The Role of the Intranet in the Modern Organisation

The Modern Intranet is changing the way that organisations conduct business, providing them with operational support, employee profiling, transparency and collaboration abilities that we have not seen before. As an integral part of how an organisation operates day to day, the Intranet should essentially serve five purposes:

• Decision Support
• Risk Mitigation
• Innovation
• Learning
• Employee Engagement

Decision Support

Organisational flux, rising competitive pressures and the expanding global reach of many organisations place a premium on information that helps executives to make the decisions required to manage a company. New demands for transparency from stakeholders and regulators magnify the need for better and more timely information.

The Intranet needs to provide two kinds of decision support;

• pull support when executives actually go out and look for the information they need in order to make decisions; and
• push support where the information is pushed to the executive by way of creating awareness, or educating or as an early warning status which requires action.

Pull Support

When people need to make decisions, they need to have access to the latest information, be able to find the most up to date version of the document, relevant reports etc.

Document management used to be the domain of the individual on his own C-drive (and prior to that in his filing cabinet), later documents were posted to share drives in whatever categorisation made most sense to the individual. Gradually project managers started imposing some structure on the share drive and people began using the shared information to inform their decision making.

Today’s business environment has become infinitely more complex and it has become necessary for people, not only to look for what they need based on how they expect the information to be categorised, but to be able to actively search using key words on the Intranet.

It is possible, using the modern Intranet, to enable employees to surface the information they require to make decisions based on a search functionality as well as individual profiling. This means that if one employee is profiled as a “marketer” and another as a “technologist”, when they search for documents and type in the words “networking event February” the marketer will get the latest plan for a breakfast she organised for senior staff members to network with clients, and the techie will get a list of disruptions on the company network during the month of February.

Push Support

Push support is generally in the forms of RSS feeds which are set up in order to ensure that the latest relevant information from outside the organisation is reaching the right executive. This may be economic data, technology development, trends analysis etc.

Push support also includes aggregated information about the company in the form of regularly updated news portals or progress reports etc.

Knowledge Management is also an important part of decision making. All to often companies deploy knowledge management tools without thinking about the kinds of decisions it may support.

Risk Mitigation

In order to be fully equipped to make any decision it is clear that the executives and employees need to have the correct information at the correct time. Care must be taken with version control and other document management activities to ensure that this is the case.

Company Policies are also incredibly important when it comes to risk mitigation and of course the documentation pertaining to governance must be easily findable and accessible on the Intranet.

It is also important to build corporate governance into the operational processes on the Intranet. For example if certain people may not speak on behalf of the organisation, they should not be able to post on the corporate blog, some employees might need to be moderated and some actively encouraged to create thought leadership blogs etc.

Risk can also be mitigated by building flags into the Intranet, for example when a senior engineer resigns, anyone who is working on a project with her is immediately notified and can proactively co-opt a new resource onto the project. Another example could be when a supplier has let the company down, that the system alerts the accounts manager that there may be a delay on delivery to the client.

Innovation

We all know that the pace of change is rapidly increasing and the Intranet is a fabulous collaboration tool for different employees from different parts of the organisation to become aware of Innovation projects and participating in innovating into the future.

Well designed Intranets let the employees attach all the related documentation to the Innovation project as well as the profiles of the individual participants, so that in future this data can be interrogated to understand the innovation process or to identify people will great innovation skills. This is a great knowledge management tool.

Learning

The Intranet can incorporate workflow which enables the employees to identify gaps in their knowledge and to book themselves on courses. It can provide on-line material and the succession plan can also be built into the individuals profile as they learn and progress through the organisation.

Employee Engagement

The Intranet is a fantastic tool for connecting and communicating with employees, whether it is providing them with interesting content, rewarding them for contributions or enabling them to see how they are performing or just letting them network and up-skill each other within professional communities of interest.

The ability to profile employees leads to all kinds of opportunities from improving their search experience, enabling people to find certain skills within the organisation.

The days when an Intranet was a nice to have are gone. The modern Intranet is a critical strategic and operational tool which no medium to corporate business or public sector organisation should be without.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication and manage brand conversations with consumers.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za

Digital Conversations – Science or Art?

One of the things that I find so fascinating about social media, is that it transcends the traditional artificial barriers that we have erected in business, letting us do things we never thought possible, or that in the past were more trouble than they were worth.

For example, an Interactive (web 2.0 enabled) Intranet means that now a marketing project can span the boundaries between HR, Marketing, Finance, Project Management and Operations, because they can all collaborate with each other on the success of the project, not just report to each other on their progress.

Social media also negates the barriers between organisations and employees. Employees are becoming an integral part of the corporate brand and customers are interacting more directly with the individuals in an organisation. I have direct relationships with many of my business partners and clients on Linked-In and we IM each other on Facebook, rather than going through the company switchboard.

Social media transcends the barriers between the public and private self; your private behaviour on-line is now part of your professional brand. When you Google someone you can find out a lot more about that person than his professional profile on the company website.

We can micro analyse niche groups and still have to contend with the “law of big numbers”, which means that mass community behaviour is not an aggregation of small communities of interest.

When communicate with our customers on-line, we can participate in their conversations. Their behaviour and personal networks are much more explicit than in the past. We can experiment with certain triggers to see what influence they have on consumer activity and we can analyse and detect quantifiable patterns and improve our product design based on what our customers are doing and saying on-line to whom etc.

But our ability to do things we have not done in the past brings about a requirement for a new type of skill, we have to become generalists, rather than specialists, both right and left brain thinkers. Although our ability to measure initiatives and behaviour on-line has greatly improved, because of the breaking down of barriers and the fact that our customers are dynamic and participating in the market on their own terms, we are going to have to find ways to skill ourselves up on understanding the intangibles, like behavioural drivers and the psychosomatics of our audience too.

Social media requires us to become both artists and scientists, an interesting challenge which I look forward to.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication and manage brand conversations with consumers.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The power of viral expansion loops when building robust social networks

When we build social networks we are gathering groups of like-minded people together for a reason. That reason may be that we want to monetise that social network by advertising to them, or to sell them widgets, applets or products on line. Another reason that we build social networks is to manage relationships with people around a common interest, this may be brand building for a motor vehicle brand, or employee relationship management for a large bank. Whatever the purpose, a social network will be most successful when we have the highest penetration of suitable members possible, active within the social network.

The concept of the “network effect” relates to the fact that the more members there are in a network, the more value that network has for the individual member. The quintessential example is the phone. If only two people have a phone, the phone has less value to you than if thousands of people have phones, because you can contact so many more people.

Online social networks are subject to the network effect, if there are too few people in the network it will not have any value to the individual member and they will abandon the network pretty quickly. Therefore when we build social networks, we want to populate them as rapidly as possible, so that people can derive value by networking, sharing, communicating, collaborating or conducting business.

Viral expansion is when the members of a community actively recruit new members and is an extremely effective and cost efficient way to build powerful social networks.

A “viral expansion loop” occurs when virality is incorporated into the function of the product, in other words a company grows because each user begets new users, just by using a product they spread it. This concept is explored in detail in a fantastic book by Adam Penenberg (2009), called “Viral Loop The power of pass it on”. In the book Penenberg says “What’s the sense of being on Facebook if nobody uses it?”. The value of the community is inherently incorporated in its size.

Tupperware was one of the first viral businesses. When one housewife hosted a Tupperware party for six of her friends, they were each given the opportunity to host a Tupperware party for another six friends and so on. This viral distribution network proved more effective and created more sales for Tupperware than any organised retail chain.

One of the ways to build robust social networks is to focus on the “viral coefficient”. The viral coefficient is the ratio with which community members attract new community members. In other words, on average, how many additional members does each network member recruit?

If the social network’s viral coefficient is less than one, it will be self contained and very soon will stop growing. For example if the viral coefficient is 0.5 and there are 20 people in the network, then they will invite an additional 10 people who themselves will invite another 5 people who themselves will invite 2 people who invite 1 person. We can see with a vital coefficient of less than one that the network plateaus very rapidly at 38 people.

If the viral coefficient equals one the, 20 people invite 20 people who invite 20 people and we see a linear growth pattern from 20 to 40 to 60 to 80 in total in round four.

The real secret to growing social networks is to cultivate a viral coefficient of greater than one. Let’s assume that the viral coefficient is two then 20 people invite 40 people who themselves invite 80 people who invite 160 and so forth. By the fourth round, we have 300 people on board. We see exponential growth in viral networks with viral coefficients higher than one, and the higher the coefficient the exponentially higher the growth. Just by doubling the viral coefficient from 2 to 4 we see that the social network grows by 80 to 320 to 1280 and in the fourth iteration we have 1700 members. In other words having a the viral coefficient is the equivalent of compound interest in the world of social networking.

So how do we increase our viral coefficient? Well there are basically three ways;

• Make is useful for members to spread the message;

• Make it easy for them to spread the message; and

• Make them look good for spreading the message.

Making it useful for members to bring more members on board

Offline examples of this include multi-level marketing such as Amway, online you could create products where members actively encourage their friends to come on board in order for them to sell more. An example could be a charity whose members actively recruit more people to donate money to a good cause, or a political party raising funding for a campaign.

Making it easy for members to bring more members on board

There are a number of ways to do this, clearly an “invite friends” button which automatically eMails friends the link to the social network is easier than expecting the person to type in the URL.

At Digital Bridges we have a saying “The more virtual you are, the more real you need to be”. The same holds true for social networking. People still network socially in the real world, you could use a real world networking tool, such as a business card, to bring people into digital communities.

There is tool called a poken which does exactly that. It is a sort of electronic business card which looks like a memory stick with a receiver and transmitter built into it. When two pokens are touched together they exchange information which has been pre-populated onto the poken. This information includes the standard name address and contact details, but it also contains data pertaining to the social or business networks that people participate in. When the poken is plugged into a computer it automatically populates all contact details and links people within the various networks that they are members of.

Making the member look good for spreading the message

This should be the easiest part if you have bespoke special interest social networks. You need to create content and encourage your users to create content which appeals to like-minded people within the network and let them share it with their friends, peers and colleagues. So for a scientist social network you might post some provocative comments about the Hadron Collider which they can respond to and share with their friends. On a joke website they could forward the latest joke to potential members.

A word of caution

It is important to remember that particularly in South Africa, we don’t have sufficiently large, digitally literate communities to become self sustaining and that although we need to focus on maximising the digital coefficient in order to approximate saturation, we also need to have dedicated resources managing these social media networks to reduce churn at the same time as raising the viral coefficient.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Forget Social Media for Social Media’s Sake – Your website is a strategic asset

There is much talk of how websites are moving away from being brochure sites, designed to communicate at the target audience, towards them being web applications for engaging with the audience. This is the natural logic which follows on from the interactive power of web 2.0, but perhaps the pendulum has swung too far.

Throughout the years companies have needed marketing collateral to position their brand to their best advantage, this includes brochureware, presentation folders, inserts, boilerplates on press releases, the website etc. and there is no reason why this should no longer be the case. Organisations need a strategically defined brand which acts as the fundamental backbone for all marketing and communication.

The website might be a manifestation of the brand because it contains the corporate messaging and the logos, but it is also a tool which the organisation can use to tell the audience where it thinks it is and what is important to the company. While the brand is a collection of experiences, we cannot expect our audiences to divine our purpose simply from their exposure to our employees, and as such, carefully written brochureware is a critical tool in the brand management arsenal. We also need to tell people what it is we think we are and why we think we are better and what better opportunity than through our marketing collateral?

At the same time, with the power of the modern interactive web and the advent of the knowledge worker, businesses are no longer about the buildings, logos and balance sheets etc. They are being perceived as a collection of individuals who provide services and ensure that operational requirements are met, whether they are legal financial, technical etc. As such, we expect to speak to people and feel justifiably aggrieved when we are forced to talk to a call centre operator or run up against obstinate individuals who hide behind company policies. It is at the touch points of an organisation that we experience the brand, whether through the sales process, service in fixing a problem, collection on payment or delivery on service.

Unfortunately with the world becoming obsessed with web 2.0 and using social media  to engage with audiences, we see a proliferation of unnecessary social media tools on so many websites. It’s as though people are adding Facebook and Twitter links for social media’s sake, without thinking about their strategic objectives; blogs stand sparsely populated, links are broken and wikis left unattended. Why do I want to become a “Fan” of some arbitrary photography shop on Facebook? What is the point of being a “Fan”, all I get is some self-serving drivel, or worse still a price list, from someone who is married to his business. There are no interesting conversations or people to meet, the owner merely has access to Facebook and thinks that web advertising is free.

The choice of the social media format that you select for your website is dependent of your organisational strategy, the types of employees, what your brand stands for, the depths of relationships that you need to form, and the investment that you are prepared to make, both financially and in terms of time and your business environment. There are a multitude of permutations, here are three examples.

• Let’s say you are a night club and audience interaction will lead to more clubbers on a Friday night, then you do want your audience using the website as an interactive application for networking with each other and you. Your website could be developed as the point of engagement and the audience equipped with a range of social media tools such as blogs, posts, wiki’s along with the usual eMail addresses and telephone numbers with which to communicate or engage with you. They should be able to be a fan and post interesting comments about what happened last week from your site to Facebook.

• On the other hand,  if you are a conservative bank which trades on its proud legacy of serving clients for one hundred and fifty years, you probably want to manage your engagement with the public in a more measured way, so your website would be a collateral site with certain mechanisms in place such as avatars and IM to manage communication and your online reputation. In this instance, you do not want every employee to have their own social profile as a representative of the organisation, although you most certainly want your executive to have a pretty robust digital footprint. Your website should be a piece of organisational collateral which everyone recognises as such, enhanced by some direct communication tools and the necessary individuals who make up the executive should build up their individual profiles using other social media tools such as Linked In, Facebook, industry forums etc.

• If you are a Management Consultancy, an Executive Head-Hunter or a company that trades on the IP of the individuals who work there  then the website could be a hybrid where it becomes a repository for both the organisational collateral and the collective intellect and thought leadership within the organisation. Depending on what the user is looking for, he can choose to “find about us” XYZ Corporation, or he can “find out about me” Bryan Mole, Head of Performance Management Solutions at XYZ Corporation. The potential employee or client has the choice of how he manages the relationship by, for example, taking the conversations into cyberspace on Linked In, becoming part of the Bryan Mole’s network, or following him on Twitter.

Social media may well have changed our ability to communicate with our environment and the way we do business, but fundamentally, the rules of engagement and marketing have stayed the same; relationship management and brand building are still all about delivering on the organisational objectives and contributing to the bottom line and as such, the planning of our web presence requires an investment in strategic thought.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Meeting the Challenges of Collaboration

Knowledge workers are individuals who are valued for their ability to interpret information within a specific subject area and advance the overall understanding of that subject through focused analysis, design and/or development. Fuelled by their expertise and insight, they solve problems, in an effort to influence company decisions, priorities and strategies. The term was first coined by Peter Drucker in 1959, as one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace.

When working with knowledge workers, we seek to aggregate their value by enabling them to collaborate on behalf of the organisation, to innovate or solve problems better than they could each have managed individually. Increasingly emphasis is also being put on collaboration as a means of informal learning and knowledge exchange between people. So how do we encourage employees to make use of the tools available and enable collaboration across departments and borders?

Well, the first step is to identify where employees should be collaborating, why they should collaborate and make sure that collaboration does not become collaboration for collaboration’s-sake.

The need to collaborate should arise out of the organisation’s strategic intent. We need to ask ourselves the following questions: In order to attain its strategic goals, what does the organisation need to do – innovate, develop, or cost cut? Will collaboration enhance the ability to meet the objective? For example if an FMCG company has a pharmaceutical brand for which the patent is about to expire, it may choose to cost-cut in order to compete on a commodity basis with other generics that are coming into the market, or it could work on developing a new product, what about innovating a different method of ingestion?

Each of these strategic imperatives would require a different type of collaboration:

• For cost cutting the pharmaceutical factory manager might need to collaborate with one of the FMCG factories to reduce the cost of packaging by consolidating production runs.
• If a new product needs to be developed then the research scientists based around the globe may need to collaborate to bring new research into the mix.
• Should they decide to change the ingestion means, perhaps the scientists need to collaborate with a nano-technology company.

Only once we have identified why we are collaborating and with whom, can we address the challenge, which is finding the right mix of tools that spur collaboration as employees strive to meet the business requirements.

When organisations look at solutions to optimise collaboration, the best idea may be to take the approach of mixing something proven and familiar with something new. Successful approaches to collaboration have to embrace people’s current work processes, while also supporting a transition over time to additional strategies that further refine collaboration.

Many organisations are finding ways to give knowledge workers the web based tools they want to use for collaboration today, while providing the means to incorporate additional strategies for addressing future collaboration requirements.

Technology Adoption

The fundamentals or hygiene factors when it comes to expecting users to adopt any technology, including collaboration tools, include ensuring that the technology is useful, easy to use and makes the user look good.

