Perry

Hewitt

Tag: strategy

Friday 5 — 1.17.2014
1. There are now 3.2 billion compelling reasons to get excited about the internet of things: this week, Google acquired connected home device maker Nest for a whopping $3.2 billion in cash. In return, Google gets a jumpstart in hardware and an ace design team. Privacy concerns abound, of course.
2. Trying to make sense of this week’s ruling on net neutrality? Read this, and start to use preferenced as a verb. It’s an abstract concept for most people to grok, and a tough issue to get the general public get excited about — until it drives up the price of Netflix.
3. Here’s a succinct piece on content principles for brands on social media. We try at Harvard to reinforce the principle of sticking to your guns on value and not falling prey to the endless RT ask.
4. This HBR blog takes a stab at defining the endgame for social media in the enterprise. The third wave of individual use is here, and the onus is on the enterprise on finding ways to facilitate and empower connection.
5. On a wider scale than social, how do organizations measure their progress in adopting digital practices? This MIT Sloan report (sign in for limited free access) looks at nine elements of digital transformation that distinguishes the organizations doing it best — and dubs them the Digerati.
Weekend fun: Miss the Golden Globes last Sunday? No worries — relive it through the magic of animated GIFs.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

Photo credit: James Britton
January 17, 2014
Jelly and the visual web

Biz Stone’s new visual Q&A platform called Jelly launched this week. The mobile app lets you use images to pose brief questions to your social network, which is defined rather expansively to include friends of friends on Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, the site is positioned more for the helpers than for those seeking to crowdsource the help. Have five minutes in line at Starbucks or the post office? Use it to help someone in your network out.

The site discourages the long back-and-forth threads of Reddit, and at first glance doesn’t seem to attract the thoughtful commentary of Quora. Without any means of sorting by upvoted or downvoted responses, you have to wade through a bunch of bad answers or jokes to find the right one. There’s also an element of randomness to the requests themselves — is it Chatroulette for fleeting questions? — without any kind of categorization for questions you might like to answer, like you’d find on Metafilter or QuizUp.

There are some great details in the UX, like the way a small Harvey ball fills to show you are approaching the character limit as you type a question. The sound effects are terrific, even if the stream of alerts is a little noisy. And the ease with which you can send a civilized and shareable thank you will promote social virality.

But what’s the end game here? Is there a differentiated and solid enough use case to make a visual Q&A platform like Jelly a standalone business? An alternative theory is that this app is a smart approach to analyzing an increasingly visual web. Gathering a large amount of data about how social networks of people respond to, understand, and share images would be a step toward solving a valuable equation. Combine that human sensibility with algorithms, and there might be a real opportunity to develop and scale insights about performance and effectiveness of images in the visual web.

January 8, 2014
Digital readiness checklist
Today 85% of U.S. adults are online, 64% are on Facebook, and a full 56% of us have a smartphone glued to one hand ¹. Digital natives and immigrants alike are now accustomed to using technology in the flow of daily life. Previously discrete activities like checking email, posting photos to social networks, and shopping online, are now worked into pauses in the Starbucks line or on a conference call. But how do increasing digital fluency and integration manifest themselves in people’s professional lives?

It’s not always obvious how consumer-led digital fluency is resulting in enterprise business benefit. Sure, the rise of consumerization of IT has led to initiatives like Bring Your Own Device that bring workplace technology services more in line with personal technology expectations. But there’s still a gap between what people do in their personal use of digital, and their readiness to apply this knowledge to business challenges.

Below is one framework we’ve had some success with lately when assessing digital readiness in large organizations.

The process starts from the bottom, by assessing general comprehension of digital technology and how it might be applicable to traditional business processes.
- Are employees aware of ways technology is affecting their industry?
- Is technology used only to replicate offline processes faithfully online, or are both processes and practices consistently revisited?
- Are employees able to relate and apply general digital practices to specific business benefit?
- Is the language expanding? Are non-IT employees developing a basic vocabulary for digital?
Next, employees must develop the capabilities, through a blend of directed training and hands-on learning, to use new digital and social tools.
- Are there both formal training and peer-to-peer learning opportunities for employees?
- Are employees aware of and able to use basic collaboration technology, from project websites to link sharing?
- Are employees able to monitor and listen through digital and social communications to inform and advance their work within and beyond the organization?
- Are employees aware of ways they can create and publish content, whether through websites or social media?
Finally, does your organization provide employees with a clear selection of tools that enable new behaviors or increase efficiency.
- Do employees know how to find what they need to solve a problem, and who will support it?
- Are employees involved as advisors in the technology selection and rollout processes?
- Are there user testing protocols in place before tools are rolled out to employees?
- Are tools regularly benchmarked against consumer-led systems?
A typical mistake in technology-led rather than business-led digital initiatives is to start at the top of the pyramid with the tools, and then try to reverse-engineer business processes around them. Savvy organizations will start from the business need and raising comprehension of digital as it applies to the business. These organizations will also cope with some heterogeneity of tools in order to drive adoption, rather push for a monolithic approach that creates endless skunkworks workarounds.

