12.11.2008

How would you change this project description -- and what would you expect it to cost?

Online Services Roadmap Project

Overview

Web Channel Management (WCM) and the office of the Chief Administrative Officer endorse the Company’s new focus on the benefits of online services to support business activities at all levels and among all audiences.

This focus represents a significant change in the role of web services. Because the high-priority work-streams now in development depend on a more robust web capability that we now provide, WCM must move quickly to identify the immediate and long-term web services requirements.

To provide our company with a realistic roadmap and timeline for needed enhancements, WCM will engage a qualified third-party consulting company to provide the deliverables listed below.

One important qualification for the candidate companies is that they have successfully provided large companies with this enterprise planning and advice, as well as providing top-notch project management and development resources. Ideally, the company will be in the business of providing ongoing support for web-facing development projects for a limited number of large companies.



Project Purpose



The Online Services Roadmap Project has two parts:

1. Develop online services roadmap with priority project plans
2. Evaluate, scope and bid on at least two “Identified Projects”

WCM continuously evaluates business requirements for web support. This project provides us with speedy supplemental expertise. We expect that the selected vendor will be able to use our current expertise, research and analysis to develop a first iteration of a new web services roadmap.

This iteration is expected to be an eight-week project (from the date of contract.) The roadmap and plans delivered should include additional analysis and planning tasks, and should include the “Identified Projects” as elements in the overall roadmap.

The vendor responding can propose an alternate timeline for the project if necessary, along with a justification for the change.

Detailed information on Goals and Objectives, Current Online Channels, Business Processes, Current Environment, and Market Research is provided in an appendix.

Detailed information is provided on “Identified Projects” listed in Part Two in an appendix.

Customer and agent research, both raw data and analyses, will be available to the project team. WCM participants are familiar with past research projects.

Project Deliverables

Part One: Online Services Roadmap

A. Strategy Review
Validate goals and objectives (in discussion with stakeholders)
Recommend revisions and reasons
Provide recommended priority weighting for revised objectives
Deliver Online Strategy Roadmap

B. Technology Review
Document standard set of online functions to support our business model.
Provide examples of each function.
Compare our current environment’s functions.
Identify important functional gaps.
Evaluate additional web requirements imposed by in-progress work-streams.
Evaluate infrastructure’s capability to support standard online services.
Identify important infrastructure gaps.
Provide recommended priority weighting for functional and infrastructure gaps.

C. Planning
Update Strategy and Technology recommendations after our review.
Align Technology priorities with Strategic priorities.
Create multi-year Roadmap of Web Services enhancement projects.
Create simulation of web presence after roadmap is finished.
Develop project plans with resource requirements for first year.
Identify ongoing third-party role.



Part Two: List of Identified Projects


Overview


For each project listed, see appendix for information on:
Scenario description(s)
Personas or roles involved
Stakeholder groups
Process overview (current)
Current technology basis
Functional requirements (high level)
Business Benefit
Known Challenges

Identified Projects



List removed for confidentiality reasons -- sixteen items are on the list, including tool and gadget creation, online campaign framework, SEO work, etc.




Deliverables

For at least two Projects, provide detailed proposals, including Tasks, Timeframe and Cost (We will provide additional information as requested).

Provide a general evaluation of all Identified Projects: general evaluation, which may include comments on project focus, feasibility, business value, likely cost range, technology options and issues, dependencies, and examples now in use.

Group related projects into categories.

Rank all Identified Projects (or categories) in order, from highest likely ROI to lowest. (We will provide additional information as requested)

Resources to be provided

Internal Roles available to support analysis project:
Web Channel Management: Channel Manager, Abby Shaw
Customer Research and Strategies
Marketing
Communications
Media
Multimedia
IT Architecture
IT Web
ASP representatives as needed

Appendix of relevant information

Appendix Contents
Contact names provided for each item, for clarifying questions

Goals and Objectives
Company Goals:
Web Channel Management Goals:
Vision
Goals and Top Objectives
Key Milestones
Known Challenges
Success Metrics
Impact of project(s) not being done (targeted ROI)

Our Online Channels
Overview diagram
For each Web Channel (four large, many small):
Site maps for large sites
Site key stakeholders (business owners)
Site future vision (if documented)
Site personas
Technology platform
Known challenges
Work in progress (if any)

Our Business Processes
The Insurance business model
Our competitors on the web
“Life of a Policy” process diagram (for Commercial Insurance)
High Value Scenarios by persona type
(Dan Moore’s Claims process diagram)
Key interaction: Types of agency visits

Our Current Environment

Online delivery:
Digital Design Standards (Parent Company standards and local exceptions for us)
Digital Standards Committee: purpose and process
Usability Methodology
Inventory of web-facing business applications (Capabilities Inventory)

Infrastructure

Web-related Technical Architecture: diagrams and description
Overview of DCMS
Overview of our current Websphere Portal environment
Collection of technical standards with known gaps identified (web NFR, for instance)
Other?

