagery, color palettes, and line leading. Hopes are once again high, and PhotoShop goes a long way to erase the sting of features lost in the requirements phase. The joy of the Bright and Shiny Object is in full effect.

    During the build, compromises are made; inevitably, some degree of requirements shifts. The technology supports the main use cases, but developers managing cross-platform delivery may have to make hard decisions about the fringe. Even in an eight-week sprint influenced by Agile, stakeholders are exhausted.

    Enter the final 10%. The final 10% is what separates a just-OK user experience from a terrific one. It’s closely related to the effort Ben Lerer pointed to in the NYT yesterday. The final 10% means making sure you’ve taken care of the tedious details that ensure your project has meaningful search results; delivers analytics to inform future iterations (and not just fill inboxes); plays well with social media; and that content syndicates neatly where it’s supposed to.

    The final 10% isn’t sexy — it’s stuff like delivering small fixes to the administrative interface that will cumulatively make the difference between adoption and rejection, or checking that the adaptive design is breaking just right in the 84,563 flavors of Android. The final 10% isn’t capital-V Vision like the discovery phase or beauty like the design phase, but it’s a big predictor of digital project success.

  • Digital delivery: CMO innovation summit

    Thanks to Margaret Molloy for Eight Digital Imperatives for CMOs, a thoughtful distillation of a panel from the CMO innovation summit in NYC last week. I liked the panel’s focus on digital delivery – there are a lot of digital theorists and issue spotters in any large organization, but this panel focused on practical approaches for successful digital experience delivery.

    Agree with all eight imperatives, but would underscore the need for broader marketing teams to get fluent in digital, and stay agile with efforts. In large organizations it’s tempting to invest too heavily in an enterprise planning approach, only to be upended as disruptive consumer technologies rapidly change audience behavior (half of American adults are smartphone owners) as well as the in-house expectations of speed (great special report from The Economist).

  • Find your mobile champion

    Google has released the Mobile Playbook, which as they point out renders beautifully on tablet devices (or on what the rest of the country calls “My iPad”).

    Not too much new news here, and unsurprising but important emphasis on the rise in mobile search (25% of all movie searches are on a mobile device, for example). Biggest need and shift identified is for appointing a mobile champion in the enterprise. We’re at the same race to the siloed bottom without an integrated strategy as we were when every product brand in the enterprise created a website back in 1995. But the stakes are higher — back in the day, the web was one among many strong brand touchpoints, where mobile in 2012 will be the leading touchpoint for many audiences.

  • 10 commandments for enterprise digital strategy

    Today’s This American Life led with a selection of Ten Commandments for unlikely and rather specific audiences. There were the Ten Commandments for Gold Miners (“thou shalt not pan out gold from another’s riffle box”), for umpires (unsurprisingly, “keep your eye on the ball”),  and Paris dining (“thou shalt not be too familiar with a waiter”). People often ask what a chief digital officer does, and my standard reply is that a CDO directs the digital strategy for communications and engagement with key audiences in ways unique to an increasingly digital social and mobile world — but consistent with the offline one. This segment made me think it was worth taking a swing at drafting ten commandments for enterprise digital strategy.

    1. Follow your users — rather than build it and hope they’ll come. Not a new idea, but a vital one relevant to emerging social platforms as well as old-school destination sites. Investing in a stable and updated web property is important — people expect to have their needs met clearly and efficiently  when they come to your site. But that’s table stakes, these days — information in context of your users’ online experiences is the real winning play. Your organization needs to provide engagement opportunities and serve content in context on the sites, within the networks and optimized for the devices of your target audiences.

    2. Strike a balance between control and influence. Today’s brand management is a far cry from the 80s when brands had a playbook that they could use to make and enforce the rules — today the brand should be guided by the institution, but is ultimately molded by your stakeholders. Understand where the brand has to sacrifice some control to understand, engage with, and influence wider audiences.

    3. Bias toward open. “Open” is both ill-defined and over-used as a concept, but remains useful proxy  for an approach to your digital efforts. Don’t focus solely on your own enterprise standards —  adopt open standards where possible. Look to build on open source platforms where you’ll have the power of a community behind you rather than a proprietary system where you’re beholden to an SDK. (Side note: watch for openwashing.) Similarly, think about which assets you have and consider how an open API for those assets might empower your community (see influence, above) to do more with them.

    4. Avoid “not invented here“ and embrace “proudly found elsewhere.” Enterprises inevitably fall victim to silos — and the fallacy that you and your team can come up with the best ideas is surprisingly common. Whether you surface those ideas by crowdsourcing, or by identifying smart people in your community who can inform your thinking, know that you’re stronger employing the network. And that there’s still an important layer of value creation inherent to bringing these ideas to production-quality and scale.

    5. Publish once, use everywhere you possibly can. Content strategy is a linchpin of any digital effort, and content marketing is an established part of digital engagement strategy. Find ways to invest in high-quality content, and make sure that content can be readily syndicated with the right metadata to fuel multiple publications. And that’s not only your own content — where possible, aggregate and syndicate assets found across the enterprise. This involves thinking about content as separate from its presentation — a core tenet of content management — in a way that’s often counterintuitive to the structure of large organizations.

    6. Adopt new technologies, but avoid enchantment with bright and shiny objects. The best thing about a digital-first communications approach is also the worst thing — it’s an atmosphere of constant change. This is challenging from a budgetary perspective (How many social channels can an organization support? How many devices can it invest in custom apps for?), but arguably an even greater drain on attention and energy. Create a set of operating principles specific to your business goals that govern your digital investments,  and use them to drive prioritization and decisionmaking. It’s dangerous (but surprisingly common) to have professional-grade FOMO drive strategy for platform adoption. Data — both third party trends and primary data specific to your users that relate back to business goals — are vital for crafting your approach here.

