January 23rd, 2010
I was at an interesting event on Wednesday, hosted by not-for-profit (NFP) supplier Iris, debating the latest technology trends (as relate to the NFP sector).
The format was to write out your top prediction at the start. These were then all collated and debated, ending up with a vote. I was sat next to Social Media expert Steve Bridger and our contributions had a significant overlap - his was the rise of real-time computing; mine was on the increasing demands for personalisation, of content, and ultimately, of relationship.
The common ground here is real-time relationships - that in the world of Facebook, LinkedIn and especially Twitter, charity supporters and association members expect a personal conversation that is (near) real time and not constrained to office hours.
This type of relationship is a real challenge for NFP organisations, certainly for their software, but more importantly organisationally:
- The best person to contribute to your side of the conversation is unlikely to be in marketing; they are much more likely to be “knowledge workers” in the research or professional development group
- The working pattern (and HR) implications of the timing of the conversations
On the software side, the phrase “social CRM” has been coined in the last year or so and a number of the software vendors such as Oracle are responding. Its important to realise here though that this actually represents a huge mindset change for CRM - from “segment and conquer” to the personal conversation. This is likely to be much more manpower intensive. It is also much more about data assimilation and less about automated marketing.
Tags: charity, CRM, membership organisation, NFP, social media
Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | No Comments »
December 30th, 2009
If you are tempted to replace your website using a bespoke content management solution, rather than using an off-the-shelf Content Management System (CMS), think again … and choose a CMS.
The advantages of using a CMS are numerous:
- Built-in features - this is where the major benefits are. The main CMSs have numerous features built into them such as social network functionality, wikis, support for internationalisation and even shopping carts.
- Easy editing - most systems will have a simple interface for editing existing content and adding new content. It should be usable by non-IT staff.
- Vendor independence - most of the larger CMSs have a good selection of companies and contractors who are experienced in delivering websites based on them, and a good variety of books and training material if you want to do-it-yourself.
- Workflow for approval - unless you are a small organisation, the best way of working will be for people in different departments to write the appropriate contents for approval by the marketing / communications department. The easiest way of doing this is to use an approval workflow that is part of all serious CMSs.
And CMSs don’t need to be expensive - there are a number of free or low cost CMSs - examples include Drupal, Joomla! and Plone. There are also some good resources for further investigations such as CMS Review, CMS Watch and the CMS Matrix.
Tags: Business, business strategy, business value, CIO, CMS, Content Management Systems, IT, strategy, transformation, value
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November 19th, 2009
Yesterday’s report by Civil Society that charity IBS-STL UK is trying to sell off its operations and wind itself up after the failed implementation of a new supply chain IT system underlines the importance of managing IT system implementation and the resulting business change very carefully. IBS-STL UK includes Christian bookshop Wesley Owen and had a £38m turnover.
Their UK general manager is quoted as saying “the implementation of the ERP caused all kinds of problems with inventory and it was just as the recession hit. Those two things together gave us serious problems.”
IBS-STL UK’s failure isn’t the first such IT led change programme to go wrong (Sainsbury’s supply system problems in 2004 resulted in a £256m write off for example) and I’m sure won’t be the last.
However, as mentioned in a previous blog, using an agile approach with incremental change (complemented with sound project and change management, and thorough testing) can significantly reduce financial exposure and risk.
Tags: agile, Business, charity, investment, IT, NFP, risk
Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | 1 Comment »
November 12th, 2009
Many organisations struggle over the best place for IT within the organisation and extracting the best business value from investment.
In his recent book, fruITion, respected CIO commentator Chris Potts sets out his views in a very easy to read fashion. His main themes are that having IT as a separate department has failed to deliver business benefits from investment, that IT should be (largely) integrated into the business units and that initiatives should be treated as business change projects rather than IT projects.
He also concludes that there shouldn’t be CIOs. Rather, there should be an individual (a Chief Internal Investment Officer) whose job it is to lead the internal investment portfolio, including all resulting business change, and be accountable for the value the organisation gets out of its investments.
Whilst agreeing with much of what Chris Potts says, the aspect this doesn’t consider is the role that IT has in innovation - bringing radically different ways of working to the organisation; not something that will generally come from within existing business units. The most obvious examples of this are Amazon in retail and Google with advertising (although innovation isn’t always as ground breaking as this).
Tags: Business, business strategy, business value, CIO, innovation, investment, IT, strategy, transformation, value
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September 8th, 2009
A recent article from the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management has concluded that the current focus for nearly all contracts fails to set the appropriate foundations for the relationship between the parties.
Instead, many contracts concentrate on the negative - on indemnities, liquidated damages, IP rights and liabilities. I’m sure many will recognise the list.
With the ever increasing trend towards outsourcing and strategic partnerships, there is a need to reflect in contracts the fundamentals of the relationship, setting the framework to enable opportunities, growth and mutual benefit.
Tags: business strategy, business value, contracts, outsourcing, strategic partnerships
Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | 1 Comment »
July 9th, 2009
Being told that your business is going to be transformed sounds scary. Transformation is the sort of word that sounds frightening and fraught with risk when you’re told it is going to happen to you, … and celebratory looking back at your achievements.
When broken down into a sequence of small steps, though, it can be achieved with little risk.
Take The Guardian for example. The Guardian wanted to transform its business by moving the Guardian Unlimited news website onto a new content management platform to provide a more attractive offering to users, provide them much more flexibility in managing their content and give them improved opportunities for advertising.
A similar story is true at the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT). 5 years ago, as Jane Scott Paul, the AAT’s Chief Executive said recently, they set out a plan to transform themselves into an organisation that is attractive to their target audience - their members - to enable them to access the vast majority of information and services online.