Identified Projects: Detail
For each project listed, information on:
Scenario description(s)
Personas or roles involved
Stakeholder groups
Process overview (current)
Current technology basis
Functional requirements (high level)
Business Benefit
Known Challenges

Audience Research (Summaries, transcripts, DVDs)

12.09.2008

Personal Brand and Company Rights

This post is triggered by Mr. Owyang's comments this morning on How Companies Respond to the Risks of Personal Brands. I am in a Company, and, having just reviewed and responded to some early materials on my company's policy around social networking sites and personal blogging, I have done some deep thinking about this topic in the last few weeks.

But I first must mention that these opinions are my own and neither reflect nor argue with my Company's policies and practices in this area. In the same vein, I have worked for several large companies and consulted for many more, and my observations here apply across the board for the standard American corporate environment. This is an environment that culturally allows for departmental exceptions -- and in many cases, celebrates departmental diversity. I am speaking of corporate culture in general, not the free-wheeling, creative groups within most corporations (incidentally, typically under the protection of a valued, but squirrelly executive.)

Mr. Owyang describes the risks and the responses he's observed, and recommends some approaches over others. The comments on this post are wide-ranging and in general agreement with each other. I also agree with most of them. What I want to contribute is a set of observations about corporate practices that affect this situation.

Okay, enough pompous stuff.

What we're talking about here is a genuine conflict between different philosophies: you can call them property rights philosophies, at will philosophies, work philosophies, personal freedom philosophies, reputation philosophies, or brand philosophies. There's a genuine clash. My belief is that this essential conflict cannot be "solutioned" around -- it's not that some people understand and some people don't. There is actual, legitimate disagreement here -- with truth on both sides. Corporations don't talk about their side of it for two reasons: 1. they don't have to, and 2. a thing can't actually talk.

That may be funny, but it's not a joke. Ten years ago, I handed out the Cluetrain Manifesto to all the internal web publishers I trained (dozens), but the basic message is still un-used: Only people can connect on the web. Or let's go back to The Medium is the Message -- the web is hot: social networks are white-hot (just south of sex for intimacy, one finds), while the Corporate voice (aka Brand messages) is cool, cooler, cold. As most brand managers would say it should be. And that's why Corporate Blogs are like congealed gravy, because they in fact are.

Okay, a sandbag here -- even the lively brands that splash on the fuschia are cold in media terms: I love the iPod silhouettes -- it's a picture of a person, not a person, and the brand is what surrounds the person, not the person -- it's both true and insightful and completely consistent with my point. A brand is not a person. If a brand, like Aunt Jemima, or Hannah Montana, steps out of the freeze frame and enters personhood, the "brand" collapses into a baggy wrapping of "reputation" around that person. And actually, when that happens, we (the people) usually get mad. It doesn't make sense, but we get mad at that person. A brand is far grander than a person -- we hold a brand to a very high standard of behavior, one that an actual person could never meet. Miley, Britney, Madonna, Princess Di, Col. Sanders, Paris, Bill Clinton, all the politicians brought down by events that we'd find odd but okay among our co-workers -- as long as it's on their personal time... Google learns the hazards of brand in China -- a good business move (opening a tight market) is a horrible breach of trust for a brand.

The only way the Corporate side of this conversation gets out there is for a person inside the corporation to decide to represent the monolith's point of view. And some of the commenters do describe their personal experiences with these issues vis-a-vis their monoliths.

Now I channel the Corporation (note the right justification):

First of all, about what indivuals do to enhance their networks -- we're not talking about Brand here -- we're talking about reputation.

By its nature, brand belongs to a non-person. Companies can also have reputations, and that has an effect on their brand value, of course, but it's not the same thing. Once a person has a brand, they aren't a person anymore -- they're a non-person, an entity, a concept. Personal brand is a similar concept to sole-proprieter. A person, but also an entity.

Many corporations have policies that forbid employees from taking a second job, or from serving on another company's board of directors (without written permission from legal). This may have caused problems for some individuals, but the reason for the policy is well understood and accepted (and endorsed by case law). A Corporation has a reasonable right to insist that their employees not put themselves in positions where they might have a conflict of interest: whether in a decision or how they spend their extra working time when it's needed by both employers -- or in 2.0 terms, this policy states and enforces the fact that your professional brain space, energy, and attention are all exclusively dedicated to the Company. Just like all your team members -- you are to focus on your teams' success when you are working. That's really the point of exempt and non-exempt employee classifications -- in one, the company is buying time, in the other, the company is buying your full attention. In several comments, people point out that in a 70 hour work week, they find it hard to distinguish personal time from professional time. Okay. Employers can't actually prevent you from taking care of personal business on work time, if you are salaried. (They can insist that you not take care of your business using Company equipment however -- for many good and bad reasons.) So go ahead.

