My dad runs his own business, I guess he employs around 30 or so people. I have worked for organisations 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 many companies of a large size are just not shaped right when it comes to implementing web changes or responding to the challenges of a “web 2 world”.

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

IT

I maintain 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, implement it, test it and deploy it within a few days. He then takes a look at it and if its not right, I change it again until its what he wants. Short and simple.

I suggest it takes at least 10 times as long, 10 times as many emails (and number of people involved, conference calls, documents and meetings required) to get the equivalent change done in many large organisations, especially where IT is largely centralised.

Hardly “agile”. Not the most responsive. And totally wrong for our growing web 2.0 world where web changes have to be implemented quickly to retain competitive advantage, and are hard to define completely, in advance of starting to implement them.

No wonder business people continually complain about the time it takes to deliver online projects.

Yes, I appreciate the need for process, risk management, governance and so on but a total waterfall / PRINCE2-based approach to managing IT change just doesn’t work for the web. It really doesn’t.

I would agree it is necessary for big corporate system changes where the risks may be bigger and where requirements can be quite clearly defined up-front in order to help manage them, but its not right for web changes where changes are sometimes small, and often the ideal solution isn’t known until its seen.

Using this methodology for web changes, in my view, also stifles innovation. People just can’t be bothered navigating the Change Control process that is usually a part of it if they happen to come up with a better solution mid way through development.

The solution seems to me to be simple – adopt more agile and collaborative ways of working when it comes to doing the actual “from requirements to development” part of a web project.

Create smaller cross-functional, multi-skilled teams and empower them to deliver the best solution for the business. 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. And clearly define the integration or hand off points where the code developed in the “agile” world needs to be passed back into the “waterfall” world to be tested and deployed on the corporate IT infrastructure.

Best of both worlds, perhaps? Combining speed and innovation with governance and risk management.

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 purpose is to manage the brand and  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 and therefore without being able to influence the discussion is probably quite worrying 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 social media 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.