In both cases, rather than take a “big bang” approach to transformation, they have approached it in a series of small, incremental steps. The advantage of this is that the financial exposure and general risk is significantly reduced and there is early assessment of the real business benefits.
So, the key to business transformation without the fright factor is incremental implementation. This reduces both financial exposure and risk, and allows the transformation to be validated (and adjusted if necessary) throughout the process - a classic application of agile techniques.
Tags: agile, business change, business transformation, transformation
Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | 1 Comment »
June 12th, 2009
Had some excellent feedback from a very enjoyable seminar at the RSA yesterday, despite the tube strike that resulted in a number of people having to drop out.
Matthew Taylor gave some fascinating reflections on the journey the RSA have gone through since he became their Chief Executive in 2006, with regards to the RSA fellowship and their use of social media. Matthew also had some interesting thoughts on the future of membership, questioning its role in modern society. He was candid in acknowledging that past attempts at social media by the RSA had not been successful.
They are now working hard to reap the potential through delivering a content proposition, engaging with and supporting their membership, and providing appropriate tools.
The AAT in contrast, has a very different membership community than the RSA, and consequently, very different needs from their social media, which are in a sense easier to understand and “sell” to their membership. Their Chief Executive, Jane Scott Paul, gave an insightful historical view of how they achieved their success, starting with a clear business strategy and then developing incrementally.
I came across some interesting examples in putting the IndigoBlue presentation together:
- Looking behind the obvious success of LinkedIn in contrast to ContactDetails (no currently available website) who had a similar website offering. The key difference was that LinkedIn had a clear business strategy and used an incremental approach, whereas ContactDetails took much more of a technology-led, waterfall approach.
- netmums is an excellent online community with over 500,000 signed up members, which provides immediate access to advice including nutrition, recipes, local events and local groups. It’s interesting to contrast this with the NCT site, which is very attractively laid out and does have a different audience, but has more of a corporate feel to it.
- And finally, when looking for an example Facebook page, came across Vladimir Putin’s info page and thought would share as an example of effective use of social media (compare with Gordon Brown’s!)
Tags: AAT, business strategy, Jane Scott Paul, Matthew Taylor, RSA, seminar, social media
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April 29th, 2009
I went to an interesting evening event at the British Computer Society yesterday - a Gurteen Knowledge Café. The format of the evening was a series of discussions with small groups of attendees based round the topic “How do you imagine the Knowledge Technologies of the Future”, with the groups mixing up at intervals.
Overall, the discussions were fairly philosophical, with some of them moving too far into the future to have any practical impact.
However, there were some interesting points for this blog, mostly around the information and knowledge made available to users of websites and other digital media.
The fundamental question is - what are the underlying needs of your audience that you are trying to fulfil? There would seem to be two parts to the answer to this:
- It is about providing the information and knowledge they want (or need, which is subtly different)
- It is also about enabling members of your audience to engage in the conversations they value, and even facilitating those conversations
I’m using the term “audience” here to mean the members of your organisation, or supporters of your charity and even going wider to include people who might be visiting your website for the first time … which poses the further question - have you assessed the needs of wider stakeholders?
There were also some interesting comments on the way that Facebook is driving user behaviour:
- Listing the number of friends someone has drives people to want to acquire more
- The question mark Facebook had for people without a photo drove people to add a photo
- There is a trend for particularly younger Facebook users to be much more open and less concerned with privacy
We are hosting a seminar with the RSA - “Engaging the Community - the challenges and opportunities for the third sector” on 11th June 2009 where these issues will be discussed in more detail.
Tags: knowledge, social media, technologies
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April 17th, 2009
A recent report by the ESRC Research Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy at Cass Business School ”Scoping the Charity Outsourcing Market” concluded that the charity sector is missing out on potential significant savings through not considering IT outsourcing. This was reported to be largely due to avoidance of risk and lack of information. The study consulted with 450 charities with between £1m and £10m annual turnover.
Our experience at IndigoBlue is that IT outsourcing is actually part of a larger picture - that charities are often small-to-medium size organisations in which IT has a disproportionally large impact. So, charities of the £1m-£10m annual turnover size would not normally be able to justify employing a full-time IT Director, but their website and membership/donor database are central to their business and there is a danger that poor IT can impede delivery of the overall business strategy.
Organisations like the AAT, however, have been able to transform their businesses, with IT being a catalyst for business change. The AAT has access to an appropriate level of IT expertise, utilising a part-time IT Director. This resource has helped the AAT to dramatically change their methods of interacting with their members, so that they are now predominantly an online organisation.
In most cases, the web is much more important than IT outsourcing in the role it plays in enabling (or impeding) a charity’s overall strategy. It is important that all parts of the organisation are able to be responsive in changing content, that the website infrastructure supports rapid (and cost effective) development of new features and provides the facilities needed to support interaction with supporters / members.
Turning to IT outsourcing, the business case for, or against, outsourcing IT services needs to be considered as part of the overall strategy for IT. In some cases an outsourcing supplier will be able to simplify the IT infrastructure and deliver significant cost savings. Elsewhere, if the IT department is of the appropriate size and delivering the services needed, there can be great advantages to keeping an in-house team. The potential benefit of an in-house team is the deep knowledge of the organisation and how it operates.
If outsourcing is being considered, it is important to select the right partner, with an understanding of the sector, with the expertise required and the ability to deliver the appropriate level of service, in the right locations.
Tags: charity, ESRC study, IT, outsourcing, strategy
Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | No Comments »