• Usefulness – If the chain is broken between the organisational objectives, the individual’s key performance areas and collaborative behaviour, then there is no way that the knowledge worker is going to use any collaboration technology, no matter how sophisticated. He just won’t see the point.
• Ease of Use – If the collaboration technology is tricky to use, requiring complex user names and difficult to remember passwords, or keeps falling over, then your knowledge worker is going to find other ways of collaborating, for example by sending eMails or using the phone. This negates the benefits of collaboration technology because the data and evidence from the interaction are not captured and you will not be able to learn from the collaboration nor analyse why it was successful or not, in other words you will have lost the organisational memory.
• Make the user look good – The collaboration technology must make the user look good and enable him to build his personal brand and build recognition for his contribution. This is achieved through creating validating employee profiles with blogs or awards or participation in forums etc., whatever is appropriate to the individual and the organisation.

Getting Ready to Collaborate

In his book Collaboration (2009) Morten Hansen explains the necessary conditions for collaboration to take place effectively across organisations, or between organisations and their stakeholders. He suggests unifying people, cultivating what he calls T-shaped management and building nimble networks.

• Unifying People – When unifying people Hansen suggests crafting an explicit common goal for the collaborators.
• Cultivating T shaped management has to do with fostering a high-collaboration high-performance culture. He talks about low-collaboration high-performance employees as lone-stars and suggests that in the long term they may not be good for innovation because they don’t share knowledge and experience with other team members which could surface hidden opportunities.
• Building nimble networks has to do with the formation of the right kinds of cross unit personal relationships to help identify and capitalise on opportunities.

Using the Interactive Web for collaboration

Whether the collaboration is required between employees within an organisation on the corporate intranet, externally between a company and its stakeholders on an extranet or with clients and potential customers on web based applications and websites, the process of collaboration should follow that of the strategy.

First of all we need to make sure that the web application that we are using for collaboration is useful. Why are we collaborating, what do we want to achieve, how will we know when we have achieved it? What do we need to provide the users in order to ensure that our collaboration tool is fit-for-purpose? Do they need a content management tool, a document management system, a collective set of taxonomies to facilitate search? Maybe they require an integrated project management tool and a wiki.

Then we need to decide what we need to equip the collaborators with in order for the collaboration tool to be easy to use. What should the process for collaboration be? What is the most intuitive way to work together? What should the user experience and interface be? etc.

Finally and very importantly, what will make the collaborator look and feel good? Is he the type of the person who works for explicit awards? Is she very proud of her education? Who needs an audience to demonstrate that he is a thought leader? To whom is a title important?

Each individual requires a personal profile which they can populate to a greater or lesser degree. Some people may only want contact details and access to the project plan and documentation, others may feel that their past experiences have bearing on the project. Some people may have a more relaxed approach to the line between socialising and work, take for example a new mother who has been asked to assist a company in the design of a new kind of nappy for newborns. While she is telling the company that she feels the elastic should be broader around the legs, she may want to share baby photos with the other mums in the nappy design collaboration group.

Knowledge workers are human too

The important thing to remember is that collaboration is to do with sharing, developing and communicating to achieve a common goal. The tools we need to give people to facilitate collaboration should make their jobs easier and more intuitive and their efforts to reach the common goal more effective. This requires a lot of thought investment into getting it right so that we really get more out of people working together than we would have out of each working on his own.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Web 2.0 and the Brand

Marketing is evolving toward a new thought-framework where the intangible experiences, transactional processes and relationships are becoming central to the brand and the customer has become a ‘co-creator’ of the brand rather than simply just a ‘user’.

The logic of branding is shifting from the conceptualisation of brand as the collection of attributes determined by the organisation, to the brand as collaborative, value creation between all stakeholders including organisations, employees and customers. This shift in logic is important when considering the Internet as a brand-building medium because its modern interactivity or web 2.0 places the user as a co-creator of the content and therefore the brand.

A strong brand provides a series of benefits to both buyers and sellers, simplifying the buyers’ search process and simplifying some of the sellers’ tasks, and enabling competitive advantage through preferential pricing.

Branding is defined as the process of creating value through the provision of a compelling and consistent offer and customer experience that will satisfy customers and keep them coming back¹ . Companies are beginning to realise that brands are among their most valuable assets.

The Internet has had a transformational impact on business shifting the balance of power from companies towards customers  adding further complexity and dynamism to branding strategy. These days brands are socially constructed by consumers who are actively involved in brand creation.

Consumers respond to brands within communities, where the members of the community have a sense of shared consciousness, personal stories, morals and traditions that are all associated with a branded good or service. A great example of this is the new mums community on the Pamper’s community platform. Their brand conversations are not limited to nappies and creams, they are part of building the Medical Aid brands as they share experiences and provide advice on which Medical Aid to choose.

Brand communities have the ability to influence members’ perceptions and actions and can lead to a socially embedded and entrenched loyalty. Although negative implications involving brand communities exist, such as the ability for negative rumours to pervade the community, competitors gaining information through the community’s internal communication and normative community pressure, brand communities offer an effective method for building brands. Companies are able to advance customer engagement with the brand, foster the creation of stronger brand relationships and in so doing mitigate customer exit barriers resulting in increased competitive advantage.

The development of a strong brand community significantly influences brand loyalty and as a result positively impacts on a company’s financial performance and competitive advantage. Online community members potentially have stronger commitment to the brand and are more likely to buy the brand repeatedly, spread more positive word-of-mouth information and provide useful information to the company.

Web 2.0 simplifies the development of an online brand because it facilitates the creation of user-generated content by the community and the interactions of its members around this content.

¹ Aaker, D. (1991) Managing Brand Equity: Capitalizing on the Value of a Brand Name. New York: Free Press

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Digital Marketing Budgets

Internet marketing is concerned with creating a Digital Footprint which serves the organisation’s marketing needs. It consists four distinct elements

• Providing information and education to the various stakeholders, whether they are potential customers, journalists, future employees etc. on the website;
• Brand building through developing on-line communities, creating digital profiles etc;
• Other on-line collateral to enhance “findability”; and
• Direct response advertising.

Budgets need to be divided along the same lines for the best results.

Budgeting for a website

The budget for a website is normally informed by the website strategy as it translates from the organisational strategy. Most of us have built brochure websites in the past, and budgeting is relatively straight forward. The following components should be found in a website budget.

• Scoping and specification in order to ensure that the site is fit for purpose and easy to use;
• Design and development;
• Hosting;
• Software – there is some question of whether the software budget belongs with Marketing or IT. My suggestion is that if it is a discreet web based software that only relates to marketing, for example a bulk mailing app, then keep it in the marketing budget. However if it is an enterprise software like Microsoft’s’ SharePoint, budget for it in IT and reallocate the relevant portion to marketing, in that way marketing can quantify its returns more effectively;
• Technical maintenance;
• Content development and management – this is usually where most website’s fail, because this part of the budget is included in technical maintenance and allocated to the web company who it maintaining the site. Content generation and management is a marketing function, not a technical function and should be allocated to an internal marketing resource or an outsourced content management partner;
• SEO – budget for the time for developing and tweaking the meta-data which is associated with the web page so that search engines can identify what your website is about and whether it is useful; and
• Constant and never ending improvement, the modern website is in a constant state of flux and the organisation reacts or pro-actively engages with its environment. The website must be budgeted for in such a way that it can be dynamic and serve the organisation’s best interests.

Budgeting for Brand Building

On-line brand building is the use of social media to create communities, whether they are fans on Facebook, followers on Twitter or registered members of specialist communities such as the Pampers’ mums who blog and message each-other about all things baby.

These communities are used by marketers to create positive associations with the brand, to make the organisation more accessible to its target market as well as to educate them as to the brand attributes etc.

Brand building, while quantifiable is difficult to relate directly into sales generation and so we see fixed marketing budgets in this area. The budget can be determined as a percentage of sales or at the discretion of a pro-active marketer. Marketers do, however, need to understand that the investment is not only a Rand investment into design and development, but there is a far higher investment in terms of human resources. Maintaining healthy brand communities is a labour intensive activity and requires dedicated time to be allocated to the community. It is important to remember that on-line brand building creates a launch platform for enhancing the effectiveness of direct response marketing and increasing conversion rates, as such it is an essential part of the on-line marketing strategy.

Budgeting for “Findability”

A large part of creating a digital footprint is concerned with “Findability”, in other words, making sure that the brand is served up to the potential consumer on-line, at the point when they require the brand’s products or services.

The additional on-line marketing collateral that enhances findability includes blogs and thought leadership articles on specialist forums, the personal profiles of prominent employees on social media such as Linked-in, on-line press releases etc.

The budget for these activities is mainly concerned with the time that people spend on creating the content on the web which ensures that your organisation is found by the right people at the right time. There will be a direct financial implication if you outsource the management of any of these aspects to a professional content generation firm, in the same way as you can outsource your PR.

So far, the on-line budget has been very straight forward, it has included the financial aspects agreed to with the executive and the cost in terms of human resources who are allocated to these highly labour intensive marketing activities. But when it comes to budgeting for direct response advertising, we see an entirely new budgeting pattern starting to emerge.

Budgeting for Direct Response Advertising

The modern web offers numerous ways to create demonstrable and predictable ROI from direct response advertising activities. Well thought-out Internet advertising campaigns produce highly quantifiable results. The big opportunity for business is to recognise that a positive ROI from an advertising campaign means that profits should be maximised by investing more into the campaign.

Progressive marketers should not be constrained by limited budgets, rather, they should be accountable for revenues and net profits and any budget should be informed by the desired outcome. This is set to change the static, set-piece budget battles that marketers have had to fight with their financial counterparts in the boardroom.

In the past 5 years, advertising has been turned on its head by the rise of social media. This new media enables us to contextualise on-line brand messages and calls to action within our audience’s digital environment. According to Forrester Research, interactive marketing will represent 21 percent of all marketing spend by 2014. Those who understand and exploit the new marketing opportunities should not be constrained by a “percentage of sales” budget and be empowered to drive increased profits through marketing programmes that deliver predictable and demonstrable returns on marketing investments.

Advertising is becoming more complex and harder to execute. Audience fragmentation has accelerated making mass market targeting irrelevant to all but the largest brands. The democratisation of content in social media has replaced print, radio and TV as authoritative contexts where product advertising and endorsements drive sales and market share.

Direct response advertising is targeted and measurable. We can determine, with accuracy and predictability, the marketing ROI by campaign. It is the marketer’s job to quantify financial expectations and monitor the results very carefully. If you know you are going to make a profit from your campaign then the constraint is not a budget but the supply of profit drivers. On-line advertising enables CMOs to figuratively buy R100 notes for R50 each, by investing in on-line campaigns that create demonstrable profits at a predictable and repeatable rate.

Building marketing programmes with predictable and reliable profits is the original promise of Internet marketing. High performance marketers start with the premise that advertisers will reach the right customers (i.e., those who are in market with a demonstrable interest in the product or service). This enables advertisers to pay only for the action (click through, register, fill in the form etc.) that is positive proof that the potential customer is in the market and considering their particular offering.

In direct response marketing, the potential customer is interested in a product or service, the advertiser only pays for the click, proof that he is interested in the product or service. With the click, the conversation between advertiser and consumer begins. As long as an advertiser understands the profitability of each sale and the conversion rate from click to sale, he knows the value of each search click (Value of a click = profitability of sale X conversion rate of click to sale). As long as the advertiser is buying clicks from the likes of Google for less than the value of each click, he is guaranteeing a profit on his direct advertising spend. The new limits on marketing spend is no longer the budget, but rather how much can be spent while maintaining the conversion and sale values, or the capacity of the advertiser to deliver products and services.

While the principle is simple, execution is hard because online programmes have many key success factors. These include:

• Managing a portfolio of multiple, evolving social media types with different conversion characteristics.
• Purchasing the media so as to limit advertiser risk (e.g., CPA, CPC, CPL);
• Targeting to ensure conversion rates and sale values stay satisfactory;
• Developing creative for all consumer touch points (both advertising and user experience) that drive conversion;
• Capturing, qualifying, and converting customer data. Advertisers need the right tools to transform customer information they gather into sales;
• Responding rapidly to initial interest. According to an MIT study, responding to consumer interest within 5 minutes versus the following day increases conversion 100-fold!; and
• Continuously optimising – Direct response advertising takes place in a dynamic marketplace, successful marketers will continuously optimise their media, creative, target segments and sales process to maximise profits.

For advertisers that understand well the value of a sale and how their advertising converts into sales, the marketing budget has been replaced with innovative, integrated marketing programmes that invest every Rand that drives a positive ROI possible.

The Internet has made marketing much more complex. But at the same time, it’s also much more measurable and accountable. Because CMOs can determine which parts of the marketing portfolio provide the greatest ROI, they can demand more from their marketing spend. Successful marketing is becoming less about bigger budgets and more about delivering ROI. Marketing requires being ruthlessly focused on delivering measurable profits.

Future winners in the on-line marketing space will understand that success means investing in continuous improvement that provide increasing and demonstrable profits.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Collaboration for Business Success

The 21st century with its advances in communication and technology requires us to be more agile than ever before in responding to business challenges and business leaders realise that helping employees access greater levels of collaborative intelligence at work is key to the future success of the business. It turns out that this is a way of motivating and retaining skilled people.

In a recent article released by GIBS entitled “The Age of Participation is about getting clever – together” (Gibs Review March 2008) they mention that research has shown a direct link between the level of collaboration within organisations and employee motivation, which depends on an individual’s attitude and the quality of their relationships within the team/entity.

Stephen James Joyce says in his book Teaching an Anthill to Fetch: Developing the Collaborative Intelligence of Teams, while that customer motivation impacts the quantity of business you do, employee motivation impacts the quality of business.

High levels of collaboration within an organisation improve employee retention, because people feel more connected and are much less inclined to leave.

Collaborative Intelligence is denoted with the symbol CQ, and is defined as is the ability to create, contribute to, and harness the power within networks of people. It enables participants to coordinate their actions closely with everyone else’s.

The GIBS Review quotes James Joyce as saying high CQ organisations:

• Attract and retain high quality team members
• Create a sense of meaningful participation
• Collaborate in highly effective ways
• Connect to a strong sense of purpose
• Balance leadership and followship

Moreover, high CQ holds many transformative advantages for organisations:

• People pull their weight and support each other to an extraordinary degree
• There is a vigorous pursuit for learning, at an individual and a the team level
• There is a sense of community within collaboratively intelligent teams/ departments, which others sense as something special.
• Teams or entities with high CQ expect challenges and meet them with one eye on the results and the other on what they can learn from each encounter.

Collaborative and collective intelligence are two distinct things

The GIBS Review warns that collaborative intelligence should not be confused with collective intelligence. They are two distinct things:

• Collective intelligence is the emergent intelligence of a collective entity, like a group or community.
• Collaborative intelligence is a way of exercising collective intelligence.

Co-intelligence can be used at any level of social organisation.

• A company can use better teamwork (collaborative intelligence) to build a more collectively intelligent company so that it can become dominant in its market (non-collaborative intelligence).
• A collectively intelligent group could use its collective intelligence in collaborative or controlling ways or use collaborative intelligence to help it compete.

Co-intelligence affects how organisations are managed. It is fundamental to our survival in the 21st century. This means we create serious problems, when we don’t use co-intelligence at the higher levels of social organisation.

Management guru, Professor Gary Hamel says few executives would argue with the traditional and outdated definition of a manager’s role: the art of getting others to do what you want them to do. In fact the Industrial Age was built on four basic principles:

• Managers have a clear vision
• Managers exert hierarchical power
• Managers get things done through bureaucratic procedures
• Managers motivate their people through extrinsic rewards.

Hamel has formulated four alternative, ‘inversed’ principles:

• Vision is often less effective than a guiding purpose and a desire for discovery
• Industrial Age hierarchic decisions are often less accurate than those based the wisdom of the crowd
• Bureaucratic procedure is often slower and less effective than a market-based system for allocating resources
• Human motivation is, in reality, built on intrinsic rewards not on money.

High CQ requires the right tools and the right attitude

Web 2.0 tools are most conducive to developing high collaboration quotients in organisations. Tools, like virtual meetings and Web-based applications and wikis -  make it possible to do things at scale without necessarily having large groups of people physically aggregated, with hierarchic structures, says Hamel.

Collaborative tools also enable business professionals to explore the true potential of the group or team to which they belong. But, as useful as they are, collaborative tools are only part of the solution. As with most IT, it is not the technology itself that enables the competitive advantage, but the people. Witness CRM, the panacea of all customer relationships in 2000. It wasn’t until we figured out that having the software and the process wasn’t enough that organisations started to incorporate people skills into the solution and we see more successful CRM applications

In the same way CQ is quantified by what employees can and will do together, rather than what a piece of software will allow them to do.

James Joyce suggests 10 ways to develop people’s collaborative intelligence at work:

1. Establish a ‘higher calling’ for the team

• This is a common purpose that represents a higher calling and brings context to the significance of the team’s existence.
• Providing a service to society is the simplest way that an organisation can isolate a higher calling for its existence.
• This process must be entered with full sincerity. A ‘true’ higher calling is reflective of the culture and intentions of the organisation as a whole. It is core to what the organisation stands ‘‘for’ and how it plans to achieve that.

