Author Archives: David

Internet Disruptions and Global Web Audiences

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Several undersea telecommunications cables were cut in the Middle East/South Asia region last week. Networks from Egypt to India were impacted, creating very slow to broken connections. Outsource operations in India were a big concern but the large players had alternate connections available as part of their disaster response.

There has been a lot of speculation as to how the cables were cut and no ships have been identified yet in the areas where the cables were severed. John Robb posted today about how cutting undersea cables is a viable strategy for small groups to execute in a system disruption campaign.

All of which made me think about organizations who address a global audience via their web sites. If Robb is right, this kind of disruption could be become more frequent. If you have a large audience for your site outside your own region, you should consider how to ameliorate this risk in advance.

What could you do? The main thing I can think of is to distribute the hosting of your web sites around the globe, either by maintaining mirrored sites or deploying localized sites in their target regions. Locally deployed sites in key regions would provide you with continued service to those audiences even if they are disconnected from the Internet as a whole for a period of time. This is a non-trivial effort but if serving global audiences is a key part of achieving your goals, it could be a good investment against future disruption and associated losses.

Dues are not Taxes

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Ben Martin recently compared membership dues to taxes. Acknowledging that Ben is engaging in a thought experiment/debate, I do think this a horribly damaging analogy.

If your members think of paying dues to you like paying a tax, you are dead meat.

If your staff consider dues income to be a tithe from the industry or field, you are also dead meat.

If everyone involved considers paying dues as exchanging money for value, then you have a healthy economic relationship, creating incentives for value-producing behavior on both sides.

Thinking of dues as taxes is a poisonous idea. Just don’t do it.

Products or Markets?

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Kevin Holland posted last week about his position that associations should be driven by the needs of their market rather than any particular product they produce.

Many association do choose to drive their products and services based on the needs of their market (which are largely their members and others closely associated with them). This is fine and often works quite well.

I would like to make the point, however, that an association could choose to have a particular product or service (or set of products/services) as the driving force for their strategy, addressing any market that values them. Their customers and members would change over time as they find new markets for their core product. The CFA Institute is a good example of what this might look like in practice.

Driving your choice of markets by a particular set of products you produce is as valid a strategy as determining your products/services by the needs of a defined market. Each would lead to very different looking associations but that’s the whole point of strategy: picking a direction and putting it into action.

Registration and Login Pages

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Both registration and login pages are critical pieces of any interactive web site. A couple of posts popped up last week that provide good tips for each.

The Art of the Sign Up Page and Account Sign-in: 8 Design Mistakes.

The critical thing to keep in mind with pages like these is to pare them down to just the bare essentials of what is needed to get the user where they want to be. This can be really tough to do at times, organizations being what they are, but you will be rewarded for your efforts if you can hold the line.

An interesting caveat to the above: do not ignore the marketing opportunities that a login page for restricted content provides. You can show the value of what is behind the login and offer a next step to do what they need to do to gain access (which probably involves giving you money). You still have to make sure those messages don’t get in the way of those who already have access while being visible enough to attract the attention of those who are your potential customers/members.

Why Business Intelligence is Often Stupid

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Business intelligence (or BI) has been all the rage for the last couple of years. It is a central topic in ASAE’s Tech conference later this month, with many sessions focused on how to extract data from your systems and present them in shiny dashboard interfaces. There is a problem though:

Many business intelligence tools are plain stupid.

All the dials, speedometers, bar graphs, and status icons in the world won’t help you if you do not first ground your efforts in what data you need to make sound decision in pursuit of your business outcomes. A lot of vendors and consultants out there gloss over these critical issues in pursuit of the BI sale.

Take dashboards, for example. The concept is that a single screen will give you all the data you need to make quick decisions, just like you can with a car dashboard. The problem is, most businesses and organizations don’t have to make a decision in a split second like you do when driving an automobile. Auto dashboards are optimized to give the driver critical feedback in a glance lasting less than a second.

When is the last time you had to make a decision of major import to the organization from your desk in less than a second? It just doesn’t happen.

Yet, a lot of business intelligence dashboard tools look just like the dashboard of a car. It is a literal interpretation that ruins a somewhat valuable idea.

So, what to do?

You have to start with the objectives you are trying to achieve. What process are you putting into place to achieve an objective? What are the measurable steps within that process? What data sources do you need to tap into to generate those measures? How will you use that data to make decisions?

Once you have answered all those questions you should be able to identify what measures you should monitor and how often. If one or more of them matter on a daily basis, a dashboard interface might make a lot of sense for presentation of the data. If not, a simple report will probably meet your needs and save you the time, effort and expense of developing a dashboard you don’t need.

That is being intelligent about your business data.

