How the IT ‘Status Quo’ Hurts Online Business Implementations

As posted in Marketing Interactions: “How Agile is your technology?” – good question!  How have the “status quo” practices implemented by your IT group or systems vendor stifled your ability to get what you need?  Keep reading, it’s common sense – and there are common sense solutions to these issues that are working.

Marketing departments have been moving more and more of their customer, partner and staff interaction to the Internet. Some are forced to make this move, while many have proactively found the Internet a valuable medium for attracting prospects, retaining customers, providing key information to sales staff and partners, and streamlining business processes. In fact, a recent report by Thomas Register found that companies list the Internet as the third most powerful way of gaining a return on their marketing investment, above trade shows and advertising. Internet-based initiatives represent a huge opportunity for marketers to get more mileage from sales and marketing budgets, if they’re implemented well. Otherwise they can create more problems than they solve.

Over the past 10 years, companies have invested millions of dollars in state of the art systems such as a Website Infrastructure, and the necessary back-end systems like Customer Relationship Management, Workflow, and Sales Force Automation – but despite the projections used to justify the projects, for the majority of those implementations, the reality has fallen short of delivering bottom line results. 

While large organizations can afford to try and fail many times before they get it right, if you’re a small to mid-size business, you can’t afford to take that sort of gamble.  You’ve got to create not only a successful online (and offline) presence, you’ve got to create a ‘capacity’ that allows you to be flexible and nimble with your online initiatives.

Mid-sized companies now have access to the same capabilities of the biggest online players, without the hefty price tag.  The Internet can create a personalized feel for these users, drawing them into closer relationship with the company.  The promise of technology means that this outcome shouldn’t be reserved for the most affluent companies.  Beyond that, the possibilities of the Internet offer a unique opportunity to level the playing field, providing huge advantages to those willing to integrate the web with their overall business processes.

So why is it that businesses don’t seem to get what they need from their IT implementations?  If you’re like most marketing executives, you’ve already implemented a website and probably one other online initiative, like an intranet or extranet.  If so, then you’ve probably also experienced the problems this new technology can create for your business.  In my experience, there are four key areas of common failure in Internet-based implementations, which we call the “status quo”:

• Users are Upset  (aka “This Website Sucks!”)  -- Website user expectations are high.  According to Genex and Jupiter research, 65 percent of people surveyed said they would not patronize a poorly designed website, even for their favorite brand.  Websites can harm relationships through outdated content, inaccuracies, hard to navigate directions, and widgets that don’t deliver useful outcomes.  This results in customer, your sales force, or partners feeling ignored and underserved.  You have not equipped them to win.   Just think about your own frustration when an organization you frequent, or do business with, hasn’t coordinated their offline and online initiatives, or has outdated information on their website.   Investing in homegrown systems, or static HTML-based websites, where one-size fits all, is no longer adequate to compete in today’s marketing and sales world.
• Lost Sales (aka  ‘How many sales did I lose because I didn’t have the correct information?’) – Often, companies discover, much to late in their implementations, that they don’t have the flexibility they need to respond to either a) their competitors, or b) the ever-changing marketing and sales climates in which they operate.  On top of that, they don’t even have control over their own tools.  Many marketing organizations leave the web design ( and delivery) work for their advertising agencies or outside design groups, who charge a lot for the ‘strategy’ and ‘design’ but don’t deliver the technology to make it easy to manage after the launch.  This leaves marketing departments dependent on those agencies for simple day-to-day changes, that cost a lot and also take time to get live on the site.  Meanwhile, IT departments have a full plate of responsibility and a growing backlog of demands on their time, often leaving Marketing departments waiting for weeks or months to update  information or move new campaigns onto the Internet.  These delays and lags create information gaps within organizations.  A sales person may be emailed information about a new campaign but unable to show prospects that same information on the company’s website.  Or a customer may see current information in one area of the site, but be unable to take action on it.
• Wasted Resources (aka “Why does it take an IT staff member with a computer science degree to insert a comma or correct a typo?”) -- Not only can poorly implemented Internet technologies sap money and time from your organization, they are a roadblock to providing the much-needed integration of online initiatives with back-end business processes (and systems).  They result in a drain that will continue to use your highly-trained personnel for routine tasks, keep others from having up-to-date information, stall new initiative delivery, and make it tough for your company to actually win at the sales/marketing games you’re playing. Redundant or hard-to-use processes push users to avoid them altogether or to spend most of their time struggling with the tools that are supposed to make them more productive.
• Spiraling Costs (aka “We’re paying how much more than we agreed at the start?”) -- You want to know that you’ve selected a vendor that won’t hit you with hidden or surprise costs, or that plans to make most of their money off service costs that aren’t stated up front. You need clearly defined costs, no surprises, and the expertise of companies that have implemented this sort of infrastructure and toolset effectively.  According to Meta Group, when companies implement portal solutions, only 10% to 20% of the total project cost comes from software licensing. In the stats on Web Content Management, the services margin is even more clear. Frost & Sullivan found leading software vendors who now sell their content management solutions at a heavy discount, taking a loss on the software itself in order to gain lucrative service contracts. 

It’s possible for these problems and others that arise to actually benefit your business, but for this to happen you have to step outside the status quo in Internet-based implementations. It’s not unusual for a company to have run into one or more of these problems and stopped cold, unwilling to open further the Pandora’s Box of online complications. One experience of too much effort for little benefit is enough to make many mid-sized companies gun-shy.

How has the status quo hurt your online implementations?  We’ll look a little further at the impact the status quo has on delivering flexible systems by looking at the common approach to “systems strategy” and “business requirements analysis” that keeps IT unable to deliver what business really needs.

Comments

[Jeff Paul Internet Millions]

I read your post on internet marketing and found it interesting to add it in my college notes. I am an IT student and I need to go around on the web to search for new IT info.