There are some terrific frameworks out there to assess your organization’s readiness for digital transformation or social business maturity. Use this digital readiness checklist as a first step toward understanding your employees’ ability to engage in digital to advance the organization.

1 Pew Internet
December 18, 2013
Four Ways to Scale Digital Capabilities Beyond Your Team

Posted over at Harvard Business Review blog network: Digital today is part of everyone’s job — and many enterprise organizations are adopting strategic mobile, social, and cloud initiatives to educate and empower employees. But these organizations still face a daunting challenge in distributing digital expertise: how do you develop digital competency more broadly across a large organization?

December 10, 2013
Digital strategy, content, and cake

What do you get when you bring together 400 folks interested in digital strategy for content and community in higher education — and add cake? ConfabEDU offered a heady mix of ideas and energy for innovative content approaches in the digital/social/mobile world.

Superb keynotes from Kristina Halvorson, Dan Roam, and Karen McGrane were interspersed with terrific sessions from thoughtful practitioners. My own keynote focused on the blurred lines and messiness inherent to content creation in this new environment — slides below:

5 ways digital strategy can drive excellence in collaborative content from Perry Hewitt

November 13, 2013
It’s not online banking — it’s banking!

Continuous and miraculous advances in the digital sphere — cloud computing! big data! the internet of things! — lead us to have a high bar for digital experiences. So it’s particularly surprising when there are mainstream services out there, in this case a retail bank, that seem to have missed the memo on the integration of the internet into their core business.

Recently I was looking for information about how to report a missing debit card (since found, thankfully). Late one evening I logged onto my bank’s website, through which we manage all our family’s banking transactions. I went to the FAQ to look for something like “lost/stolen debit card” and found all this:

I scrolled through the FAQ, which continues for pages, before realizing why I couldn’t find what I was looking for. All the questions pertained to online banking, i.e., how to use this website instead of actual banking questions. When I finally called the support line listed on the website, the person I reached could answer only questions related to online banking. All the help text and call center staff training were geared to questions like “which browser can I use?” or “how can I to export statements to Microsoft Money?” (a software package discontinued in 2009). To resolve any issues related to actual banking, like a misplaced debit card, I would need to go to a branch or call a different telephone number that the “online banking” person dutifully read off to me.

Many of us live and work in an internet echo chamber, where we’ve been trained to view the internet as a set of capabilities that can enhance and extend traditional businesses, or create entirely new ones. Reading this FAQ was a stark reminder that [tweetable]there are still whole industries out there with a 1996 mindset[/tweetable], where digital is a discrete channel positioned as a segregated use case rather than a realization of the core business.

Despite the many “flying car” advances we see, there are still lagging businesses in desperate need of internet integration. The dramatic juxtaposition brought to mind this tweet:

The true promise of the internet of things—the singularity, more or less—is not having to adjust my oven clock for daylight saving time.

— Zach Seward (@zseward) November 3, 2013

November 6, 2013
Friday 5 — 11.01.2013
1. Has a Chinese language photo app become the first one to achieve global popularity? This app allows you to snap a selfie and then modify as a cartoon character. Its meteoric rise has prompted some skepticism — can an app with instructions only in Chinese be so popular in Australia, US, and Canada, or are the numbers somehow being gamed?
2. Healthcare.gov remained in the news this week, with more fingerpointing and testy hearings. This article argues for the US government’s developing a “digital core” of in-house expertise with more direct control over resources and deliverables.
3. Pew reports that both image creators and curators are on the rise, at 54% and 47% of internet users respectively. 18% of cell phone owners have Instagram, and 9% have Snapchat — the latter speaking to this hunger for just-in-time but oh-God-not-forever content.
4. More on this visual web: Pinterest late last week signed a deal with Getty. Pinterest licenses the images, and Getty hands over the metadata. Seems like a smart win for both, and not the last deal we’ll see where clean, searchable metadata about visual assets is core to the value.
5. Many would kill to have a review from Michiko Kakutani that concludes the author “tells this story of disruptive innovation with authority and verve, and lots of well-informed reporting.” If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, leadership, and the internet, run don’t walk to, well, the device in your hand an order it. Amazon is the most innovative and algorithmically-optimized internet company that people rarely talk about, and The Everything Store is about to change that.
Weekend fun: Recovering from the World Series and Halloween, and just a few things left before you get to the weekend? Perhaps you can relate to this mouse’s struggles …

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
November 1, 2013
Mastering digital project momentum

What are the factors that make a digital project take off and gather momentum—or drop like a stone?