    7. Understand that mistakes will be made. And if you’re doing it right, you’ll be making a bunch of them. Enterprise environments are generally more forgiving of wait-and-see indecision than they are of failure — particularly when a mistake becomes public knowledge. Digital is such a fast-moving environment that it’s hard to advance without any initiatives failing. It’s important not to confuse this reality with acceptance of mediocrity and/or sloppiness, and to make sure every failure is a learning opportunity. An enterprise digital competency and change management go hand-in-hand, so find leaders and partners that share your bias, acknowledge the role of failure, and reward responsible risk-taking.

    8. Accept that the devil is in the (sometimes tedious) details. Everyone enjoys attending the design comps meeting, but one hell of a lot happens between layered photoshop files and delivering a compelling digital experience of your brand. The success of a digital initiative often depends on the smart people and agile, iterative processes focused on execution. Performance, measured in milliseconds, matters. The more you communicate internally about your performance metrics as much as your visual design, the more you’ll educate executives and peers about what drives and diminishes user adoption.

    9. But don’t underestimate the value of design. Position your digital products at the intersection of speed and beauty. The load and transaction times are key drivers of usage, but the design thinking behind to your products is critical. And the bar is high, especially in the growing mobile sphere, where design as well as functionality is a key part of the success of apps like Instagram.

    10. Measure, rinse, repeat. Understand the behaviors of the people using your products. Too much digital experience design is done in meeting rooms over PowerPoint, and too little by looking at analytics data or live testing in the field. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole of mindless reporting, but thoughtful analytics provide both illustrative insights and data for making your case for investment.

  • The mobile future’s already here …

    Cross-posted on the MITX blog

    One of my favorite quotes is from the science fiction writer William Gibson. He once said, “The future’s already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”  I first grandly predicted the Year Of Mobile in 2000. Now, finally, there’s enough of it here that I can claim to be right.

    What’s happening in mobile right now is exactly what happened during the stampede to the desktop web in 1995. Organizations are trying to force-fit existing content and transactions to meet the needs of a new use case. Unfortunately, in most instances, it’s not working. There are so many mobile–appropriate and even mobile-magical opportunities left on the table.

    Social is the accelerant that’s igniting the mobile platform. It took AOL 9 years to get to one million users; it took Facebook 9 months, and it took Draw Something only 9 days. (Source) Mobile apps spread socially – brands need to figure out how their mobile experiences fit into that ecosystem, and how learned mobile behaviors, from gestural inference to game mechanics, provide opportunities to surf the social wave.

    But on the technical front, figuring out what to do with mobile isn’t always easy. Developing for mobile elicits church and state decision points, like native app vs. mobile web. Both play an important role in the mobile ecosystem. However, the advent of HTML 5 is helping to address this. Better HTML support in native apps allows for faster/cheaper native app creation for both smartphones and tablets. The “hybrid” approach of injecting HTML5 code into native allows developers to do both effectively. And of course browser-based apps can be made more compelling. Check out Facebook at http://m.facebook.com/ on iPhone/iPad’s Safari web browser and compare it to Facebook iPhone app and iPad app experiences, for example.

    Another emerging religious issue is responsive design vs. RESS (responsive endpoint with server-side adaptation). Responsive design addresses a fundamental challenge that everyone’s facing today: how to serve the growing variety of physical form factors of end-user devices. Responsive design assumes that all users on all devices want the same content, just formatted differently. That’s not always true; if you’re walking down the street looking at an iPhone for a few seconds, do you really want to see everything served up to a user sitting in front of a large-screen desktop? In contrast, RESS does more of the work server-side, and offers customized (and reduced) content for different form factors.

    What’s next for mobile?

    First, analyst firms report that in just a few years the number of mobile devices will dwarf the number of personal computers. We see it anecdotally with the devices students bring to university each fall, and we see it as mobile-first behaviors are reflected in our site analytics and app download numbers. This will be a wake-up call for organizations used to thinking of mobile as discrete apps or afterthoughts.

    Second, the steep innovation and adoption trajectories mean that generations just a few years apart are having very different experiences with mobile. We’ve all seen the video of the baby trying to make the print magazine behave like the iPad – and who knows what her little brother will expect? So the rapidly growing and rapidly changing experience of mobile will be yet another way consumer behaviors drive seismic shifts in the enterprise. In the mobile near-future, we may see a more seamless interaction with things and people around us, compared with the relatively clunky and interruptive way we “check in” today. Tablets are already changing how people – especially senior ones — access and share information in business meetings, too.

    So, “mobile first and mobile everywhere” is where we’re headed. It took me a decade, but just like that stopped watch, the prediction was finally right.

  • Content & design practices from HBO Go

    AllThingsD interviewed Allison Moore, SVP digital platforms at HBO. HBO Go is one of my favorite apps, and provides, just as she describes “an incredible digital experience for our customers…just like they have with our content…wherever consumers expect us to be.” The “wherever they expect us to be” part is pretty impressive, with existing or planned content distribution partnerships with Roku XBOX, and more …

    Another point she raises about how the app design “not only brings in some kind of immersiveness and color and zap… but also gets out of the way.” In web and app design, this is the biggest tension – knowing how to convene users with your brand content, and how to support that convening, and then judging when to get the hell out of the way. Not as easy as it looks.