A Funnelweb World

My dad runs his own business, I guess he employs around 30 or so people. I work for a company where the IT dept alone is probably 10 times that size. And that’s not unusual for big organisations.

And having now worked for several large companies, I’m becoming more convinced that companies of a large size are just not geared up right for the web 2.0 world. They are still too much like oil tankers.

I’m particularly referring to marketing and IT departments. And here’s why I think that.

IT

I manage my dad’s website. Whenever he wants a change made to it - anything from creating a new page to editing a photo or pdf - he just sends me an email. One email. And I plan the change, make the change, test the change and deploy it. He then takes a look at it and if its not right, I change it again until its what he wanted.

I suggest it takes at least 10 times as long, 10 times as many emails (oh, and let’s throw in the number of people involved, the number of conference calls, documents and meetings required) to get the equivalent change done in any typical large organisation.

Hardly agile. Not the most responsive. And totally wrong for our growing web 2.0 world where things have to be done quickly.

Yes, I appreciate the need for risk management, governance and so on but this approach to managing IT change just doesn’t work for the web. It really doesn’t. I agree it is probably necessary for big corporate system changes where requirements can be quite clearly defined and outcomes predicted but its not right for web changes where often the preferred solution isn’t known until its seen. There are too many people and layers of mgmt involved, for starters.

Never mind doing the change itself - you usually need to debate it, document it, challenge it, plan it and so on. (Ask yourself in a typical project within any large org, what proportion of time is spent physically implementing the change?) Its bizarre.

The solution seems to me to be strikingly simple - adopt more agile and collaborative ways of working. Create small cross-functional, multi-skilled teams and empower them to deliver the project objectives. Remove as many layers of bureaucracy for them as possible and just let them get on with it. What’s the worst that can happen? Create some / minimal controls to guard against this - but don’t go overboard.

That’s why small organisations are probably more agile than larger ones - they have less people getting in the way of change, for starters.

Marketing

The other day, when talking about his website, my dad happened to mention an enquiry he received through it from a new customer in Perth. He then went on casually to say that he put the customer in direct contact with his supplier in China so they could discuss the enquiry (about product spec) directly, and in more detail.

Customers / suppliers talking to each other. Without the organisation.

I thought about how difficult it would probably be to do that in many large organisations, and pondered why this was the case.

Now I’m definitely no expert in marketing but I think its because in typical large organisations, you probably have whole departments whose very existence depends on them managing the brand and controlling the messages around it. Its historical, from when messages could be controlled and sent one way only. The thought of customers and suppliers now talking about their products without their knowledge is probably terrifying to them.

Not sure if this is something about a lack of trust (why do many organisations seem to naturally think that if given the chance, customers will say bad things about them??), but I doubt its sustainable in a web 2.0 world.

This is traditional marketing. Web 2-based marketing (also known as social media marketing) is multiway, participatory and user-generated. Its also loads cheaper and I suspect more insightful.

And I think its the future.

And totally not what many large marketing departments are probably about. They’ve got to change, to trust the conversations that will happen or are already happening and to become a part of them. There are loads of opportunities for customer insight, surely.