Let's be clear in our definitions, however: spending time on private matters is very different from engaging in activities that might create a conflict of interest.

What Corporations are wrestling with right now is the large and tangled question of whether these new opportunities for external self-aggrandizement (or personal brand development activities) pose the same risks of conflict of interest as a second job with a different employer.

This is the advanced point of view: other Corporations are still being distracted by internet porn policies -- thinking that the risk of employees' external publishing is in the area of morality and the risks of inappropriate sexual conduct. They're putting it in the same box as sexual harrassment, thought it's not said -- the concept is that there is too much risk of our employees publically misbehaving and embarassing us to permit them to play in this space. This will pass. And by the way, it will only pass when people start acting online in a way they would act in the lobby of their offices.

What's ended along with privacy is the ability to distinguish between a work self and a personal self. For people who are what they work (like Mr. Owyang, god bless him), this has happened without their noticing. For people who find expression in a self that isn't really the same as their work self, it's going to be an issue. It's an issue for them and it's also going to be an issue for their employers, once they figure out what's going on. I think it's more in the nature of a rocky transition coming than a "first amendment issue" (C'mon -- if you don't know that the first amendment doesn't apply when you're at work, you're seriously out of touch -- in the eyes of the law, your speech at work is "commercial speech" and it belongs to your employer -- you don't really get a say in it, so to speak.)
The rocky transition is going to go both ways -- shouldn't everyone work for an employer who appreciates them for their real self? Isn't it crippling to have to spend your professional life pretending to be a person you are not? Most people would agree that that is true I think -- though many (most? Who knows?) corporate workers do show a different face to their employer than their true one.
And by doing that, we've created unmeetable expectations on the part of our employers -- the employers will have to adjust their expectations to embrace the fallible, foolishness that we're going to be showing in our online photo galleries or there will be few qualified candidates for the big white collar factories.
It's going to force us all to be more honest. As transparency does.
But don't miss this fact: the question of whether an employee can be forbidden from engaging in activities that might create a conflict of interest has already been answered: and the ansswer is Yes.
If you are salaried, you work for your company in a much more comprehensive way than you might think. Like it or not, you are a company man. If that agreement doesn't work for you, and you are a very valuable employee, you might look at consulting to your current employer to remove the uncomfortable constraint. Of course, benefits... If you're not a valuable employee, you'd better decide which is more important to you. And even if you're valuable, you should know that you are always at risk of making a mis-step. There is no net if you are building a personal brand that conflicts with your employer's commercial interests.
And don' t get me started on intellectual capital, the investment of training, and how far into my brain does my employer's ownership extend? Seriously, don't.

Random asides:
Some people find it easier to talk about the conflict as if it were generational, a fiction that Dan Schwabel and Adam Singer tussle over in the comments.

Have you experienced this? In a lively and irreverent phone conversation with a vendor developer, we talked about some of my requirements, including an interface that approximates TwitterDeck. "I love Twitter" the developer said. "Me too," I said, "I'm abbyshaw -- who are you?" Long silence -- "Well, it's not really business-appropriate" he finally said. "Okay," I said, "mine isn't either, really." But here's the consequence: I really admire this developer, but all of a sudden, I felt like he was presenting a fake front to me in our dealings -- and that he didn't want me to see his real side. It really hurt my feelings. But maybe that's okay.

I should also mention that I am a deep believer in the inevitability of the commercial reputation web. But that commerce is different from the business of my Company.

I can't believe I can post this to my blog...

Here you go: the first episode of the season of Dexter now underway on Showtime. First a little startled to find it available for free viewing on Sho.com, but now even more intrigued by the offer to embed the code where ever I want....

12.04.2008

Palin Fights Dead Turkeys for Media Attention

Okay, I was working on finding a way to provide an outside company with a sort of index to resources that are a mix of documents and links -- so I thought h'm maybe a blog that's restricted to those who are invited might work. So I looked at WordPress (sorry, Blogger, I need more flexibility for this purpose, though I love your integrated simplicity for my own privative needs). Okay, always exciting to see the ferment of plug-ins, add-ons, and fanatical user ideas at WordPress (new version just released!), so I was enjoying that, but then my eye fell on this link to a site that is evidently dedicated to celebrating failure in signage, videos, and juxtaposition. It's called the Fail Blog. So, even though I was working (really), I took a look at it. The signs like this one, for example are very funny, especially the fractured English ones. So I was looking and laughing and sort of monitoring why I was laughing and feeling pretty horrible about laughing at a video of a poor broken-headed gymnast, when I browsed to an item labeled "Interview Location Fail".