2. Establish a reward system for innovation and creativity

• Ensure that rewards are equally available for ideas and innovations that don’t work as for those that do.
• Instead of focusing on the practical results of a particular idea, focus the level of innovation, even those that don’t result in ‘success’ in the conventional sense.
• Many ‘mistakes’ have gone on to became innovations of great value
• When we reward attempts at innovation, we demonstrate that it is the intention that is important.

3. Plan to use all of the experience within the team

• Think of the years of life experience represented in a room of 15 people with an average age of 35. It represents over 500 years of life experience.
• Great team leaders and managers know how to harness and tap into those years of experience and wisdom.

4. Raise awareness of the importance of shared assumptions

• Assumptions cause us to run on ‘autopilot’.
• Supported by assumptions that go unchecked and unchallenged, teams continue to run the same old routines for a long time without anyone noticing.

5. Encourage team members to find out about each other’s roles

• The more they know about others perspectives, the more likely they will be able to empathise with each other when the going gets tough.
• Empathy is an important business skill. The ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes helps us understand what others’ needs and motivations are.

6. Intention is very important

• Intention is just as important as attention. Intention directs attention.
• Having the whole team form a positive intention around an objective is one of the best ways of doing this.

7. Celebrate successes along the way

• Making celebration an integral part of the organisational life helps individuals feel more deeply connected to the entity.

8. Invest resources in learning

• Continuous improvement is only possible when individuals and the team as a whole learn new things.
• By publicly demonstrating support for the learning process, leaders model the importance of building ‘learning organisations’. This serves everyone in the long run.
• Establishing learning teams’ is one of the core strategies of running an organisation that is highly adaptable and responsive to change

9. Provide opportunities for sharing ideas during the project-planning phase

• Getting ‘buy-in’ for a project is much easier when everyone plays an active part in the planning process.

10. Balance ‘top-down’ with ‘bottom-up’ processing

• This means that directives and guidance from the top must be balanced with feedback and ‘street-level’ information.

When we look at each of these ideas, we see that 2.0 technologies lend themselves to supporting collaboration. With careful planning it is possible to create an Internet based platform that becomes a strategic tool for facilitating collaboration and organisational growth.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Marketing and Innovation in Managing Skills

Many companies like to boast that employees are their greatest source of competitive advantage, yet the reality is somewhat different. it has become imperative for us to focus not only on how we attract and retain talented people, but also on how we engage them to deliver to our bottom line, to the best of their abilities.

Gone are the days of company loyalty. Talented employees see themselves as mobile and in control of the future of their careers. As the workforce becomes more mobile, gains control of negotiations with employers, the costs of managing and retaining talent intensify because we need to take a strategic approach to attracting talent and managing our competitive advantage.

So where do marketing and innovation fit into the picture?

In their book Marketing Management, Kotler and Keller (2006) say that “Marketing deals with identifying and meeting human and social needs”. The American Marketing Association (2004) defines marketing as “an organisational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organisation and its stakeholders”. The social definition of the role of marketing in society is “a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and freely exchanging (products and) services of value with others.”

Substitute the word “customer” with “employee” and we see a remarkable similarity in the processes for attracting and retaining talent.

To escape the economically challenged business models that have their roots in a time when talent was plentiful, companies will need to adopt a strategic approach to the HR processes for attracting, retaining and engaging talent through innovation (Hamel 2007). Elements of this approach can be adopted from marketing best practice.

So how could we use innovation and marketing to mitigate the skills shortages?

There are several steps in creating, communicating and delivering value to employees and for managing relationships in ways that benefit the organisation and its stakeholders

Creating value through innovating employee processes

Many organisations have removed themselves from their employees and adopted processes to automate their management and standardise their delivery. This was entirely relevant in a manufacturing world such as we saw in the last century, where the unit we applied to make money was labour. Today, it is intellectual capital that provides competitive advantage. The rules have changed, we are no longer standardising delivery, but amplifying it.

Take a good look at your business. Are you creating sustainable competitive advantage through your most important assets? Have you evaluated and innovated the principles, processes and practices that are based on outdated economic and business environments? Wealth creation will come from ensuring that you get a superior return on your employee investment. This is the product of attracting, retaining and engaging superior skills that are committed to acting in the best interests of your organisation.

Delivering value to your employees

We find ourselves in a very interesting time; just as we see the rise of the power of the knowledge worker as a revenue generating resource, along comes a new technology in the form of web 2.0 which enables us to change the way we manage to get the best return from employees.

The Gartner Group describes web 2.0 as “a transformative force that’s propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business characterised by harnessing collective intelligence, openness and network effects.” We derive value from our employees by engaging with them, delivering the value to them as knowledge workers and motivating them to act in the best interests of the organisation.

The future of how an organisation will derive value from its employees is gathering pace on the web. The Internet is the most adaptable, innovative and engaging thing that human beings have ever created (Hamel, 2007).

The modern role of employee management is to magnify human effort, this is now possible using web 2.0 to get more out of individuals by harnessing their initiative, creativity and passion and then equip them with the tools, incentives and working conditions to compound those efforts in ways that allow human beings to achieve together what they could not do individually.

Grow your employer brand

Critically evaluate your brand from the point of view of potential and existing employees. You may know that you work for a first-rate organisation, but does prospective talent know this and how much credibility does your employer brand have in the market? How can they recognise you as a superior employer above other companies?

In marketing there are three primary ways to communicate your value; advertise it, use compelling public relations and rely on word of mouth. When communicating to your employees and future employees, the best way, is to let them experience it and tell others about it. What better way than to harness the power of 2.0 as a strategic business tool in your organisation?

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The Ergonomics of 2.0

Web 2.0 represents a fundamental change in the way that people interact, collaborate and perform in the 21st century. It has become necessary to review the way we think about many other business disciplines in response to this structural change in the way we could do business. In this article we look at the ergonomics and contextualise it in the web 2.0 environment.

Ergonomics is defined as the application of scientific information concerning objects, systems and environment for human use (International Ergonomics Association, 2007). The term ergonomics is derived from the Greek words ergon – work and nomos – natural laws.

Ergonomics is commonly thought of as how companies design tasks and work areas to maximise the efficiency and quality of their employees’ work. However, ergonomics comes into everything which involves people. Well designed working environments embody sound ergonomics principles; this includes web 2.0 enabled employee management and engagement systems.

The goal of ergonomics in the 21st century, in a 2.0 environment, should be to make the interaction of humans with humans and technology as smooth, intuitive and enabling as possible, enhancing the adoption of the system, improving performance, reducing error and increasing user engagement through comfort and aesthetics.

Cognitive ergonomics

Cognitive ergonomics in the 2.0 environment concerns mental processes such as perception, attention, cognition and collaboration as they affect interactions among humans and other elements of a system, for example – diagnosis, decision making, innovation, project management and planning. It focuses on the complex, cognitive thinking and knowledge-related aspects of system performance. Cognitive ergonomics enhances cognitive tasks by:

• Adopting a user-centred design of human-technology interaction
• The design of information technology and applications that support cognitive tasks
• The development of human mentoring, training and development programmes
• Work redesign to manage cognitive workload and increase skills optimisation
• (Social) Network and collaboration oriented application design

Macro-ergonomics

Macro-ergonomics is concerned with the optimisation of socio-technical systems, including organisational structures, policies, virtual spaces and processes. Relevant topics include virtual time and space scheduling, job satisfaction, motivational theory, supervision, risk mitigation, culture, teamwork, network and ethics.

Macro-ergonomics is concerned with the analysis, design and evaluation of work systems. The design of any job in a work system should focus on work modules, resource networks, tasks and knowledge, capacity and skill requirements. Other factors to consider in job design include the degree of autonomy, identity, variety, meaningfulness, feedback and social interaction. This is where web 2.0 technologies are increasingly playing a role in organisations.

Virtual ergonomics

The use of web 2.0 technologies in the business environment necessitates that we optimise human interactions in the virtual world in order to increase collaboration and productivity.

Digital Bridges has adopted the term “Virtual ergonomics” for an approach to ergonomics that emphasises a broad system view of design, organisational environments, culture, diversity and work goals in the 2.0 context. It deals with the design of collaborative interfaces and applications and the virtual environment. It focuses on the nexus of strategy, process, people, environment and technology and the consequences for competitive advantage and productivity.

It also deals with the optimisation of the designs of organisational and work systems through the consideration of employees, technological and environmental variables and their interactions. The goal of virtual ergonomics is an efficient work system at both the macro- and micro-ergonomic level which results in improved productivity and employee satisfaction and commitment.

We can thus see that while web 2.0 is an enabling technology, it is still merely a business tool. Through the application of certain strategic disciplines such as virtual ergonomics, it can be harnessed as an effective tool in order to optimise the benefits of collaboration for wealth generation and sustained competitive advantage for businesses.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Putting Marketing back in the Boardroom

Web 2.0 seems to be the latest buzzword, everywhere we go we hear about MySpace and Flickr, YouTube and mXit. Many marketers are recognising that their audiences are consuming web 2.0 offerings and that if they are to remain relevant, they need to get onto the web 2.0 bandwagon. Starting in the obvious place, they have advertised on large community networks like Facebook or bolted blogs onto the existing website and ticked the web 2.0 box.

Whilst there is some merit to advertising to segmented communities of interest, and creating a feedback mechanism for customers who go to the site, this is not the real advantage that web 2.0 has for marketers.

The future of web 2.0 is more closely aligned to innovation, creating open, transparent conversations and achieving business agility. In other words the advantage that web 2.0 brings to bear is in the brand, communication, service delivery process and even, in some cases, in the value proposition. Web 2.0’s value is very strategic when it comes to marketing, and goes beyond marketing tactics to create awareness or a call to action.

Peter Drucker is credited with saying that “Business has only two basic functions marketing and innovation”. Web 2.0 is has the potential to enable Marketing to take up its rightful place at the boardroom table as it becomes the driver of the organisation’s business strategy.

In this series of articles we will examine each of the functions of marketing including the Brand, Communication, Advertising, CRM and Public Relations and look at how marketing potential is enhanced by the addition of web 2.0. In this edition we start by looking at the various definitions of web 2.0 and the power it confers on the marketing function in the organisation. In articles to follow we will look how 2.0 can augment the Brand Equity, the Value Proposition, Profitable Relationships and Revenue.

So, what is web 2.0?

As with any disruptive technology, there is a plethora of definitions, mostly influenced by the background of the person defining it. Technical people will define web 2.0 in the context of the tools, such as wiki’s, blogs and vlogs. This is like describing a car as an engine on wheels that you sit on and guide with a steering wheel.
The role of extracting value from these tools lies with the business people who define web 2.0 in terms of strategy, based on the competencies that it enables, a car therefore becomes an extension of your personal brand which confers the ability to go places and meet people.

Wikipedia describes Web 2.0 as “a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.”

While this definition goes beyond describing the types of technologies that enable web 2.0, it does not describe its strategic potential. The Gartner Group describes web 2.0 as a “transformative force that is propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business characterised by harnessing collective intelligence, openness and networking effects.” This is the crux of the matter; web 2.0 doesn’t just provide a more cost effective channel to markets as web 1.0 did, through eMail and websites. It actually provides the opportunity to enhance relationships, delivery mechanisms and create new value propositions for organisations that recognise the opportunity. This in turn delivers bottom line results and increases organisational productivity including return on employee and return on invested capital, depending on the nature of the organisation.

Web 2.0 facilitates a dialogue by enabling user generated content; we are now building marketing tools and applications, rather than websites. These tools enable audiences to engage with each other and collaborate to the benefit of the business. Imagine a virtual boardroom on your Intranet, where employees from all over the organisation are working together to develop better ways of doing business and enhance the value of the brand, without the constraints of geography or time. Another example could be virtual focus groups where your customers help you design products they want, or improve your service delivery mechanisms. Search mechanisms enable you to track and respond quickly to what consumers are saying about you on their blogs.

Now is the time for Marketing to take its rightful place at the sharp point of the Corporate Strategy and we need to re-evaluate our role in the organisation given the power of web 2.0 at our disposal. It is also time for marketing to bridge the divide between IT and the business and collaborate with them to develop the systems that enable marketing to put the business well and truly on the path of unassailable competitive advantage.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Putting Marketing back in the Boardroom

Web 2.0 seems to be the latest buzzword, everywhere we go we hear about MySpace and Flickr, YouTube and mXit. Many marketers are recognising that their audiences are consuming web 2.0 offerings and that if they are to remain relevant, they need to get onto the web 2.0 bandwagon. Starting in the obvious place, they have advertised on large community networks like Facebook or bolted blogs onto the existing website and ticked the web 2.0 box.

Whilst there is some merit to advertising to segmented communities of interest, and creating a feedback mechanism for customers who go to the site, this is not the real advantage that web 2.0 has for marketers.

The future of web 2.0 is more closely aligned to innovation, creating open, transparent conversations and achieving business agility. In other words the advantage that web 2.0 brings to bear is in the brand, communication, service delivery process and even, in some cases, in the value proposition. Web 2.0’s value is very strategic when it comes to marketing, and goes beyond marketing tactics to create awareness or a call to action.

Peter Drucker is credited with saying that “Business has only two basic functions marketing and innovation”. Web 2.0 is has the potential to enable Marketing to take up its rightful place at the boardroom table as it becomes the driver of the organisation’s business strategy.

In this series of articles we will examine each of the functions of marketing including the Brand, Communication, Advertising, CRM and Public Relations and look at how marketing potential is enhanced by the addition of web 2.0. In this edition we start by looking at the various definitions of web 2.0 and the power it confers on the marketing function in the organisation. In articles to follow we will look how 2.0 can augment the Brand Equity, the Value Proposition, Profitable Relationships and Revenue.

So, what is web 2.0?

As with any disruptive technology, there is a plethora of definitions, mostly influenced by the background of the person defining it. Technical people will define web 2.0 in the context of the tools, such as wiki’s, blogs and vlogs. This is like describing a car as an engine on wheels that you sit on and guide with a steering wheel.
The role of extracting value from these tools lies with the business people who define web 2.0 in terms of strategy, based on the competencies that it enables, a car therefore becomes an extension of your personal brand which confers the ability to go places and meet people.

Wikipedia describes Web 2.0 as “a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.”

While this definition goes beyond describing the types of technologies that enable web 2.0, it does not describe its strategic potential. The Gartner Group describes web 2.0 as a “transformative force that is propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business characterised by harnessing collective intelligence, openness and networking effects.” This is the crux of the matter; web 2.0 doesn’t just provide a more cost effective channel to markets as web 1.0 did, through eMail and websites. It actually provides the opportunity to enhance relationships, delivery mechanisms and create new value propositions for organisations that recognise the opportunity. This in turn delivers bottom line results and increases organisational productivity including return on employee and return on invested capital, depending on the nature of the organisation.

Web 2.0 facilitates a dialogue by enabling user generated content; we are now building marketing tools and applications, rather than websites. These tools enable audiences to engage with each other and collaborate to the benefit of the business. Imagine a virtual boardroom on your Intranet, where employees from all over the organisation are working together to develop better ways of doing business and enhance the value of the brand, without the constraints of geography or time. Another example could be virtual focus groups where your customers help you design products they want, or improve your service delivery mechanisms. Search mechanisms enable you to track and respond quickly to what consumers are saying about you on their blogs.