We’ve all been in kickoff meetings for large-scale web projects. People show up bright-eyed and well-intentioned, ready to take part in a brainstorm led by someone with fashionable glasses. Colorful sticky notes and Sharpie fumes create an atmosphere of endless possibility. And by and large, that’s a good thing—kickoffs are a reasonable way to assemble a team and get everyone aligned. But once people leave the headiness of the room, I’ve seen many projects become far more complex and less orderly.

How does that happen, and how can you, as a digital leader, strive to prevent it? Read the full article over at A List Apart.

Photo credit: Jay Peg

October 15, 2013
Why digital is bigger than the screen
“Digital is bigger than the screen,” says Zach Dunn, who co-founded digital experience company One Mighty Roar with his brother, Sam. [tweetable]We can already see how digital experiences are transcending the screen[/tweetable], from ubiquitous FitBits and Jawbones to emerging Google Glass to Evernote’s move into Moleskine and PostIts. Arduino experiments are everywhere, with Intel today announcing its entry into the maker movement via Galileo. Cisco predicts that by 2020, there will be 9.4 internet-enabled devices per person, and has even launched a connections counter to track the rise of the so-called Internet of Things.

“Internet of Things” is a bit of a misnomer. [tweetable]Ideally as more interactions become internet-enabled, the device as a clunky intermediary will reduce in importance[/tweetable]. Private home automation is an easier first frontier. If a wearable sensor can tell my house I am home, turning on the lights and turning up the heat are straightforward. Companies like Withings have established home markets with a number of smart devices from scales to blood pressure monitors. Users track their own personal health data, and can opt into more public sharing for motivation and support.

In public spaces, internet-enabled interactions raise security and privacy concerns, but provide opportunities as well as solutions to longstanding problems. Three ideas to consider for physical campuses of any kind:
1. Immersive experiences: Imagine a person picking up a signifying object (example: a gavel for the law school), and interact with it to summon up an immersive digital experience. Images, video, and sound can create this experience in a setting as dramatic as a whitewashed room (museums, take note) or in a smaller surround-sound booth setting.
2. Traffic management: The ability to measure opted-in wearable devices crossing a threshold would improve campus foot traffic management. This could improve wait times at a fitness center or limit time spent in lines at popular food trucks; wearable devices on the alert recipients to could be customized to preference (elliptical, taco truck) in either case.
3. Serendipity creation: At a networking event, how do you find the three-five people most interesting for you to meet? There are analog attempts to solve this problem: events like WebInno provide colored nametag stickers if you are hiring or looking for a job. And skilled superconnectors like Peter Boyce (who pointed me to One Mighty Roar) will always be relevant. But what other personal metadata might spark valuable conversations? Imagine an opt-in system where people’s professional and personal interests display above them, and alert others to proximity of those with similar interest. Might it be possible to create or even just enable serendipity?
Much of this is technically possible, if not yet robust. And the structural lag in both social norms and privacy policies remains enormous. While you may not yet feel the need for your own Internet of Conference Tables, consider the opportunities as internet-enabled interactions through devices come to private and public spaces.

Photo credit: mozillaeu
October 3, 2013
Mobile mandate

In case the persistent drumbeat of blog posts, newsletters, and conferences underscoring the mobile mandate were not enough, here’s some compelling new data from Pew:

63% of cell owners are what Pew calls “cell internet users,” people who access the internet via phone. The number has doubled from 31% since 2009. See also that email and internet use were equal in 2009, and by 2013 internet is 13 percentage points higher. Presumably, as cell internet users move beyond email, they have higher expectations for mobile web and native app experiences.

The report also includes recent demographic data. If your organization is focused on 18-29 year olds, take note: 85% of them use their phone to go online.

So what are digital publishers doing about the rise of mobile internet use? Last week, Digiday asked publishers what mobile-first meant to them. Definitions varied, with emphasis on interface design or short-form content. All concurred that optimizing for mobile is a core element, not an option. Buzzfeed, for one, has seen mobile traffic rise from 20% to 40% over the last 12 months, and predicts an increase to 80% as networks improve.

Now you’ve seen the numbers and read the anecdotes — what can you do to improve your mobile readiness today? Here’s one idea, taken from Facebook’s successful shift of emphasis to mobile by turning off the desktop version internally. The next time your agency shows you design comps, or your team shows you a prototype, ask that it be demoed only on a handheld. At the end of the meeting, during the last five minutes, have them show you the desktop version. [tweetable]It’s time to flip the focus toward mobile [/tweetable].

The separate mobile use case is dead; the universal mobile mandate is here. Digital leaders need to work with their agencies and teams to flip the process: think, build, and ship mobile-first.

September 17, 2013