By the way, I will be presenting a session with Wes Trochlil at the ASAE Technology Conference titled: “Getting Intelligent About Business Intelligence: Finding the Value Behind the Hype.” If you only go to one BI session, I suggest you make it ours.

What Should ASAE Blog About?

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Lisa Junker has asked for feedback on what the ASAE Acronym blog should cover in 2008.

My biggest wish as a member and supporter of ASAE is that they would talk more about themselves. This is often a bad idea but I think that ASAE has an opportunity to use blogging as a way to discuss what they are doing as an organization and to engage more directly with their online member community about the society itself. Walk the transparency talk, in other words.

So, Lisa, that’s my suggestion. Good luck in 2008!

The Marketing Compiler

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I came across this line below from Seth Godin in an interview with Hugh McLeod:

Programmers need computers and compilers because without them, they can’t see if the program works. The web is a giant compiler for marketers. You can experiment here for less money, in less time, than anywhere else. If Al Gore hadn’t invented it, I’d be seriously bummed out.

That is a great insight by Seth (no surprise). The web enables you to try things out and test response for very little investment other than some effort on your part. That which works can be enhanced and extended online and off with less risk of failure.

Why don’t more people try this? Lack of knowledge and lack of willpower, both of which are completely under your own control.

New Year Resolutions for Web Executives

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Below are a few ideas on new year’s resolutions for web executives:

Get Strategic
Meet with each of the senior executives in your organization or department and ask them about their primary goals for 2008. How will they know they have achieved them? How important are they to the company? What role should the Web have in supporting those goals?

Those few hours of meetings will help you, as the leader of the organization’s web team, develop a clear image of what the organization is trying to achieve this year and how you can align your team to provide the most value they can to those goals. You will also earn the respect and support of your senior team by proactively reaching out to them.

Get Innovative
Innovation is the simple act of doing something differently in order to create new value. This might include creating greater efficiency in your processes or developing new value for your web site visitors in the form of content and functionality.

Commit yourself this year to constantly assessing opportunities for innovation in your processes and ultimate product. What areas need to change in order to meet your goals for the year? Where can you be more efficient in your content publishing processes? Can you tweak an administrative interface to be easier for staff? Can you simplify the interfaces you present to your customers?

You get the idea. Innovation should be a daily activity for any web executive.

Challenge Your Team
Challenge your web team to achieve something this year they have never done before. Make sure the challenge is aligned with your overall goals but feel free to get creative otherwise.

For example: When I used to lead a large web team, we had an organizational goal of improving the accessibility of our web site. Since standards-based design practices get you most of the way to accessibility, I challenge the team to develop a new set of templates that had “code we could be proud of” when someone viewed the source of pages. That phrase resonated with two staffers, who I then tasked to lead the project. It was our rallying cry that year and helped to make sure we kept focused on that major change to the site.

By now you may have realized that you should be doing all three of the above ideas as part of being an effective web executive. Use the New Year as an opportunity to recommit yourself and your team to these activities.

Should You Add Live Chat to Your Web Site?

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A friend asked me recently about adding live chat to their business web site. This is the kind of functionality where site visitors can click a button to initiate a chat session with a company representative. Some of these will even pop-up a dialogue box on their own, asking the visitor if they need assistance from a live person. I’m sure most of you have encountered this kind of thing somewhere before.

Here is the five second test for whether you should consider adding live chat to your site:

Does your organization already have a call center fielding questions and/or orders from your customers?

If yes: you should consider live web-based chat as another medium for their efforts.

If no: you most likely won’t benefit from live chat.

Live chat is not going to help you much if you don’t already have a large force of people engaging one-on-one with your customers. The reason is that if you don’t already have those kind of staff, you most likely aren’t pursuing outcomes that live chat support can serve well. And you most certainly don’t have the human resources to do it well.

Stop Blocking!

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Shel Holtz has started a site that encourages corporations to not block their employees from large chunks of the Internet: Stop Blocking!. From the site:

Companies everywhere are blocking employee access to the Net, fueled by questionable research and irresponsible pronouncements of self-serving individuals and organizations. This site is designed to serve as a hub information resource for those who believe the benefits of providing access far outweigh the risks.

Shel was kind enough to post a link to my idea about making online holiday shopping a benefit rather than an infraction. Shel’s initiative is combating all the misguided rules put in place instead of actual good management practices. Bravo!

Not to mention the damage companies do their employee’s ability to engage online on their employer’s behalf. Plus the recruiting implications. Think the generation coming out of college now will take well to corporate nannyware?

A final aside. Discovering Shel’s Stop Blocking initiative only happened because I wrote an entry and someone commented on it pointing to Shel’s site. I love the serendipitous discoveries that blogging creates for me.