Now is the time for Marketing to take its rightful place at the sharp point of the Corporate Strategy and we need to re-evaluate our role in the organisation given the power of web 2.0 at our disposal. It is also time for marketing to bridge the divide between IT and the business and collaborate with them to develop the systems that enable marketing to put the business well and truly on the path of unassailable competitive advantage.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The EQ of CRM

Web 2.0 provides us with an opportunity to improve our relationships with our clients by focussing on the interactions that are important them and on the way our employees interact with clients.
Mature companies with many points of contact with their strategic clients — banks, investment houses, IT companies, telecom providers — devote a great deal of money and effort to retaining their current customers because the costs of doing so tend to be much lower than those of acquiring new ones. The success of this strategy depends on expanding the breadth and depth of client relationships and on translating the resultant loyalty into higher sales, as well as a healthier bottom line.
However, although companies are investing in traditional loyalty programmes, CRM technology and service-quality improvements, most of these initiatives do not return the expected investment. What’s missing is the sparkle between customers and employees that transforms people into strong and committed brand followers. No where is this more apparent than during interactions when clients invest a high amount of emotional energy in the outcome (for example, a lost order or a cancelled flight).
Companies struggle to transform the way employees respond to its clients. Some assume that the quality of emotional responses — what Daniel Goleman calls an employee’s “EQ or emotional intelligence”1 — is impossible to influence. Others script what “spontaneous” conversations, removing authenticity from the clients’ experience. Still more underestimate the importance of employing employees who are mature enough to understand the clients’ world and the impact of poor service on it. This makes it difficult to foster appropriate behaviour and enhance the intrinsic emotional intelligence of employees, across the whole customer facing employee network.
There are a number of practical ways to overcome these challenges. In any industry that offers a service, there are moments when the long-term relationship between a business and its clients can change significantly. By supporting and developing the emotional intelligence of its employees, it can ensure that those moments have a positive outcome.
High emotion, high performance
What is the link between emotionally charged interactions and the purchase decisions of customers? McKinsey research has identified the existence of “critical moments” for customers as well as the companies that respond appropriately to them.2 These moments occur when the customer has a problem or receives advice, either good or bad. By contrast, routine transactions (such as collecting a credit card) don’t offer the same opportunity to create an emotional bond with the customer. Many companies make the mistake of over-investing in routine transactions but fail to differentiate themselves in the customer experiences that really matter.
McKinsey’s research demonstrated clearly the impact of emotional intelligence on the bottom line. After a positive experience, more than 85% of customers increased their value to the bank by purchasing more products or investing more of their assets; more than 70% reduced their commitment when things turned sour. More worrying, this isn’t necessarily immediate or visible, it takes the form of shifting part of a client’s business to another institution, or a willingness to talk to the competitor.
Given the clear link between positive interactions and share of wallet, every customer-facing business should identify the points of interaction that are relevant to its industry. In insurance, for example, there are many of these potential service interactions, from shopping for quotes, to claims procedures and claims handling. All offer the potential for something to go so badly wrong that a customer defects. Only a few can provide positive moments — opportunities to intensify the customer’s loyalty to a carrier.
Then, having identified the “critical moments” for their industry, they need to build a support mechanism into the employees’ environment for them to acquire the EQ and behave in a way that is relevant to the clients’ needs.
Why behaviour is the key
Standard responses to eliminate human error (IT systems, mechanistic CRM approaches and complex protocols) may smooth simple customer interactions. But pure technological solutions can never strengthen the emotional connection between employee and client.
Technology falls short when it is designed to standardise processes rather that support the employees through collective sharing, for example by taking into consideration the three elements that largely govern human behaviour: thoughts and feelings, values and beliefs and personal emotional needs. These are not acquired through a standardised process, but through collaboration and communication. Web 2.0 technologies facilitate a two way communication between the employee and the organisation and employees and each other. This was recently demonstrated in the Awareness Report, released in late 2007. They noted some incredible results in terms of the positive external impacts of the application of web 2.0 customer relationship applications such as customer engagement was increased by 68%, brand awareness & loyalty improved by 64% and additional revenue that was generated went up by 39%.
Employees can succeed with the right skills and competencies and while most companies understand the importance of building capabilities (through training etc.), many ignore the mind-sets of their client facing employees.
If employees believe that they are the guardians of the client’s well-being, they feel confident in what they sell and in their ability to communicate. This mind-set makes it easy to have successful conversations with clients, to understand their emotional and financial needs, and to perform well during interactions. They have the positive feelings, values and individual needs; the emotional intelligence required to connect with and help clients at key moments.
Seizing the moment: How managers can help
McKinseys believe that emotional intelligence in business settings typically manifests itself through 4 intertwined characteristics:
o A strong sense of self-empowerment and self-regulation, which together helps employees to make decisions right on the spot if that should be necessary;
o A positive outlook, promoting constructive responses to the challenges of work;
o An awareness of your own and other people’s feelings, creating empathy and facilitating better conversations with customers
o A mastery of fear and anxiety and the ability to tap into selfless motives, which make it possible for employees to express feelings of empathy and caring
These can be intrinsic features of a human being’s personality. Even so, companies — particularly those with far-flung networks of thousands or even tens of thousands of employees — can take practical steps to encourage and enhance them using web 2.0.
Naturally companies should begin by hiring emotionally intelligent frontline employees in the first place; a business starts with an obvious advantage if it can attract people with the right emotional instincts for frontline employment.
Recruitment is only part of the story. If companies understand and act on three key “environmental” levers, they can significantly influence the front line’s emotional intelligence. Activities inspired by these levers must be mutually reinforcing and they create a workplace where excellent customer service can blossom and key moments of truth are handled deftly and successfully.

The levers are:
o Creating meaning and clarity of purpose for client facing employees, thereby addressing their thoughts, feelings, values, beliefs and emotional needs. This could, for example, be supported by an interactive Intranet where employees are enabled to communicate with the organisation about how the organisational values translate into the way they do their work
o Improving the capabilities of employees and influencing their mind-sets so that they acquire the right emotional skills. Once again a 2.0 enabled Intranet with an effective mentorship programme could harness the benefits of collaboration to enhance employee EQ
o Putting structures, reward systems and processes in place to back up these changes. An Intranet that uses social media technologies to make rewards and recognition explicit to all employees would support these changes.
Get meaning into people’s work
Employees deliver exceptional customer service and perform well at critical moments if they know clearly what they are supposed to do and why. The “what” part addresses their competencies they were employed for and the “why” addresses their motivate them to work.
Efforts to help employees understand the “what” can be complex, but they are more successful when the material is presented as simply as possible. Companies should use general statements of values and principles, repeat them regularly and avoid the extensive protocols that undermine empowerment. The interactive technology offered by 2.0 enables the employees to communicate with the organisation and translate these general principles into specifics which guide their behaviour. Employees are unlikely to react spontaneously, or emotionally intelligently, if they feel the weight of a lengthy and detailed policy document, designed remotely by head office. An engaging intuitive system of communication is more likely to support emotionally intelligent responses to clients.
A range of motives drives human beings: from the purely selfish to the more creative, altruistic and personally fulfilling. Successful companies enable people to discover their motivations themselves. These companies believe that most frontline employees actually want to help customers and to gain their goodwill. Once again 2.0 technologies enable employees to discover their motivation for themselves through working closely with the organisation and collaborating with each other through two way communication.
People work hard when they are given the freedom to do the job the way they think it should be done, when they treat customers the way they like to be treated. When you take away their incentive and make their work rules based you kill their passion.
Align structures, systems, and processes
Employees respond positively if structures and systems reinforce the message. It is necessary to create rewards for behaving in certain ways and for demonstrating an ability to behave in new ways.
Companies should modify their performance-management systems to strike a balance between financial results and things that really matter at critical moments. Web 2.0 technologies provide us with the opportunity to create an employee environment that guides the right behaviours, empowers employees, enhances performance management and simplifies processes because they are based on the human aspects of networking and communication.
Simplifying frontline processes is a key priority; it gives employees time to perform more effectively at moments of truth and reinforces the vital sense of empowerment. Employees often resist change because new initiatives come on top of their existing responsibilities and overwhelm them. They won’t understand why the new initiatives are being deployed, unless the organisation engages with them on a meaningful level. Web 2.0 technologies should be designed to be intuitive, attractive to use and most of all seen as useful by employees.
Emotional intelligence may be inborn, yet companies can take concrete steps to improve the EQ of their customer facing employees. Doing so can pay off in improved interactions and more profitable relationships with customers.
Notes
1 Goleman, D. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, NY: Bantam, 1997
2 Marc Beaujean, Vincent Cremers, and Francisco Pedro Goncalves Pereira, “How Europe’s banks can profit from loyal customers,” The McKinsey Quarterly, Web exclusive, November 2005.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Buffering the Global Economic Meltdown in South Africa using Web 2.0 Applications

Even the most removed business from the global market is starting to feel the bite of the Global Economic meltdown. This year is going to be a challenging year for many South African businesses.

Most companies are looking at what they can do to make the best of the current economic situation, and battening down the hatches against the economic tsunami which looms ominously across both the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Some business leaders are cutting back to the bare essentials, but others are investigating entirely new pursuits to survive and flourish. The decisions executives make now, will determine what will happen to their businesses in the future.

Despite the global downturn, the fact that the web has become a bilateral communication system (so-called web 2.0), provides many opportunities. Most businesses have a surprising number of options if they are willing to think creatively.

Web 2.0 brings with it new economic realities and abilities. We see the network effect at work, whereby, for every new member who joins a network, the value of the entire network goes up exponentially. Web 2.0 is about making the most of the intrinsic power of the network, the communication tools (wikis, blogs) and features (cloud computing, mashups, open API’s etc). These collectively represent better, more efficient and less expensive ways to attain competitive advantage. Think of the brave man who bought the first fax machine.

We also see the law of abundance entering the mainstream of business. With the Internet, the investment into production is up front and the marginal cost of every additional product is equal to the bandwidth for delivery. Amazon’s Kindle is reducing the price of books by 60% and still selling them profitably.

Web 2.0’s ability to facilitate a dialogue enhances our ability to collaborate and manage geographically unfettered projects more effectively. While some executives might believe that the social aspects of web 2.0 are inconsequential in their business environment, when it comes to the deeper implications of web 2.0 across the enterprise, many business functions are enhanced by the stakeholders’ ability to communicate, drive change and transform in these radically different business conditions.

What does this mean for creating value in an unpredictable time, how can this help cut costs while driving growth?

Here are six practical ways that 2.0 can help organisations grapple with today’s economic challenges.

6 Strategic uses of Web 2.0 for growth and resilience

1. Use Enterprise 2.0 to capture the employees’ collective knowledge.

Enabling open, persistent, freeform collaboration amongst employees causes vast amounts of institutional knowledge to pour out into visible places on the network where that information can be studied, reused and learned by others.

When mass layoffs take place in organisations, years of built up expertise and capability leave the company. This knowledge resides in inaccessible places such as e-mail accounts, file servers, meeting notes and in the minds of the departing employees.

An interactive Intranet with blogs, wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 tools enable organisations to be elastic in terms of headcount while mitigating the erosion of corporate culture, knowledge, historical context and critical methodologies.

Many benefits of Enterprise 2.0 have been reported by early adopters including greater efficiency, more transparency and better communication. Making your Intranet a strategic, vibrant, ever growing, knowledge worker-powered, interactive application is one of the best investments you can make.

2. Embrace new low-cost models for innovation and production such as crowdsourcing.

There are numerous competitive and economic reasons to move to crowdsourcing models for many aspects of modern business. These include using the vast audience of people on the global network as a primary source of innovation, research, and product development as well as customer support, sales and marketing. Almost anything that you can outsource you can crowdsource for less and with more robust results, although, it has to be said, with less predictability.

Crowd-sourcing is very different from traditional corporate hierarchical command-and-control, which works well in outsourcing relationships, but much less in a social computing environment. Crowdsourcing is providing increasingly impressive stories, although some organisations will still fail with it. Digitally sophisticated companies have the most success. The dramatic cost savings and leaps in innovation that can be tapped with crowd-sourcing, make it one of the most potent Web 2.0 business models.

3. Lower customer service costs by pro-active use of on-line customer communities.

Many of your customers are online, are you truly engaging them, supporting them, and creating a rich community of shared interest around what you’re doing?

Few large companies have created successful on-line communities around their products and customers have largely had to create them on their own until very recently. Many organisations have been slow to move to using on-line customer communities.

There is a skill to creating and nurturing successful on-line customer communities, but there are many companies who specialise in managing these communities for you. Digital Bridges is one of them. Now is time to provide customers an entirely new and largely superior channel for communication, collaboration and working together and amongst themselves.

Organisations that want to minimise customer disruption during staff turnover, lower customer service costs and retain the customers they have must look to robust online customer communities.

4. Manage employee relations though web 2.0 HR portals.

Knowledge workers require a different set of management skills to motivate them to bring their passion to work. Highly engaged employees are more likely to harness their abilities in favour of the organisation they work for, particularly in difficult times.

Using Enterprise 2.0, employees can be given the ability to profile themselves, their skills and experience in the organisation. Closed communities between individuals, managers and HR can be used to share performance management dashboards.

5. Deploy a content management strategy.

Content management strategies separate the content from the context and enable organisations to create content once and update it everywhere. This ensures brand consistency and reduces the communication and workflow gaps which are the inevitable consequence of employee churn.

6. Focus on eMarketing.

As so many clients are on-line, eMarketing provides the perfect opportunity to engage with potential and existing clients while they are in a receptive mindset.

This entails creating a digital presence beyond your own web domain, by advertising, or writing industry blogs, commenting in forums etc. It is well to appoint a dedicated resource to do this as this is a full time dialogue with your target audience.

There are specialist companies that you can outsource this function too, Digital Bridges is one of them.

With web 2.0, there is a major shift in control, a much higher level of transparency, and an openness that many businesses can be uncomfortable with. However, organisations that are willing to overcome these largely political, cultural and mindset challenges can realise significant opportunities, often for relatively modest investment.

Web 2.0 models offer one of the most potent ways we presently have to regroup, reorganise, and systematically improve what we’re doing. Right now is a very exciting time to be in business.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The new Internet will change business…

Technology research company Forrester predicts that by 2013, social software, the application of Web 2.0 for the enterprise, will grow at an annual rate of 43% per year. This is the fastest growing sector in the enterprise software industry. However, many people are confused by what Web 2.0 is and its significance in the workplace and in culture, including those planning to adopt it.

Web 2.0 is a revolution in how people use the Internet to interact with each other. This enables people to use technology in a way they have never been able to. Consequently, websites developers have reacted and evolved rapidly to adapt to these new users and companies have realised that the Internet is a medium of expression, sharing and revelation.

Users have voted with their clicks for sites that appeal to their personal sense of expression. Sites that impose constraints are quickly discarded. The ones that allow individuals to write, edit or tag rise quickly up the internet charts of popularity. Web 2.0 has became a democratic revolution with core principles of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly on the internet.

Social networking sites allow everyone to become a contributor by simply creating their home page and enhancing or adorning it in response to friends doing the same thing. Many large corporations have skills or profile pages for their employees.

Web 2.0 is not anarchic, nor is it necessarily bad for business. To try to control Web 2.0 is like trying to put one’s finger in the dyke. It is happening and there is nothing that business can do to prevent it. When companies try to restrict access, they either find that the roadblocks have been circumscribed or that employees go elsewhere.

Generation Y, has only known the empowerment of the internet and has become accustomed to have their vote counted. To try and control it can only disenfranchise them. To empower them yields an optimistic workforce, with conversation between stakeholders in enlightened collaboration.

In addition the Baby Boomers, are starting to retire, taking with them some of the most valuable knowledge ever accumulated. Knowledge management programmes over the last have failed to capture that knowledge, web 2.0 could be the way to retaining it.

Change in the enterprise is likely to come from outside as well. Knowledge workers use Google more than any internal systems. These websites set further expectations on the internal systems enterprises use and create a requirement to integrate information with these external sources of information. These external sources of information provide something that internal information systems could never provide – a critical mass of opinion using the “Wisdom of the Crowds”.

The most profound effect Web 2.0 will have is on the way we do business. Employees will use this freedom of speech to provide valuable feedback to the business. Customers will become part of the decision-making process and allow us to design the most imaginative products and services.

Care should be taken in what is opened up. However, rather than treating Web 2.0 content suspiciously, businesses should ring fence the information that must be controlled and open up the rest to participation.

Smart businesses see the opportunities and are embracing the Internet in ways they haven’t before.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

What influence the web in the first economic depression in the Internet age?

We all know that economic growth moves in cycles — up and down. However this is the first recession that we have seen in the Internet Age, and particularly the web 2.0 era. So what is the role of the hyper-networked Internet in managing through tougher times?
In the recession of the mid 70’s, there were massive layoffs. Labourers and workers were dismissed from plants and offices. They were powerless, and cut off from information relevant to their industry, co-workers, and new opportunities. In 1981, 1991 and 2001, more powerless white-collar workers were retrenched.
These days, knowledge workers are no longer powerless, subject to the whims of their employers. Instead, they carry around portable skills, portable resources, and portable networks that can be quickly applied and adapted to new environments and situations, and with the global talent shortage the balance of power has shifted to the employee.
Now, employees remain connected in real time not only to their co-workers from organisations past and present, but they also network with professionals across the world in their areas of expertise. Opportunities and new ideas for generating opportunities can be quickly shared and acted upon. Blogs, wikis, search engines have transformed workspaces into one single gigantic virtual workplace. We no longer depend on our co-workers down the hall; we now leverage resources from across the globe.
Many employees simply may not even need a full-time employer anymore. It’s possible to start an innovative new business with virtually little or no investment, employing Web-based resources. It’s now possible to run an entire business on Web 2.0-based services. Many are free, the rest only charge on an incremental per-use basis.
Web 2.0 and Software as a Service (SaaS) may give rise to thousands of new businesses.
Unlike previous economic downturns, many of today’s knowledge workers and professionals will not resign themselves to the powerlessness of unemployment. Any economic downturn has the potential to be reversed or mitigated by empowered employees or entrepreneurs who will be able to collaborate, share information and knowledge, and quickly respond to and act on new opportunities, thanks to our networked economy.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Digital Bridges Company Profile

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the value of the web through the rigorous application of globally accepted management disciplines, effective process engineering, innovation and deep experience from around the world. Digital Bridges “bridges” the traditional divide between Business and IT. We translate the business and operational requirements of the organisation into strategies, processes and implementation methodologies that optimise IT investment.

