I’ve been exploring the Promise of Technology as it relates to marketing and sales. My last post talked about how the IT status quo hurts online business initiatives. In this post, I explore the notion of vision, and how knowing everything before you start is a recipe for missed opportunities and inflexible implementations. I’m not saying don’t have your ducks in a row and know what you want to do – but the need to know all of what you want to be able to do is more an outdated method of requirements definition, than a tool that enables the flexible systems necessary for today.
One of the most significant barriers to mid-sized business’ implementations is not the lack of vision, but either the presence of a partial vision or a complete vision that seems impossible to implement. It’s common practice to spend months detailing a Portal, Internet, Intranet or Web Content Management (WCM) project, spelling out the requirements, the vision, and the ways it might need to extend or integrate. A monolithic vision with its resulting detailed projects takes time to articulate fully and then even more time to implement. During that time frame, the business realities may change in ways that the planners did not anticipate. It’s a classic systems problem that users’ needs change, or were not accurately articulated, altering the scope of the project – commonly called “scope creep.” The traditional solution has been to try various ways of defining the whole problem, creating a big enough picture to encompass all possible aspects of the problem. Legacy players in the market often say that you need a complete requirements definition that specifies what your vision is. That first step can take months and cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Often executives don’t engage in the online initiatives that could bring them success because they don’t have the whole vision for it, they don’t want to spend the money to create that plan, or they can’t absorb the cost if it fails. Given recent economic pressures, marketing executives must justify all expenditures more than ever before, creating a CYA environment. It’s easy for them to get stuck trying to define their specific requirements and never step up to the plate at all. No one wants to be the executive who set in motion a project that fails to deliver the promised results.
A related practice that often contributes to these failures is to define the full scope of the project, as above, and then compile the “best of breed” parts that comprise that solution. This usually results in companies spending thousands in integration and consulting to find the right parts and fit them together. After racking up many failed projects that attempted this “Best of Breed” approach, companies are now interested in finding total solutions that are already integrated, that can be implemented incrementally.
If you look at the business realities of today, visions change, plans are altered, and you need software that changes too. A static, monolithic vision can be out of date by the time it’s implemented. The marketplace is moving faster than ever and mid-sized companies are challenged to keep up. In fact, mid-sized companies have the capacity to move more quickly than their larger competitors, except that they often fail to implement the kind of technology that will capitalize on their internal, cultural speed. What is needed are software systems and business processes that equip your organization to win.
You may have been told that you “have to layout the whole picture – complete with where you want your online expression to be in five years,” but that’s ridiculous. In today’s changing business climate, it’s only to be expected that visions change. The environment of your marketplace, the economy, the changing positions of your competitors all necessitate that you have a vision that is fluid and organic. Even if the words of your mission statement don’t change, the ways in which your company implements these words must reach a level of dynamic change that companies never had to deal with in the past.
Here’s the good news: If you thought that you needed to have the whole vision and that has your eyes glazing over, you can relax. In today’s market, if your Internet software can’t roll with the punches, you don’t have the right tools. So here’s what you need to know; think incrementally. An inherent trait of a valuable online initiative is its ability to be flexible, and scale to adopt new capabilities as needed. And to enable that without backtracking or expensive re-engineering work.
Choosing the components of your online initiative by true, quantifiable value and then selecting the ones most important to the way you do business is a good way to begin. This doesn’t mean taking a “best of breed” approach and selecting a solution that may not integrate down the road; you want to begin inside of an infrastructure, but with only the pieces you need today. Once you have narrowed the array of opportunities to a critical focus, find out how the process is accomplished now. Determine what elements can be refined online that will eliminate time, confusion, repetition and other barriers to productivity that consume resources better utilized elsewhere.
Begin with the single online initiative or project that you need today, and choose an infrastructure that is built to expand, that allows you to adapt to the marketplace of tomorrow.
I'll start exploring a concept I call the "solution cycle" in my next post -- a common sense way to look at and approach IT Implemenations, your Online initiatives, and other highly changing or dynamic processes.
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