And it's the lovely Sarah Palin, chattin' away about Alaskan politics, and "awl," and finance in front of a cage of what turn out to be white turkeys getting their affairs in order. And between the doomed turkeys and Gov. Palin was a workmanlike workman fiddling around with a farm implement on a table -- it was hard to see what exactly he was doing, which made it all the more fascinating, but as you squint at the screen, you can make out a pair of enormous chicken feet protruding from the cone-shaped sleeve suspended above a sort of wooden table or trough, and as you note that the workman is attending to the bottom of that cone -- where, if those are feet, then what's there ought to be a head, and what is he doing with it? Then you notice that the wooden bench below the plastic? fabric? cone is "painted" bright red. The video is grainy, but that red looks sort of -- liquid. You have plenty of time to work this out, because Gov. Palin goes on and on and on, while the workman behind her first listens politely, facing her, and holding what turn out to be the turkey feet above what we now know to be the cone of death, and then, as politely as he can, the fellow turns away and back to his work at the cone -- he projects an air of "well, I haven't any more time to give to this stuff: I've got work to do." Having completed the task -- whatever it is that he did to that white turkey while it was quietly upside down in the cone -- he gets to the point where it's obvious to all watching (and I can't imagine anyone watching this who would not be fixated on the workman at this point)that he would now normally lift the turkey out of the cone and carry it away. He glances at the camera, apparently the only one present who considers that perhaps his activities might not be just right for the five o'clock news to broadcast, and you can tell that the poor fellow is just trapped there. He wants to go get another turkey and keep things moving, but it just goes against his grain to show the world what will show when he lifts the turkey. There's a pause. The workman gathers his resolution -- you can see him doing it -- and he lifts the turkey out of the cone, shielding it from our view with his body. So we still don't know what's really going on in that cone. Gov. Palin talks on and on, and a little while later, the workman sidles back into the frame, holding (I presume) another turkey upside down by the feet (they do all look alike), and now he looks like he's a little fed up with how this is going on and on and on and interfering with his work. He turns his back on the camera, lifts the turkey and stuffs it head-first into the sleeve. Well. This turkey is not having any of this -- the sleeve sort of billows and the alarmingly large feet thrash around so the workman has to concentrate to get a good grip on them. Then, once the turkey is subdued, he turns his attention to the bottom of the cone again. What is he doing? We still don't know. We're peering at the screen, looking for clues -- is that blood? Will the head still be on when he lifts the turkey out of the cone? And oh, yeah, there's Sarah Palin still goin' on and on. Even she has noticed the turkey activity out of the corner of her eye by now, and she's got that sort of fixed smile that you see on a person who is wishing they were elsewhere. The interviewer continues to ask questions, so Sarah Palin takes the situation in hand and starts to slowly move away, though she continues to talk; she's sort of pivoting, trying to get the camera to move its angle out of the line of sight of the workman's activities. The cameraman does not cooperate. At this point, I realize that the cameraman probably does not like Sarah Palin very much. And I have to say that here's a Democrat who saw his chance and took it. And took it. It's with a sense of real civic pride that I celebrate an American who can use the media to take a stand. Off camera.

Here's the clip:


Okay, something I learned after watching the clip is that this was an interview immediately following the Governor's ceremonial "pardoning of the turkey" -- presumably that specific turkey had been released from the pen and was not actually watching the dispatch of all his or her friends and relations. Actually, I lived near a turkey farm for a while (thank god, not too near -- there's a lot of guano involved in turkey cultivation.)Apparantly, one of the hazards of turkey farming is to make sure they're tucked in for the night in cages because otherwise, they'll fly up to the tree limbs and lay their eggs into the air: splat, splat, splat.

Watch for the reporter's "on the chopping block" question around 1 min 20 seconds. Also, Gov. Palin's characterization of this event as an opportunity for "a little bit of levity." is a stopper -- but I suppose...no, I have nothing, it's still death.

12.01.2008

Where are the candles?

A reminder that today is the first day of Advent. I've searched for Advent candles for the past four days -- got the wreath, got the green stuff, but the candles? No. Three purple, one pink. I live in Berkeley: I went to the many spiritual stores, I went to Elephant Pharmacy, I went to Longs, I went to Safeway. No no no no. Chakras, toe rings, budda heads, incense, menorah's galore'ahs, but no Advent candles. Has catholicism become a cult before my eyes? Am I going to be deprogrammed by Bill Maher? I just want to start Advent properly!

I've decided to take four white candles that I have in my candle drawer and paint them with my acrylic paints.

But what really impressed me was the number of clerks who had no clue what I was talking about. And the ones who did were the sharp ones -- it's almost like a litmus test, a sort of Diogenes lamp (who?) for those who live in the entire world -- the one with all the different religions. I also enjoyed the kind lady who suggested that I buy a set of Mehorah candles and just use four of them. Now that's an interesting idea.

Addendum:
Leslie took me in hand and provided me with this link for next year.

B to B Participation