Web Strategy

We consult on

• Organisational strategy and frameworks for web alignment across the organisation;
• Digital and web based application strategy and delivery on the mandate of the organisation;
• User Adoption Modelling to ensure that the users embrace the technology and the organisation gets the optimal return on its IT investment;
• Security and Risk Mitigation to reduce the risks associated with all stakeholders having the power to communicate through web based technologies;
• Customised application development for specific audiences and segments which maximise revenue streams;
• The ongoing management and development of the applications as they mature and grow to meet the organisations changing needs;
• Develop roadmaps for ongoing delivery and project prioritisation
• Manage Performance Improvement Points
• Relationship management methodologies that enhance communication and collaboration between stakeholders in a business to Business or Business to Consumer environment using systems theory;
• eMarketing and communication strategies for 21st century business models, developing Web oriented value propositions, defining the business case and revenue models, brand building, optimising the network effect, managing community dialogues, setting up quantifiable measurement systems etc.
• The development and deployment of Business Intelligence reports and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) into workable business activities

We create

• Workable strategies with robust, clearly defined implementation plans;
• Human Capital Management Strategies that leverage the value of technology and web 2.0 based Intranets;
• Marketing Strategies that lead to Extranets and useful functional Websites;
• User Requirement Specifications which define the business needs from IT, platforms and applications;
• Functional Specifications which model the user’s processes during their interaction with the software, platforms and applications; and
• Use case and test data.

We provide

• Project management;
• Ongoing training;
• Workshop facilitation;
• Change management; and
• Business process analysis.

Our Solutions

Our solutions deliver value internally into the organisation, or externally to the organisation’s customers and clients.

Solutions internal to the organisation

Our solutions are integral to successful HR programmes designed to win the war for talent through managing employee relationships, communication, engagement, learning and performance using technology. They can be deployed through Intranets which results in the Intranet becoming a strategic asset in the organisation because there is a high level of adoption by employees who see the value and experience it as easy to use. Internal solutions include communication portals, eLearning, performance management, project optimisation and knowledge management. They can also be integrated with, or optimised for mobile applications for employees who don’t work in a centralised location. We also develop project management and other collaboration tools on the Intranet

Externally facing solutions

Externally, our solutions add value to brands and communication programmes. They can form the backbone of the organisation’s product or service delivery, or they can be integrated into client service and CRM tools.

Content Management

Great web based applications require dedicated content management to keep the applications meaningful, useful and strategically in line with the core objectives. We also assist our clients in search engine optimisation. Our clients can out source their content management to our dedicated team of web content and specialised competency experts.

Digital Public Relations

Digital Bridges also provides on-line public relations services, from the writing of digital press releases to managing industry blogs and participating in on-line forums

Partnering for end to end delivery

Digital Bridges partners with technology vendors and companies who deploy technology solutions into corporates, in order to enhance the business value of the technology platform. We work closely with the software vendor in order to ensure that together we deliver on the client’s expectations.

Some organisations but instead prefer open source, custom built applications, specifically when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Digital Bridges has partnered with LUUK (Pty) Ltd in order to develop bespoke solutions for these clients. LUUK has recently been voted as one of the “Leading Emerging Technology Companies in South Africa” by Top Technology 100 in 2006, and its owners have been recommended in the Top 200 entrepreneurs by the Mail&Guardian.

Why Digital Bridges?

There are many reasons why businesses choose Business 2.0 solutions developed by Digital Bridges:

Our Solutions have strategic relevance

They are designed within the macro strategic context of the organisation in order to ensure that they deliver on  the mandate . Best practise business solutions are employed in their design. Our clients realise an increased return on their technology investments. Our open source tools are powered by LUUK.  These technologically advanced applications are pre developed and modular, this speeds up implementation and drives down the costs

We customise our solutions in creative and innovative ways. Business processes is an integral part of the solutions we develop.

Many of our clients say that they enjoy working with Digital Bridges because we become intimately involved with the organisation, working with the same passion at every level from the coal face through middle management to the C suite.

Leadership

Digital Bridges is headed up by Kate Elphick. Kate has spent twelve years in the IT Sector, working on both the business and the technical side of organisations such as Datatec, Didata, Business Connexion and Primedia. She has an MBA from GIBS. Her business interests include Innovation and Growth Strategies and their successful deployment for material returns on invested capital

Our Home

Digital Bridges is based at the Innovation Hub which houses a community of pioneers, inventors, entrepreneurs and free thinkers – challenged and inspired, breaking new ground, collaborating and inventing new technologies.

Our web address is www.digitalbridges.co.za and you can contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Our History

Digital Bridges was started at the beginning of 2007 and has, in the past two years, had some very prestigious clients including Naspers, The Jo’burg Roads Agency, Go NGO, The Innovation Hub, Goal Technology Solutions, Worldsview Consulting, Knowledge Factory and the South African Institute of Professional Accountants (SAIPA) amongst others.

BEE Accreditation

Digital Bridges is an independently rated Broad Base Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) level 3 contributor in terms of Empowerment Act No. 53, 2003.

Kate Elphick mentors three MBA students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds at GIBS. E

Digital Bridges provides support to young start up BEE IT Companies. We are currently working with BI Technology Solutions in order to assist them to fulfil their dreams of becoming a great South African company.

Part of the South African Community Corporate Social Investment

In order to participate in the creation of a sustainable future for South Africa, Digital Bridges has embarked on a programme designed to assist our country bridge the Digital Divide. Research has shown that in developing countries, when the Internet reaches the masses, it results in significant growth in the economy of that country, because entrepreneurs start up Internet businesses without being hampered by faulty infrastructure and governments can deliver services online to citizens.

The biggest barriers to Internet uptake are a fear of the unknown and a lack of understanding of the value that the Internet can bring. Digital Bridges provides value generating solutions for communities who have traditionally not used the Internet, in order to encourage participation in the Digital Age.

Using a combination of Web and mobile phone technologies we deliver the virtual world of the Internet to people in the real world through their cellphones.

The Memorial Wall is the first such project The Memorial Website, www.memorialwall.co.za is a service which enables people to create memorials to their loved ones, with a photograph and an obituary. Friends and relatives can SMS their condolences, memories and thoughts directly onto this site, which can be visited online at any time in the future.

The website provides a cost effective way to create a collection of family memories. Parents will be able to show their children what their ancestors looked like and how they were remembered. The Memorial can also be printed out as a beautiful document which can be used as handouts at funerals, posted or eMailed to people living far away.

In time, additional services will be provided such as advice on what to do in the case of a death; who to notify and how a deceased estate is administered. The idea is to take away the unnecessary pain that comes with not knowing what to do next.

Pro Bono Work to help the under privileged

Digital Bridges is also doing pro bono work for GoNGO, an application designed to assist NGO’s to meet their mandate by providing them with the skills and applications to manage their day to day activities.

Cewl Business Tewl

I have just discovered a handy little business networking tool with the rather unfortunate name of a “Poken”.

Poken is a tiny USB key with an embedded RFID reader/transmitter. When you place it next to another Poken it passes pertinent information between Pokens. You then plug the Poken into a laptop and connect to your on-line manager and you can then “add” that person to your contact list.

No more business cards. How handy is that for the next conference or breakfast you go to?

It immediately links your new acquaintance to your profile of choice, Facebook, Plaxo, Linked-in etc.

Digital Bridges will be importing customised business Pokens into South Africa with a two gig memory stick.

If you want to see these in action or are interested in these unique corporate gifts, you can contact me on katee@digitalbridges.co.za

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Enterprise 2.0 and the High Performance Organisation

Social networking tools can enable enterprises to tap into the collective potential of employees, partners and customers enabling better, more productive business practices. Social networking isn’t going anywhere and it’s not just a way for kids to make new friends or for those in the business world to build professional relationships either. Social networking in the business world is evolving into an organisation-wide communication and collaboration phenomenon called Enterprise 2.0

The vast benefits of Enterprise 2.0 reach into every aspect of the business – from customer driven product development and employee collaboration to community driven customer service and more.
When business is faced with mergers, restructuring, global locations and telecommuting, connecting the right people at the right time can be a challenge.

Enterprise 2.0 can address that challenge by helping people locate expertise, share information and expand their professional networks to accomplish more in less time. In fact, these applications are so effective that some employees are using external social networking sites for work related tasks, potentially putting corporate information at risk outside the firewall.

Enterprise 2.0 is designed to empower people to be more effective and innovative by building professional networks of co-worker, partners and customers. Users can find and collaborate with experts; easily locate people and information; build closer partner and customer relationships; and foster bottom up, community-based innovation.

Normal document management strategies are rarely embraced by employees, yet there is a voluntary sharing of knowledge and networking using online Enterprise 2.0 applications. The power behind Enterprise 2.0 applications is that users are able to bring this into an enterprise and capture it in a secure knowledge environment.

An integrated Enterprise 2.0 user experience can be used with the email, instant messaging and portal applications that users already deploy.

Enterprise 2.0 applications should incorporate five key components designed to work together to create an integrated, collaborative environment that is both secure and scalable:

Profiles – enhancing the company’s directory structure creating a rich online persona of employees by adding elements like photos, interests, skills, work associates and even reporting structures;

Blogging – a handy way for matter experts to share their project and work experience using forums frequented by other employees. Searchable blogs ensure the expert information is readily available to anyone across the enterprise. Blogging enables knowledge transfer and collaboration within the enterprise, and is a means for an enterprise to harness and archive the collective employee knowledge base;

Social Bookmarking – provides a means for subject matter experts to share their prequalified internal and external tags, which are searchable by person or subject;

Communities – provide a way for employees and external people to become part of a community that shares similar interests. A secure platform enables these groups/communities to collaborate around these interests. The power of this tool is that it is owned, defined and managed by the collective experience of the community members;

Activities – During the course of a business activity, information is accrued in many forms – email, instant messaging, presentations, documents and other means. Activities is the central conduit to present, in an orderly manner, this information to the participants for their shared use.

Because Enterprise 2.0 technologies are so intuitive, they are easily adopted and can form useful portals for the adoption of other enterprise applications such as CRM or BI tools. Employee performance management gets personalised through dashboards on individuals’ portals.

The new interactive Intranet, web and extranets are changing the very fabric of our business landscape.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Interactive Intranets and Employee Commitment

Research indicates that customer loyalty is significantly enhanced when employees are happy in their work. Organisations that maximise their employees’ commitment, grow more sustainably, make more margin and perform better on the stock market than their apathetic peers.
Employee commitment includes engagement, motivation, performance, morale and satisfaction.
Interactive Intranets
Interactive Intranets are Enterprise-wide web applications that provide the underlying support of all the employees across the organisation. They are composed of the traditional Internet with its content around the organisation, policies and procedures, employee ordering, general communication forums etc. Employees also need to be able to find sector specific news through RSS feeds, company news as well as industry trends and other useful information on the Intranet.
Interactive Intranets also have specific portals for each division that have divisionally related information and workflow, such as booking IT training in the IT portal and leave management functions on the HR Portal. The divisional manager needs to be responsible for his communication across the organisation. This can be managed using a series of wiki’s, blogs and instant messaging, for example software upgrades or changes in policies.
When employees feel that their work is worthwhile and is connected to both the organisation and a larger purpose, then they are more committed to the organisation. Each individual employee also requires his own personal profile, where he can display a photo contact details, qualifications, job description, experience and interests.
But Interactive Intranets are more than “Facebook for Business”, they can be used to manage projects on wiki’s, collaborate on client service and capture the implicit knowledge of the employees through the conversations they have on-line.
Gaining Employee Commitment
Employees need to understand where they are going related to the vision, to buy into the culture, to know what the company stands for, and to understand how to connect their work to the strategic imperatives. This needs to be clear in their engagement with the Intranet.
The vision of the organisation should be made explicit using tools such as the Balanced Scorecard, and the individuals Key performance areas linked to the organisational scorecard. Personalised dashboards on their Intranet profiles can then be used to link the work that they are doing to the macro-strategic position of the organisation in a very visual way.
Collaboration hinges on an environment that is motivating and inspiring and where people work together to help one another succeed. A key trait of high performing organisations is shared power and high involvement where participation, collaboration, and teamwork are the way of life. This is facilitated through open dialogue and project collaboration using wiki’s RSS feeds and blogs on the Intranet. Employees must be encouraged to join collaboration forums where they share ideas, documents and knowledge around each project.
A corporate culture that encourages sharing and team spirit is essential to creating collaboration. It is important for colleagues and leaders to support one another on tasks and to express appreciation for one another’s ideas.
Employees will commit to an organisation when they perceive that justness and fairness are present. Interactive Intranets foster transparency and the demonstration of fairness amongst employees.
The concept of Fairness encompasses many things including an environment where pay, benefits, and workload are fair and equitable and in which people treat each other with respect and leaders act in an ethical manner.
The Intranet can also be used to provide individuals with the tools, training, support, and the authority to make decisions. It involves creating an Intranet environment where the thought framework is collaborative and participative, allowing people to feel in control of their work and able to achieve their goals. Clear guidelines must be in place to allow individuals to succeed in regard to making decisions about their tasks.
Most people appreciate being recognised for their achievements by team members and their leaders, and this recognition can be made explicit through awards on personal Intranet profiles etc.
Having opportunities to learn and grow professionally and develop skills that lead to advancement in one’s career are core to the concept of growth. eLearning is enhanced when teams of eLearners can learn on the Intranet and collaborate on learning assignments.
Having a manager and organisational systems that provide these opportunities, as well as being in an environment or department where colleagues can learn from one another or coach each other are important dimensions that support individual growth.
In addition, individuals need to feel that they are part of the process in terms of career planning, which becomes explicit on their profile.
Having a solid relationship with one’s leader and colleagues that is based on integrity and trust is a key component in creating employee passion. People need leaders who share information and make an effort to build rapport. A leader who takes an interest in his or her employees and shares personal information is more likely to establish and maintain connectedness with direct reports than one who does not. The use of blogs or instant messaging, posting comments on the individual’s profile will facilitate this.
Just as a solid relationship with one’s leader impacts employee passion, so too does a strong relationship with colleagues and co-workers. People want to have a personal connection with their co-workers in addition to a professional work relationship. There is a human need to connect. People want to care about others, and they want others to care about them.
The Interactive Intranet is the perfect opportunity to connect with the job, the organisation and the employees, to gain commitment and grow the organisation. It needs to become a strategic asset to the organisation, because in future it will be a key component to the modern organisations’ future success.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The smart website

Websites today are becoming a key asset to any organisation. Gone are the days when your website was a brochure that people could access on-line. Now days they are powerful sales tools and an indispensable way to manage relationships with existing and potential clients.

Your website needs to deliver on the same business objectives as every other function in the business.

For a long time now websites have enabled eCommerce and clients have been able to order products and services on line, but how do we create smart websites, that maximise your ROI?

The website as part of your sales strategy.

Sales are concerned with maximising turnover and margin at the lowest costs. Websites form an essential part of the modern sales strategy.

In the past they were marketing collateral, supporting sales by providing clients with information about your company and its products and services. Web 2.0 has enabled a crossover from marketing to direct sales.

To get the most sales out of your website, you need to analyse your overall business and sales strategies, and carefully align your company’s website to quantifiable business and sales objectives.

Meeting Sales Objectives

You need to manage your website as a sales channel by using the same measurement that you use for off-line sales, in order to maximise your return. Here are some ideas for relevant metrics that can be mapped to sales objectives.

Number of qualified leads generated. What types of leads convert into sales? How can you secure more of them?
New sales revenue. What is your cost each sale? Is this a number you can justify from an ROI perspective to secure new business?
Incremental sales revenue from existing customers may help you to reduce your “cost per up-sell” to current customers. This will help you measure the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of your website.
Conversion rates are directly related to the source of the leads on your website. Understanding what types of conversions (new sales, up-sells, etc.) are happening and where they originate gives you the opportunity to go after those that deliver the greatest ROI.
Time to conversion speaks to the efficiency of specific leads to contribute revenue. For example, if leads that are generated through your website’s “product profile” pages convert twice as quickly as those that downloaded a whitepaper, then you can make sure those pages have the greatest visibility and easiest access on your website.

eCommerce

In the late 90’s many businesses were experimenting with eCommerce, but they neglected to take the physical delivery mechanism into consideration. In South Africa, our Internet penetration was too low to make the economies of scale viable. eCommerce sales were miserable and many companies soon abandoned them.

Today the numbers of South Africans who use the Internet on a daily basis whether from home or work has increased enough to make the business case for relooking the opportunity. Our potential clients are far more tech-literate and we know a lot more about how to make are sites intuitive to navigate and easy to use.

Managing Client Relationships

The website is not just a digital catalogue with a payment mechanism attached, we can now create interactive platforms for engaging with our customers and building loyalty. Our clients can be enabled to communicate not just with us, but with each other too. Imagine a jewellery design club around on-line semi precious stone website. They can create communities around how to use your products or provide suggestions to you on how you can improve your products.

Search Engine Optimisation

Few people access your website from the landing page, today most people search for what they are looking for and enter your site from where the search tool directs them. This means that you have to design every page to be found and easily navigated using search engine tools and process driven navigation.

