Archive for January, 2009
January 30, 2009
Should You Have a Web Committee?
An association executive on a list I belong to asked this week if organizations should have a web committee to determine the content, design and functionality of their site.
My answer? No.
The problem I have had with most web committees is that they often pursue solutions via consensus. Each individual comes to the committee with their agenda and the group then works out some compromise where no one gets everything and everyone gets something. This results in web sites where no one can find anything and that produce relatively low value for their organizations.
Every site must have defined, focused, outcomes that it is intended to create if it will generate significant value. Committees just can’t do this because of their structure.
What does work? Teams.
This isn’t just semantics. A team is a group of people who are pursuing a common goal. They will succeed or fail together and therefore have incentive to collaborate and endeavor toward common goals. This requires some extra effort and thought by senior management but, hey, that’s why they have that job!
Web committees, as they are usually constituted and governed, fail to produce value at the level that a focused team can achieve.
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January 23, 2009
Two Excellent Resources from Consulting Colleagues
I wanted to point you to two great resources from some consulting colleagues of mine.
First, Wes Trochlil is publishing a series of podcast interviews with the CEOs of association management system vendors.
Second, Jeff Cobb is publishing a series of reports on survey results for association elearning trends.
Wes and Jeff are offering original material you won’t find anywhere else, check them out.
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January 20, 2009
Poor Judgement + Social Media = Unhappy Client
Peter Shankman provides the gritty details about a very expensive marketing and communications consultant getting into hot water with a client for bad mouthing his home town via a global, networked, communications platform known as Twitter.
Further evidence that people don’t get punished for blogging (or tweeting in this case). They get in trouble for having poor judgment in what they write online.
The lesson for us all in using social media today is that privacy does not exist for personal commentary you chose to post online. Even things that you have restricted to just friends have a way of wriggling into the public sphere eventually.
Be careful out there and be prepared to back up what you post.
On the other hand, I do think the staffer at the client overreacted a wee bit to what was a rather innocuous, if stupid, comment of less than 140 characters. So he doesn’t like Memphis, life goes on.
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January 16, 2009
Creating NPO Innovation Capacity in a Downturn
Google announced this week that they are closing down several sites and services. According to reports they are eliminating some redundant services (Google Video being a good example of that) while closing others that never performed.
Peter Drucker, in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, said that the single thing that highly innovative companies had in common was that they were ruthless in killing programs, products or services that no longer created value. There is almost always a finite limit to which you can expand your capacity to add new things. The most innovative organizations, according to Drucker, free up existing resources for more valuable efforts.
This is precisely what Google is doing now.
In my experience, stopping programs is a significant challenge for a lot of non-profit organizations. Services and programs tend to come with their own built-in constituencies (that’s how many of them get created in the first place!). The ones that fail to flourish become sacred zombie cows, staggering along without truly dying yet with no hope for growth.
This recession creates an environment where those sacred zombie cows can finally be driven from the organization. Before contemplating layoffs or uniform cuts across the organization, take advantage of the disruption around us to stop doing things that no longer create value. This will allow you redirect resources to more productive programs which will create a thriving organization while others continue to struggle.
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January 15, 2009
Jared Spool and The $300 Million Button
Great story from Jared Spool this week: The $300 Million Button.
It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.
The button? Register.
I personally worked with an association where we made a similar change to an e-commerce process that resulted in a six figure improvement in revenue. Some small changes can have a big impact!
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January 7, 2009
R is for Open Source Statistical Analysis Programming Language
I read in the New York Times today about an open source programming language and environment for conducting statistical analysis. R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts:
R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.
But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use.
This is pretty interesting stuff on a couple of levels. One, it is a programming language created by and for statisticians and data analysts rather than programmers. The story indicates it is easier to use by non-programmers who want to do custom analysis. Two, it is an open source project begun over ten years ago that is now starting to challenge the dominance of SAS, the dominant stats package. It is a classic example of an established firm being disrupted by an upstart, innovative, technology.
The R Project web site. This might of interest to your in-house statisticians, if you have them.
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January 6, 2009
Designing for Mobile Devices with Web Standards
Nice article on A List Apart this month on using CSS style sheets for presenting web-based content on mobile devices: Return of the Mobile Style Sheet.
It is a rather technical piece but if you are planning for growth in your mobile-based visitors, this would be a good piece to forward to your web designers and programmers.
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