A Funnelweb World

Yesterday I read Don Tapscott’s brilliant article in the Guardian. (He was the guy who wrote the excellent book, Wikinomics). It helped me feel that I wasn’t being unreasonable in wanting to find somewhere where “work” really could be “fun”. Hey, there is a whole generation of people who think that way.

He sums the dilemma up perfectly and big organisations really should take notice.

He suggests that work = fun when you are able to choose where, when and how to work and you have the right organisational structures and toolsets (mostly web 2.0 tools) in place to support that choice. And when you have challenging problems to solve and can work collaboratively with whoever you need to work with to get the job done, and share common goals and achievements.

The crucial point about this is that for the new generation of workers (”net-geners”) coming through, they expect that to be the norm. Organisations that don’t sit up and take notice of the needs of their future workforce, which have or are growing up with the web, are going to find challenging times ahead.

From the article:

It’s a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The net-geners arrive at work, eager to use their social networking tools to collaborate and create and contribute to the organisation. However, they are shocked to find technological tools more primitive than the ones used in school. The organisation still thinks the net is about websites presenting information, rather than a Web 2.0 collaboration platform. Then the organisation bans Facebook at the office because it suspects net-geners are chatting with friends and throwing digital snowballs when they should be working - thus depriving net-geners of their link to friends, to fun, to colleagues. Pretty soon, they head for the exit.

His article was inspiring.

If there are a whole bunch of people out there seeking the same things as me when it comes to work, then there must be some organisations out there (not many, its true) who are starting to respond to  these needs - I’ve just got to keep on looking.

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.