Dedicated Management

When we are converting our websites into strategic assets, we must dedicate enough resources to manage the site and ensure that it is constantly improving and very responsive to our clients needs. Website are no longer just created and updated regularly. Now days they are dynamic, agile and engaging with our clients on a daily basis.

In South Africa, we don’t have the numbers to ensure that we create sufficient critical mass for our clients to create large enough networks to run by themselves. They do require interventions from humans to keep them interesting and sticky.

With the current economic slowdown, your clients will be looking at more cost efficient ways to go about their daily business. If you build smart website with a robust delivery mechanism that clients will trust and optimise it for search, you will build a robust web sales channel that delivers the returns you are looking for.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The Importance of Process Mapping when defining Interactive Intranets

Many companies are looking at Interactive Intranets to improve business performance, maximise employee relationships and enhance innovation and communication. But without careful evaluation, companies can end up incorporating unnecessary, cumbersome business processes and functionality, which leads to employees rejecting the Intranet.

Interactive Intranets are Intranets that have been enabled with web 2.0 capability which allows a two way dialogue between the users on the Intranet and the organisation. Interactive Intranets also make good collaboration and knowledge management tools because they capture the digital conversations in the business context.

In order to be sure that employees adopt the Intranet and use it to its full advantage, you need to ensure that it is easy to use, useful in their day to day work and supports their personal brand amongst their peers. This is achieved through careful planning when specc’ing the Intranet

Here are a few steps to deploying an Interactive Intranet that achieves true business benefits while building a foundation for future success.

1. Develop an Intranet Strategy which delivers on the organisational strategy

The first step is to understand the organisational strategy and mandates. A Balanced Scorecard is a useful way of breaking down what the business’ and therefore the employees’ deliverables are. This should give some indication of the extent of the potential of the Intranet, and determine what the employees should ideally be able to do on it. Will they collaborate on projects, communicate with each other, learn and develop their skills, access other systems, receive information about the business etc.?

2. Understand the existing processes

Few companies have a well-documented, current record of their core business processes. It can be time-consuming to detail daily business activities, but it is time well spent: A well-documented set of business processes makes it far easier to deploy an effective Intranet, and it provides insight into the entire business workflow.

It is important, however, to remember that there will always be two sets of processes, those that the management think are there, and what the employees are actually doing. Both should be documented because often employees can find much easier ways in practise to solve problems than the best processes in theory.

3. Review Each Process

Once you have established the “what” of your business processes, it’s time to understand the “who” and the “why.” Who is responsible for each step? Where does the information flow? Why does your company follow this particular process? If the process does not support business objectives or improve business performance in a meaningful way, then it might be time to jettison it. There is no room for “we’ve always done it this way.” When too many bad, superfluous or repetitive processes become ingrained in daily operations, a business stagnates.

This is a difficult part of a technology deployment for several reasons. It takes time that companies often haven’t budgeted for their Intranet rollout. It can ruffle a lot of feathers internally when the team responsible for deployment continues to question how and why people perform their jobs.

Some companies avoid the step entirely and force technology often at great expense for modifications. However, employees will reject the Intranet if it doesn’t meet their needs and make their work better. If business performance improvement is the ultimate goal, it’s vital to question the validity of each process.

The ultimate advantage to mapping the processes from the coal face backwards is that the employees get an understanding of what you are doing and they feel like they are part of the scope, this goes a long way to getting buy in to the new Intranet.

4. Managing Performance Improvement Points (PIP)

It’s one thing to reject a bad process; it’s another to protect a good one. Your Interactive Intranet must offer an easy way to manage a good process, it’s worth it to invest in a custom modification, particularly if it supports your core business objectives.

Modifications can quickly get out of hand, as people come to understand the power of the Interactive Intranet, and suggest ways to improve the performance. You need to institute a formal change review/approval process which controls the prioritisation of requested changes and one member should have final-sign-off authority for any request. This is the only way to avoid “scope creep,” where project costs escalate out of control and deployment dates get continually pushed back.

The team that manages the change review process is responsible for measuring needs against wants, and identifying the changes that will deliver true business benefit. This team must establish firm ground rules to avoid spending time and money on unnecessary modifications. It can be a tough job, as the team will have to deny users’ requests to modify the software rather than their routines or processes – but a list of “Performance Improvement Points” can quickly add up to a long list of custom programming. Also, each “little change” has the potential to impact some other mission-critical aspect of the deployment.

5. Take It One Step at a Time

It is important to prioritise the deployment of the Interactive Intranet, so that you maximise the value as you roll out. This is determined on a case by case basis, depending on the business’ priorities, however, generally we recommend the following sequence.

Start with a generic Intranet to replace the existing one, but include the clever use of some web 2.0 tools to provide an immediate improvement. Pull in news feeds, create an organisational blog for the CEO.

Next create Intranet Portals for each of the functional divisions which facilitate their value to the rest of the organisation. For example leave-management workflow must sit in the HR portal, and booking IT training in the IT portal. Each division also needs to have wiki’s and blogs for interacting with the organisation.

Now it is time for each individual employee to get his or her own profile, with a photograph, contact details, qualification, experience, interests etc. When you have these three layers in place, you can enable collaboration, such as letting employees create groups around specific projects.

Another important step is to understand how other applications can be brought into the Intranet, for example, each employee could have a performance dashboard, pulled through from the HR performance management software, the ideas are endless.

By phasing in system functionality, companies can maximise return on investment by making immediate improvements in their operations. They can address critical needs right away and enable users to become familiar with the system, easing the adoption of future changes. Phases can be separated by as little as two to four weeks, creating a continuous stream of process improvement with minimal disruption to the organisation.

Implementing these steps can make a big difference in how successful a company will be with an Interactive Intranet roll out. However, choosing the right business partner is just as important as managing the process.

External partners such as Digital Bridges have worked with multiple companies and can provide invaluable advice on which business processes make sense and which deserve a second look. While you might not want to take every piece of advice the vendor offers, make sure that the company you choose to work with has experiences to share. It makes a lot of sense to listen when the vendor pushes back on modifications or programming requests – they can save you time, money and disappointment.

The winning combination for an Interactive Intranet deployment is the right business partnership plus the commitment to define and refine your business processes.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Start with your business strategy before you execute an Internet strategy

South African companies are starting to switch on to the enormous potential that the new Internet, or web 2.0 holds as a business platform, but many organisations don’t know where to begin to craft their Enterprise-wide web 2.0 strategy.

The correct place to start is by understanding what your business objectives are, and extrapolating your Internet Strategy’s goals from that understanding. For example one business objective might be to grow revenues and profits by moving into a new market; another might be maintaining the position of employer of choice, making the client central to the organisation, or maintaining current profitability in the face of increased competition.

Enterprise 2.0 is a range of integrated web based applications to meet practically any business objective. Depending on your business goals, your Enterprise 2.0 objectives may include, achieving customer conversions, creating employee loyalty and increasing productivity, managing knowledge or simply getting your brand out there.

The beauty of Enterprise 2.0 is that you can measure and track the results you’re getting from each application and tweak and experiment until you identify what works in each particular situation. This can be mapped back onto your business objectives, giving you a very clear picture about the bottom-line returns on your Enterprise 2.0 implementation.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Employee Engagement using the Interactive Intranet

The Interactive Intranet is an Intranet that has been enabled with web 2.0 tools in order to facilitate interactions between the organisation and the employees. Employees create personal profiles with their photographs, contact details, qualifications, skills and experience. They can start communities of interest, for example the CRM forum, or the employment equity forum. They can write blogs and collaborate on projects etc.

It is important, as an organisation, to use the Interactive Intranet to engage with your employees rather than merely using it as a tool to communicate to them. By engaging with your employees, you enter into a meaningful conversation with them that is based on a deep understanding of their needs, interests and behaviours. This improves morale, motivation, productivity and loyalty.

The Interactive Intranet is a complex and fragmented environment that offers you multiple channels to create relationships with employees, for example in their communities of interest, forums, eNewsletters, blogs, on Twitter, Linked-in and more.

In an environment with so much choice, it’s no longer enough to segment your communication into groups such as “Frontline Staff”, “The Executive Team” “Everybody”. Instead, you need to understand the behaviour of your employees as well as their motivations, which in turn will give you a better idea of where to engage with them and what they’ll respond to.

Initially you will need to focus a lot of your energy on experimenting to understand exactly what works for your organisation and its employees. The important point to remember is that every interaction with an employee is an opportunity to learn more about him or her, and to strengthen their relationship with the organisation, make the most of each interaction.

You’ll need track the success of your campaigns and conversations to see which message employees responding to. You also need to be tracking the employees path through the Intranet once they’ve logged in so that you can understand their on-line behaviour, do they create communities of interest, collaborate on projects, search for skills, share documents, instant message etc.

What is the content of their communication? One of the most important words in online employee engagement is ‘relevancy.’ You need to understand their needs and interests so that you can target them with messages that are relevant to them in the work context.

Armed with this information, you are able to filter employees through a conversion funnel that begins with communicating meaningfully with them and ends with a loyal, productive workforce aligned behind your brand.

Of course it goes without saying that the role of engaging with employees is a dedicated one and you need to invest in sufficient resources to maintain a dialogue with your employees, rather than sporadic bursts of communication.

Interactive Intranets give you the tools you need to understand your employees better so that you can constantly tweak your engagement process and address them with the right messages at the right time to achieve your desired outcomes.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The Intranet as a strategic asset

A Semantic Intranet is an Intranet which can enhance the way employees collaborate because it uses “meaning” to understand the content of the documents stored within its infrastructure. It is an intelligent tool which separates the meaning from the format and enables this information to be used anywhere. Whenever documents are created they are allocated snippets of meaning which the Intranet uses in its search to “understand” the content of a document an make it available to the user.

Imagine being able to “Google” your Intranet for meaningful content when on a project. You could “Google” for the relevant skills in your organisation and other documents created for similar projects.

For years, there’s been a frustrating chasm between Intranets, knowledge and work processes. Even the best technology struggles to make sense of the unstructured and meaningless morass of information that burdens most enterprise information systems. Organisations are finally beginning to understand the value of connecting knowledge and process into a seamless experience.

Semantics are effective way to make information systems smarter. If a corporate memory becomes semantically activated, corporate applications can help the users use the corporate memory.

Although Intranets use the same technology as the Internet, the contents of the intranet, the document standards, and meta-information can be controlled by the organisation. This means that a corporate dictionary, or definition of terms, may be used to provide the meta data for documents, and if this dictionary is formalised to the level of an ontology, then the Intranet can become a tool for managing actionable knowledge.

Due to their low entry barrier, easy deployment, and simple yet powerful features, wikis have gained popularity for agile knowledge management. Semantic wikis give information more structure to enable automatic processing of the wiki’s contents. This facilitates enhanced navigation and search in the wiki itself as well as simple reuse of information in external applications or for generating different views on the same information.

Semantic technology promises to have a major impact on enterprise information discovery. Which means that the power of Intranets to deliver relevant and useful information when needed may soon begin to be fully realised.

It is quickly becoming clear how powerful this technology is, and how the pieces of the solution; common languages, formats and ontologies, are coalescing to allow for semantics in action. But semantically described and integrated information will not reach its potential unless it surfaces to managers and knowledge workers in flexible applications that adapt dynamically to changing contexts and requirements.

To achieve this, Intranet management teams will need big-picture thinkers who have both a wide view of enterprise information flows and a focused understanding of how individuals in an organisation work. Imagination and creativity will also be needed to identify and deliver these unique and powerful views into the enterprise.

The Intranet should be the strategic backbone of the organisation. Semantics may be where enterprise data architects meet the Intranet team to move beyond content templates and UE standards to understand and implement the tools that will turn the Intranet into the powerful and valuable information system it should be.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Winning the economic war while fighting the battles

Decisions and actions taken during times of crisis, uncertainty and change can have a disproportionate impact on our future success. With the global economic turn down, many businesses are battening down the hatches, reducing costs and focusing on core business, others are poised to take advantage of unusual opportunities — acquire troubled assets, attack weak competitors and create new relationships.

This recession will be more severe than those in the recent past because it was triggered by a deep, systemic banking and financial crisis. At the same time as we are dealing with an economic crisis there are some fundamental structural shifts on the horizon, caused by the developments in the Internet. These developments also promise dramatic discontinuities in the global economy.

Businesses find themselves adapting to a new and very different economic order as a result, one that demands different strategies, relationships, and capabilities.

The disruptive power of the new Internet has only just begun, and it will continue to transform successful businesses at an accelerating pace. eMarketing, eCommerce, virtualisation and outsourcing, crowd-sourcing, social networks, consumer empowerment and transparency are challenging business and organisational models, while simultaneously generating new opportunities and capabilities.

This combination of a recession with new Internet driven opportunities, creates the need to win battles on two fronts; businesses must focus on exploiting what they already have and at the same time explore what they can discover and create. The first drives revenues and incremental growth in existing markets; the second drives renewal and the expansion of opportunity for transformational growth. Both are critical to a business’ survival.

On the one front, the pressures of the recession leads companies to the adoption of command and control; “return to basics”; cut costs, eliminate risks, slow down and delay investments, especially in employees and client relationships. On the other, the structural discontinuities that are reshaping the world demand a more expansive and exploratory approach, as new geographies, relationships, customers, network economy rules and players, value creation systems and capabilities increasingly determine future success.

Organisations must take actions to win the battle in the short term and act to position themselves to triumph in the war over the longer term. Finding the right solutions demands hard work and thoughtful analysis, and there are no easy short-cuts. However, there are some core capabilities that will underpin successful navigation of this complex and uncertain environment.

In order to compete to win the war organisations must have a superior understanding of the structural dynamics reshaping the global economy, how they impact their industry, the new opportunities, challenges and imperatives they pose. Courageous and proactive moves require a deeper exploration and understanding of the systemic shifts under way, and a clear positioning to win in the emergent order.

Sophisticated competitive strategies that take advantage of the power of the new Internet are critical because today, most markets are in a zero-sum or negative game where share must be won from competitors as overall growth slows. The competitive landscape has changed significantly and will continue to do so, probably faster and at a greater magnitude.

Traditional, linear value chains are increasingly becoming more co-creative “eco-systems,” in which competitors are also partners, customers are part of the value creation process, suppliers are often fellow-innovators and channels to market are blurring as the borders between companies erode. This demands an increasingly sophisticated approach to the formulation of winning competitive and co-creative strategy.

The winners will have superior decision-making capabilities. Today, businesses must also be able to contend with increased uncertainty, this demands a capacity for systems thinking and simulation to optimise the robustness of key decisions and their execution to create a sustainable enterprise.

Digital Bridges has tailored many of our most powerful methodologies and offerings specifically to address the multitude of challenges now present in most organisations, we are committed to helping our clients achieve superior results, especially in this extraordinary period.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Creating Digital Communities in South Africa

Digital Communities are on-line networks of people around a communion interest, or on a common web application. They are made possible because of the modern Internet which supports two way communication. Examples of Digital communities could range from the HR performance management forum on an Intranet, to a project manager’s best practice forum on PMBOK’s site or a new mothers’ on-line support group.

Why should you build an on-line community?

Digital communities can be powerful business tools, bringing innumerable benefits to a brand both internally and externally of an organisation.

• By providing customers with a useful or entertaining community, you are increasing the value of your offering and creating a positive brand experience. Your community members feel like part of your brand, creating a deep brand loyalty that gives you an edge over competitors.
• You can use your community to communicate key brand messages.
• You will have the chance to deal with customer complaints in your own space, before they are broadcast to the world.
• You’ll be able to market to your exact target population on a platform that’s completely under your control.
• Community members can post new content, which keeps the site dynamic and improves its search engine performance and increases the number of visits.
• If your community is useful, the word will spread, bringing new visitors to your Web site and fresh attention to your brand.
• A community will allow you to understand your target customers, their interests and needs, their communication style, and the details of their daily lives, which helps you market to them more effectively.
• You can also get advance feedback from your community on product concepts and campaign ideas.
• A functioning community can reduce the need to spend money on other marketing channels, as well as on SEO, content development, product testing, and so on.

Digital communities are about creating robust relationships among website users, and to achieve this there are certain basic criteria:

• Members with a common interest have to find the on-line community;
• They must be visible to each other;
• They have to have a way interact with each other directly on the site;
• There must be a reason to interact;
• There needs to be enough members in the community to make it worthwhile;
• The application upon which the digital community is run, whether it is a Intranet, an Extranet or a website, needs to be intuitive and easy to use; and
• Members need to visit the site regularly over a period of time in order to get to know each other.

The last factor is the hardest to achieve, you need to have a minimum activity level on the Web site, and until you reach this, visitors to the site are likely to find themselves alone there and if they return, they are likely to find that not much has changed since their last visit. They will have little reason to return a third time.

In South Africa, where we have a very low level of Internet penetration, you actually need to invest in keeping the community dynamic, because only a few digital communities of interest are big enough to be self sustaining on the web. We need to think very differently about how we derive value from these communities. Great care and strategic thought must be invested, to ensure that we attain the desired results.

Digital Community Strategy

Before embarking on a digital community project, it’s important to develop a digital community strategy. Consider your business goals, time line and the resources at your disposal. Ask yourself:

• What business goals to I need to deliver on?

• How much backing do I have in my organisation?

• When do I need results?

• What alternative options would allow me to reach my objectives?

• Is launching a community the most efficient means to the end?

• Will my on-line community be large enough to deliver on my objectives?

• What does the community want?

The launch phase of a community can be particularly difficult. You may have to invest money in member recruitment, offer incentives to members for participating, and inflate the activity level on the Web site, this requires resources and time.

If you are successful at building a community, it can bring huge returns on the initial investment. It could be a direct line to customer or employee base, offering a unique opportunity to become a part of your stakeholders’ daily lives, and it will engage them in an ongoing conversation.

Building a community involves more than just the initial investment. You can’t just put up a community page, walk away and expect it to function on its own. An ongoing effort is required to recruit members, encourage activity, provide support, gather feedback, and keep the community dynamic.

It is often a good idea to outsource this community management to a dedicated professional , such as Digital Bridges, who can make your community come alive.

If you are looking to build a valuable asset for your company over the long-term, a customer community can offer enormous benefits in terms of marketing, public relations, customer research and more.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The Semantic Intranet

A Semantic Intranet is an Intranet which can enhance the way employees collaborate because it uses “meaning” to understand the content of the documents stored within its infrastructure.

It is an intelligent tool which separates the meaning from the format and enables this information to be used anywhere.

Whenever documents are created they are allocated snippets of meaning, called metatags, which the Intranet uses in its search to “understand” the content of a document an make it available to the user. Imagine being able to “Google” your Intranet for meaningful content when on a project. You could search for the relevant skills in your organisation and other documents created for similar projects.

There is a frustrating disconnect between Intranets, knowledge and work processes in many organisations. Even the best technology struggles to make sense of the unstructured and meaningless information that burdens most enterprise information systems. Organisations are finally beginning to understand the value of connecting knowledge and process into a seamless experience.

Semantics are effective way to make information systems smarter. If a corporate memory becomes semantically activated, corporate applications can help the users access the corporate memory. The content of the Intranet, the document standards, and meta-information are determined by the organisation, therefore a corporate dictionary could be employed to provide the meta data for documents, and if this dictionary is properly structured into a business ontology, or mind map of metatags, then the Intranet can become a tool for managing actionable knowledge within that business.

Semantic technology means that the power of Intranets to deliver relevant and useful information when needed may soon be fully realised. This is achieved through strategic alignment with the organisational goals, an enterprise view of information flows and a focused understanding of how individuals in an organisation work.

The Intranet should be the strategic backbone of the organisation and semantics may turn it into the powerful and valuable information system it should be.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Systems Theory and The Network Effect – Could the Internet solve the Global Economic Crisis?

We stare in abject fascination at the economic world falling apart. It is not unlike when we watched aghast as two passenger planes flew into the twin towers over and over again. This time it is a different building crashing to the ground each time with different metaphorical jumpers, there goes Lehman Bros, now RBS, KPMG next GM?

The world economy looks set to be in a more severe and protracted down-swing than anything since World War 2. Analysts are starting to factor the risk of a global depression into their scenario planning and the emerging consensus is that we are in for a long period of global stagnation. This means several years of less than 3% global growth. SA is likely to achieve no more than a 0,6% economic growth this year.

However, this is the first recession that we have faced in the Internet Age.

The Internet has changed the way we do business and the way that we think about communication. It is also one of the most transparent manifestations of Systems Theory and the Network Effect in action. Could this new economy be harnessed to mitigate the effect of the economic Bin Laden?

Systems Theory

Systems theory is an interdisciplinary field of science and the study of the nature of complex systems. It is a framework by which one can analyse and describe any group of objects that work in concert to produce a result.

Macroeconomic Theory

Adam Smith believed that the ideal economy is a self-regulating market system that automatically satisfies the economic needs of the people. He described the market mechanism as an “invisible hand” that leads all individuals, in pursuit of their own self-interests, to produce the greatest benefit for society as a whole, and believed that fiscal policy would ensure economic growth.

Keynes argued that markets were not self correcting and that if the economy was in a crisis of confidence and downward spiral, it was necessary for government to use spending to stimulate the economy. It would pay the money back later. Otherwise a general deficit of effective demand would lead to a very long slump.

A crisis in confidence could send stock markets plummeting, meaning companies go out of business, more redundancies and fewer people with jobs, people would have less money to spend, businesses will have fewer customers, therefore more companies go out of business, sound familiar?.

Milton Friedman, on the other hand, argued that the Great Depression was result of a contraction of the money supply, controlled by the Federal Reserve, and not by the lack of investment as Keynes had argued. Ben Bernanke, current Chairman of the Federal Reserve, generally accepts Friedman’s analysis of the causes of the Great Depression.

So, can we use the Internet to stimulate demand, or is it really up to the central Banks to implement a more expansive monetary policy?

The economic implications of wikis, blogs, social-networking, open-source, open-content, file-sharing, peer-production, etc. is starting to gain attention. What are the implications Web 2.0 has for the principles underlying the economy of the modern Internet?

Mass Collaboration

Tapscott and Williams argue in their book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything that the economy of “the new web” depends on mass collaboration. They regard it as important for companies to find ways of how to make profit with the help of Web 2.0. The prospective Internet-based economy that they term “Wikinomics” depends on the principles of openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.

Organisations can prosper with the help of Web 2.0: Companies can design and assemble products in collaboration with their customers, the traditionally passive buyers of editorial and advertising can take active, participatory roles in value creation.

Tapscott and Williams suggest that modern business strategies are “models where masses of consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners and even competitors co-create value in the absence of direct managerial control.^” They see the outcome as an economic democracy.

Others in the debate agree that value-creation increasingly depends on harnessing open source, user content generation, networking, sharing and peering, but disagree that this will result in an economic democracy, predicting a subtle form and deepening of exploitation, in which Internet-based global outsourcing reduces labour-costs by transferring jobs from workers in wealthy nations to workers in poorer nations.

In such a view, the economic implications of the new web might include on the one hand the emergence of new business-models based on global outsourcing, whereas on the other hand non-commercial online platforms could undermine profit-making and anticipate a co-operative economy.

The Network Effect

In economics and business, a network effect is the effect that one user of a service has on the value of that service to other people.

Mobile phones are an example; the more people own mobiles, the more valuable the phone is to each owner because he can call additional people. This creates a positive externality because a user does not purchase their phone intending to create value for other users, but does so in any case.

Network effects become significant after a certain critical has been achieved. At the point of critical mass, the value obtained from the good or service is greater than or equal to the price paid for the good or service. As the value of the good is determined by the user base, this implies that after a certain number of people have subscribed to the service or purchased the good, that additional people will subscribe to the service or purchase the good due to the positive usefulness : price ratio.

A key business concern, if we are to create macroeconomic growth using the network effect, must then be how to attract users prior to reaching critical mass. One way is to rely on extrinsic motivation, such as payment, free use, or a request for friends to sign up. A more natural strategy is to build a system that has enough value without network effects, at least to early adopters. Then, as the number of users increases, the system becomes even more valuable and is able to attract a wider user base.

It is possible that the dynamics of the new economy could create robust networks, through the complex systems made possible by web 2.0, working in collaboration to create macroeconomic growth in a very different economic order than we have seen in the past, only history will tell.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Creating High Performance Organisations Using Interactive Intranets

What makes it possible for some companies to transform into high performance organisations, and achieve great success compared to other companies in the same market? There is no holy grail to high performance organisations, but there are key patterns that drive this performance.

Many businesses express the desire for a transformation into a high performance organisation that is fit and friendly for human life. Yet this transformation remains the exception to the rule. Even in the face of great desire and evidence of the superiority of high performance organisation cultures, why is the progress so slow?

There are several drivers that are required to overcome the inertia and fuel the high performance organisation. The predominant driver of entrenching a high performance culture is to have a demonstrable values shift, which requires crossing a personal transformation threshold where every employee moves from an independent silo approach to an interdependent and inclusive approach.

This can be achieved by translating the core values of an organisation into processes which are entrenched in “the way we do things around here”. One of the fundamental ways of doing this is to create an interactive Intranet that is based on the core values, processes, workflows and content structures of the organisation, and which at the same time, transparently illustrates the end to end business value chain to the employees. Once employees recognise that they are part of a system that they can identify with, they will understand which behaviours are required from them.

Let’s say, for example, that the core values are “quality” and “innovation”. The first step is to identify how we demonstrate quality and innovation. Is it a failure rate of less than one in a thousand, or is it one new product every six months that provides a return on investment that exceeds 35%?

Once we understand the outcomes we can begin to design the processes that will get us to those outcomes. Where are the Quality Assurance check points, how do we innovate in this company? This is built into workflow and incorporated into the interactive Intranet and other technologies that employees use daily. For example an interactive virtual innovation space can be made available to all the employees with a common interest, regardless of their position in the organisational hierarchy. Virtual reward systems could be displayed on the individual employee’s personal profile.

In order to ensure that high performance is further entrenched into the Intranet, a knowledge or content management strategy should also be devised to ensure that there is a single version of the truth and that it is explicit in all processes. We need to ensure that both the documents and the on-line conversations are captured in their original work context for all who need to understand them.

Another important driver of high performance organisations is to leverage powerful communication to energise the system. The executive team must ensure that everyone communicates the same message throughout the organisation.

In a knowledge worker environment, this too can be done through an interactive Intranet, where communication takes the form of blogs and wikis as well as instant messaging between employees.

The advantage of using an interactive Intranet is that employees can ask questions for clarification that can be shared with other employees. This kind of dialogue must be aimed at driving sticky relationships and reducing the misunderstandings that occur in siloed thinking.

The executive team must involve the entire workforce to develop a common understanding and competence of the high performance organisation drivers to create an inclusive culture that is energising and reinforces sustainable competitiveness.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The Importance of Usability Testing

How many times have you tried to download an application or use a newer version of the same software only to give up in frustration when you can’t navigate your way through to what you need? The adoption of technology is predicated on three basic tenants, it must be easy to use, useful and make you look good – simple really. If your application is not user friendly, chances are people will not come back, nor recommend it to their network, and your effort will be wasted.

It is often said that software developers must not write the user manuals because they don’t understand the problems that a user experiences. This is where usability testing comes in. It is an important step in the development of any application that we check to see whether the application is designed to fit the users’ needs.

Application usability is achieved by first understanding the users’ needs, their actual goals, challenges and limitations they face, or the unique or unexpected ways in which they use the application. These needs are determined by collecting data on representative users’ interactions with the application. This data must be objective, based on actual performance, as well as subjective, based on the users’ impressions and preferences. It must include measurements such as task time, errors, learning rate, satisfaction, cognitive load, level of frustration etc.

Once the users’ needs and challenges have been clearly defined, then this information should be incorporated into a specification for the developers to build the application.

An important part of usability is the testing of the system after it has been built. It is often a good idea to collect the data of a fictitious user who would be using the application and to run through the entire process from start to finish, as though you were the user. This illuminates any gaps in logic that may have crept into the application.

Once the user testing has been tested on a fictitious character, then real users need to test the application and criticise it in a controlled environment. Only when you get the thumbs up from real users should you unleash your application on the market.

It is important to remember that your application remains in permanent beta with constant and never ending improvements and as such, usability testing is a constant step in your application development.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Thinking about eMarketing

With the digital population growing, companies can no longer afford to overlook eMarketing. We need to build an on-line presence, create brand awareness, drive leads and engage with existing and potential consumers. Here are two critical strategic objectives which lend themselves to eMarketing and the ways they can be implemented to create holistic and successful on-line and off-line marketing campaigns.

Create a Digital Footprint

The first step to eMarketing success is establishing an on-line presence. Website development provides the central hub upon which all future activities are built. It has to be thought through carefully in order to ensure that it is aligned with your off-line brand, not only in the iconography, but also in the messaging and user experience. If you sell rustic food, an upmarket corporate style of writing will not contribute to your web presence, even if your look at feel are the same as they are in the real world.

Once your website is place, you need to look at social media, web PR, on-line advertising, industry blogs and viral marketing to extend your digital footprint beyond your website to drive potential and existing customers back to your site. This should be a dedicated activity.

With a digital presence comes more potential customers and an additional revenue channel. You need to ensure that people can find you by using search engine optimisation (SEO), which will ensure you are better represented on the SERPs (search engine results pages) – increasing your exposure to potential leads and driving traffic to your website.

Using the many avenues for driving on-line presence presents unique advantages over traditional brand awareness drivers. For example, the upfront costs of a website are considerably lower than those of TV and, with reduced cost and time lag, it’s possible to mould your presence to opportunities and risks in a near real-time fashion as they arise. Furthermore, the economies of scale apply, it costs the same to open a market of 100 000 potential consumers as it would 10 million.

Conversion optimisation makes the most of each unique visitor coming to your website – subtly directing them to meet your marketing objectives. By implementing conversion optimisation, more traffic is turned into viable business leads. This improves the profitability of your web presence and your overall business.

Engaging your audience

There are various channels to drive engagement and build relationships with your consumers. By exploiting one of the two key advantages of on-line marketing – one-to-one engagement and economies of scale – it becomes possible to meet consumers’ particular needs.

Social media provides a useful channel to spread your marketing. By creating a platform for engagement, you are opening the door to further engagement and this allows for a relationship to be developed. However, all engagements should empower and enrich the relationship rather than directly sell products. A simple measure to establish whether you are on track is to make sure that no more than 10% of the content is focused on sales. This encourages the development of a relationship built on transparent and honest communication.

Provided engagements have clear pay-offs to the users’ time investment (financial, social or emotional), users will continue to engage. It’s important to remember that your consumers are as time-starved as you and need to provide value in exchange for their time.

This is fundamentally changing the way we communicate with our consumers. The new focus is on empowering them to communicate on your behalf, therefore increasing the impact of their trust – the perfect opportunity for social media marketing.

eMarketing doesn’t stop at the creation of a digital footprint, driving of leads or the creation of a platform for engagement. One should also consider the possibility of internal business process improvement through integration of certain processes with your web presence. CRM can be perfectly integrated to improve consumer satisfaction through targeted and timely engagements. This reduces the fixed cost overhead of staff and replaces it with the low variable cost of a “per engagement” model which can grow and be shaped as your needs develop.

From these engagements deeper customer insight can be gained which can be used to improve the effectiveness of your current and future marketing strategies.

As the on-line population continues to skyrocket, eMarketing provides the competitive edge necessary to excel in today’s highly competitive environment.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Mitigating the economic downturn by unlocking the power of the web

Web 2.0 offers an unparalleled opportunity for businesses to compete and thrive in a time of mounting economic difficulty – yet incredibly many have little idea of what 2.0 means. Far too often, it is dismissed as a buzzword – but it could hold the key to the survival of many businesses as the slowdown kicks in.

Today businesses are challenged by a global slowdown in the economy, rising inflation, severe talent shortages, cheap imports from the East, the rise of the knowledge worker and a new tech savvy generation Y entering the economic landscape. Also, for the first time, user driven web 2.0 technologies are changing the balance of power between the corporate and its stakeholders, be they consumers, employees or the public.

The last few years have seen the launch and successful rise of creative online businesses offering clients faster and cheaper solutions that they would have previously looked to traditional outlets for. Sector after sector is benefiting from the speed, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of online services, and increasingly, crowd-sourcing and collaboration enabling innovation in new categories and market sectors.

The initial reaction of many big businesses was to batten down the hatches and prepare themselves to ride out this “Facebook craze” which was wasting employees’ time.  Now, the recession looms large in the minds of marketers, the industry is experiencing a noticeable shift in attitudes towards web 2.0 and the new business models it enables.

The “network effect” is becoming ever more important in that for every additional member of a community; the greater the value to each of the community members, and this is fundamentally changing the business models. No longer are communities just “eyeballs” to be advertised to they are now dynamic and demanding sources of revenue.

Businesses are reaching out to online communities to deliver efficient, effective and economical solutions. Perhaps most notable is the range of industries that are embracing such alternatives. All evidence is pointing to web 2.0 being an even more remarkable opportunity than even the most fervent of supporters may have thought.

This is a fascinating time to be in marketing. As we grapple to find ways to do more with less, the smart decision makers are expanding their horizons to include more creative and resourceful solutions to their business challenges. In a broad sense, this means that digital and PR solutions are being implemented to a greater degree than ever before, even replacing some pricey traditional executions. From a sourcing standpoint, marketers are engaging with open-source models, where they’re finding increased return on their investment, as well as global input on their brand.

It will be interesting to see what kinds of businesses are born out of this increased willingness to explore non-traditional models. What other industries will change because necessity, does, in fact, breed creativity?

As businesses continue to adopt these tools, decision-makers looking to leapfrog the competition need to move fast. Web 2.0 tools are being adopted in companies across all industries, and any business which fails to recognise that runs the risk of being left behind.

Consumer Web 2.0 technology is a real force that is changing how business is getting done, and any company looking to improve performance should be taking a closer look at how it can benefit from driving business the Web 2.0 way.

Social media and networking sites provide the platform for companies to collaborate, share information and expertise and market their goods. In fact, all over the web, communities of like-minded firms are supporting each other with advice, swapping internet links and trading together.

The interactivity of Web 2.0 also allows an authentic and direct line of communication between a company and its customers – invaluable any time, but essential in the light of the challenging business environment.

The tools of Web 2.0 – blogging, podcasting, photo and video sharing – have been adopted by millions of consumers because they are simple and powerful communication methods. For that reason, they are ideal for businesses to use in their marketing strategies.

A company that is prepared to engage in an open, honest dialogue, whether it be through a blog or video, with its customers, is being sensible and shrewd. These days very few consumers are prepared to just listen to announcements and one-way broadcasts without being able to give their feedback.

However, there are still far too many companies which have not tapped into the rich potential arising from web 2.0 because they either are not aware of it or feel it is irrelevant or too complicated or they underestimate its power.

This reticence may be in part explained by existing attitudes to the internet generally. Many businesses are not seeing a measurable return from their websites or online marketing and sales.

There are good reasons for this. Running a website can be a costly, complex business that often requires the support of third parties to build, maintain and market. Many organisations regard their website as a brochure for the organisation and have not contextualised in the business strategy as a whole. Larger businesses to use paid search and display ads supported by a comprehensive Search Engine Optimisation strategy to ensure a good Google rating.

If we put the problems of traditional online marketing alongside the growing importance of the internet as a research and purchasing medium for consumers, it becomes apparent that we desperately need to find a better way to promote ourselves online. This is where Web 2.0 is vital.

To attract customers, it is necessary to participate in online “communities” relevant to your business. That also means engaging in an ongoing, meaningful dialogue with customers on interactive networking sites about products, prices and service.

The social web has changed the landscape of e-commerce forever. Audiences are fragmented and this means customers are harder to reach but they are surfing the web for information about goods in ever-growing numbers before buying. If these trends continue, then any company wishing to succeed has to embrace the interaction encapsulated by Web 2.0 to build strong, trusting relationships with its customers.

Businesses can benefit from the power of social networking precisely because the tools of Web 2.0 are well suited to the personal and conversational marketing style that already works to their benefit offline.

Firms large and small have started to take part in social networks and internet communities but the results are mixed. Some are successfully attracting customers and boosting the bottom line, others are not. Of greater concern is that most have not taken the plunge at all with many approaching the internet in general with apprehension.

These businesses should realise that Web 2.0 offers relevant and powerful tools for them to promote themselves and build an oniline brand. They should stop hiding – and start using it to their advantage.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Word-of-Mouth and eMarketing

The Internet has brought many unique benefits to marketing, one of which being lower costs and greater ability to engage with a global audience. The interactive nature of eMarketing, both in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses, is a unique quality of the medium. eMarketing refers to digital media such as the Internet, e-mail, wireless media, the management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management systems.
It also refers to the placement of media along different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimisation (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing and Web 2.0 strategies.
Word-of-mouth (WOM) principles play an important role in eMarketing. People no longer need to wait to meet someone in person to discuss a book they’ve read or an event they attended. Today they simply generate content in their social networks letting everyone know their views. For live events, people broadcast themselves via Twitter for real-time content generation not to mention the interaction as others tweet, retweet, comment, like, or post reactions.
The traditional push communication techniques are becoming less effective while still costly. We have transitioned into a media environment meant to be about conversations where the media and its message represent the starting point for the generation of meaning in social media. Digital media has relinquished the control to audience.
If you’re actively using eMarketing, you have a higher chance of being heard, connected and engaged when you’re part of the WOM network. eMarketing should be used to manage reputation and generate awareness. Brands should care about what people are saying and how they are saying it. They must actively listen and participate in order to humanise the relationship through interactions and manage their reputations.
Whether you’re a blogger, a marketer, or an entrepreneur your opinion counts and can be contagious. It’s now possible and easy to circulate your message via the new digital channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube. The key is to facilitate effective word-of-mouth campaign through these communities.
Each time you’re able to influence experts, opinion leaders, or people with authority you’ll instantaneously gain a little more credibility and access to their fan base. Then the collective minds with shared visions will continue to spread your message forming the viral wave pushing all the way.
If you want to attract relevant audience to your branded social network, you must do more than just spam visitors with self-promoting ads. You need to offer compelling value that keeps your audience engaged as well as perpetuating the interaction. The more interactivity a social network platform allows their users to have, the more engaged users will be which often leads to a greater chance of influencing the network effectively. This is why blogs are still amongst the most influential social media because they encourage bloggers to interact with their audience in a simple and easy fashion.
Although eMarketing is complex, it is critical to the future of any organisation

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Creating Productive Work Environments using Enterprise 2.0

Intranets are not known for their dynamism, employees do not gleefully consult them when they get into work, but all that is set to change with the advent of the Interactive Intranet

An Intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet technologies to share any part of an organisation’s information or operational systems with its employees. In the past Intranets were created as a form of hierarchical communication between the organisation and its employees, but with the advances in the web, modern Intranets are becoming dynamic communication systems for organisations and their employees to engage and collaborate with each other. This has important implications for the business.

The Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is a term used to denote the balance of the rewards and benefits that are received by employees in return for their performance at the workplace. Personal job satisfaction is increasingly becoming a major factor where financial factors were key motivators in the past. EVP is critical to attracting, retaining and engaging the right people. This is where the power of the modern web comes in, in creating Interactive Intranets that foster job satisfaction and productivity.

Frederick Herzberg’s two-factor theory of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation distinguishes between: Motivators; (e.g. challenging work, recognition, responsibility) which give positive satisfaction, and Hygiene factors; (e.g. status, job security, salary and fringe benefits) that do not motivate if present, but, if absent, result in demotivation.

The factors that motivate people can change over their lifetime, but “respect for me as a person” is one of the top motivating factors at any stage of life. Interactive Intranets enable employees to profile themselves and build their personal brands within the organisation. Knowledge Workers, are motivated if they feel they are seen and heard and recognised for making a contribution. They require ongoing accurate informative feedback for performance management.

When organisations recognise that the Intranet is the strategic backbone to their business, then they can use individual employee profiling, linked to their performance metrics to manage, recognise and communicate with knowledge workers more effectively.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

The Power of Avatars

With the modern Internet, content has taken on a whole new dimension. In the middle of a global financial meltdown, marketers are moving to digital channels because it offers highly targeted, trackable reach to specific audiences at great prices. Throw in the increasingly influential viral impact of social networking and you’ve got a communication channel that can save the company advertising spend in hard times.

But getting noticed is becoming an increasingly tough business and can only be achieved through dedication and great content.

In the 21st century content is consumed at such speed that enough is never enough. Even if your brand has great content that is sought after by readers, Internet users and twitterers, to keep feeding the beast can become an insurmountable challenge. While the user-generated content (UGC) phenomenon can lift the content pressure, in South Africa, we don’t have enough web users to make a niche site viable or sustainable in terms of good UGC.

In today’s social networking and user commentary environment, brands really need to live their image. Information can be consumed over multiple devices, and if you offer people information that actually adds value to their lives, they will be more receptive to your message, and therefore your brand.

What makes producing attractive digital content such an issue is the perceived conflict between digital and real worlds. Great digital content relies on being present and understanding real world communities.

If you want great content for your target audience, you need to understand that audience, you need an authentic presence in that community and you need to know how to speak to them in their language. If you have an authentic presence within a community you will know instinctively how to service it properly.

We recommend the use of an avatar who becomes the specialist and the thought leader for the community, in other words the personality of the brand. This avatar should be represented across the major social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter etc. so that it participates in the audience’s social networking environment.

Most importantly, the avatar needs to be managed by a dedicated employee or team, who are empowered to solve problems if they arise. This avatar then becomes the accessible face of your brand.

When we develop avatars for clients, we go through an exercise of determining what the ideal personality would be to service their customers, should she be a sassy sexy blond who services writers, or a conservative accountant who supports decision makers in the financial sector? Then we build the profile from there adding demographics and psychographics to the character and creating a content architecture, which is a framework of the main themes that the avatar will address in order to deliver on its business objectives.

Here is an example, if the main aim of the avatar is to position the company as “An Employer of Choice” then the avatar could be a fictitious senior HR manager, who is attractive, warm and friendly and approachable and who blogs and tweets etc. about employee engagement and what her company is doing for its employees. She will be creating content that the readers can comment on, and if she is skilful, she can start a very meaningful conversation to the company’s benefit, with the kind of employees they wish to attract.

Generally we recommend that the avatar be a cartoon character. Audiences are not stupid and they will immediately recognise a fake blog that is being run by the marketing team. However, if the avatar is a cartoon character the audience will understand that you are not trying to trick them, but rather making a concerted effort to engage them.

Avatars represent a serious and strategic business opportunity for companies to interact and relate to their audiences in a way they never have before.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

10 Considerations for starting a web-based business in South Africa

I am often approached by people with fabulous ideas for on-line businesses in South Africa. Many of the ideas are great and the demand should be phenomenal because they solve the structural problems in both our Macro and Micro economy, but South Africa is a capricious mistress when creating successful online businesses.

As with off-line businesses, perhaps more so, you need to develop a strategy for the business. Setting up an on-line business goes beyond the idea and the development of an on-line application. You need to do some research; understand the technology opportunities, realise the investment implications, consider your revenue models, target markets, marketing, sales channels, creating competitive advantage, operations, scoping and application development etc.

Here is a check list for Innovators and Entrepreneurs when thinking about starting an on-line business in South Africa.

1. Understand the technology opportunities

Technologies are emerging every day, social media opportunities abound, mobile apps are prolific and any of these could contribute to the success or otherwise of your business. The use of technology may be determined by age, wealth levels, education or even the life-stage of your audience.

2. Investment

The cost of setting up an on-line business are minimal, for several thousand Rand a web developer can build you a website, a payment gateway will cost you some more, but the biggest cost in on-line businesses in South Africa is the cost of customer acquisition and service.

It’s easy in the US when you have ninety million Internet users to attain critical mass, why you could sell gold fish furniture on line and make a fortune.

3. Revenue Models

There are countless revenue models to choose from in South Africa, including the subscription model (which rarely works in SA), eCommerce, Advertising, Application Reseller, Data Aggregation and many more.

The revenue model depends on a variety of factors from your audience, your network, your product, geography etc.

It is also important to understand that while there have been some notable exceptions, most online businesses experience a very slow flat start, picking up incrementally until they reach a tipping point at which stage growth becomes exponential. This may take a number of years. Until you reach this growth phase, your investment will be bigger than your revenue, and so you had better be sure that you have alternative personal revenue streams

4. Target Markets

This includes market research into the current Internet psychographics and demographics in South Africa which are incredibly dynamic. Three years ago I started an on-line business for the township market. I threw everything at it and … nothing. All of a sudden, this year, after it is was all but forgotten, my market is sophisticated enough and has sufficient access to the web to start using it.

Business to Business markets react differently to Business to Consumer markets, niche audiences react differently to large generic audiences. How big are your target markets, where will you reach them, how networked are they, what does their risk profile look like?

5. Marketing

Your biggest investment in an on-line business is marketing. The investment may take the form of money, resources, people or time. You need to decide how you are going to create awareness, educate audiences, drive them to your site, persuade them to buy etc.

In the past we used to say that “Content is King”, today we believe that “Search is King”. Unless your audience can find you on-line you are dead in the water. You need to ensure that customers reach your application when they are looking for what you have to offer.

In order to keep people coming back to your on-line business, it is often a good idea to provide them with value beyond their expectations. One way to do this is to create “communities of common interest” where you let users network with each other around subjects that are relevant to your industry. If you sell travel on-line, let them talk to each other about destinations they have visited.

Once again in South Africa, you are unlikely to get audience of a sufficient size to make these communities of interest self sustainable and dynamic enough to maintain your customers’ attention. You will need to manually manage these communities in order to ensure that there are sufficient members and that there is enough activity to keep it interesting. We often recommend the use of an Avatar whose job is to act as a “digital host” to your customers, creating blogs, starting discussion forums, and posting interesting articles etc.

6. Sales Channels

Sometimes, if you are lucky, the web is your only sales channel, but usually, when creating robust on-line businesses, you have to cross over into the real world. Sales channels can include online, high end strategic business development, direct face to face sales, partnership with complimentary services, channelling through organisational Intranets or sales through industry bodies, to name a few.

7. Creating Competitive Advantage

Strong branding is the key to online business success. Audiences must understand and relate to your value proposition. They must be willing and able to endorse you through their own (social or business) networks. They may need to interact directly with personality which is the brand through commenting, sharing, blogging etc.

8. Operations

Operational management goes beyond ensuring that the site is up and running, but could include product creation, storage and distribution networks or contract management etc. If your fulfilment doesn’t work in the real world, your on-line business is doomed to failure.

The modern web (web 2.0) requires that sites are dynamic, constantly evolving, changing and improving to meet customer requirements and to feature in the relevant search results. Content management is one of the most important ongoing operational considerations and a key factor in on-line business success.

9. Scoping

People adopt and use technologies if they find them useful, easy to use and they make them look good. Considerable energy must be expended in identifying how and exactly why people are doing business on-line with you. User Requirement Specification and Functional Specifications must be drawn up in order to ensure that you don’t alienate customers as soon as they start interacting with your application.

10. Development

I have deliberately left development to last. Development is like housekeeping, it is a hygiene factor. It will not make your site, but could very easily break your business. Choose your technology and your developer with care. I prefer to use local developers who are within “throttle range” so that I can actively monitor progress. I also like to have them on an SLA and a monthly retainer for the constant and inevitable improvements.

In conclusion, South Africa is ripe for Digital Entrepreneurs, we desperately need access to products and services which enable us to overcome infrastructure problems and to take advantage of the opportunities that the geographically and (almost) sociographically unfettered modern Internet provides.

It is not difficult to start a successful on-line business in South Africa, it is hard work which requires a lot of strategic thinking and investment, but it is well worth your while.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Can South African Banks regain their Reputations after the Economic Crisis?

The financial crisis of 2008 spawned not just a deep recession but a structurally different business environment globally. This restructured economic order, requires some new thinking, particularly for retail banks.

Many retail banks responded instinctively to the recession, without giving any thought to the aftermath of their actions, and there is a growing perception they have violated their ’social’ contract with their customers.

In the heady days of courtship, when banks are acquiring customers, they make promises of service and understanding to clients. They position themselves as suitable partners for the long term, especially when it came to buying the major assets in peoples’ lives, houses and cars. Customers commit themselves to the relationship by signing up for twenty year bonds.

Up until mid 2008 it was rational to assume that a customer who didn’t pay back a loan was unwilling to, or incapable of doing so in the very short term, through incompetence or poor planning. It was also perfectly reasonable for a bank to divorce a client that wasn’t committed to the mutually beneficial aspects of the relationship.

When the crisis loomed, many people were retrenched and entrepreneurs, who had been successfully trading for years, suddenly hit a brick wall, where money just stopped coming in regardless of what they did.

Banks responded in a pre-crisis manner, based on the  economic assumptions that non payers were the bad guys. They came down harshly on offenders, foreclosing, handing over to debt collection agencies who are used to dealing with recalcitrant bad guys, harassed and heckled already devastated clients, who’s only fault was not to have foreseen a recession when even the economists didn’t see it coming. Their way of helping customers was to offer quick sells of customer’s homes before handing them over to the courts. They reported gleefully of moving more inventory through the system.

What they effectively did was to kick their customers while they were down, and then grind them into the ground. Banks should have looked at this as a relationship-building opportunity and demonstrated that customer loyalty was not misplaced. Instead they alienated a captive audience, who though they might not have been happy, were unlikely to have migrated in droves away from their respective banks.

Had the banks taken a long term view on their client relationships and their financial position, they could have operationalised a single view of customer strategy and considered the customer as the complex entity he or she really is. This would have enabled them to rationalise their exposure to the customer’s risk and facilitated the renegotiation of the terms of their relationships so that the customer would retain their lifetime value to the bank, instead of squeezing them for the present value in a recession.

Take for example, a regularly paying bondholder who has been with the bank for ten years, he hits a problem in the global recession. Judging by his history and paying behaviour, he is likely to get back on his feet in the next twelve months and resume repaying any loans regularly. His house is still worth more than the bond, mitigating the risk that the bank will not be able to recoup its money in future. Surely it makes sense to arrange for a 12 month payment holiday and raise his interest rates by 2%, for the rest of the bond period, thus retaining his Life Time Value to the bank, rather than selling his house off at auction at 50% of its value, alienating the customer, even when he has been rehabilitated and incurring the cost of acquiring an unknown customer from another bank which has similarly disenfranchised their relationship?

The banks add insult to injury by managing their collection processes so badly, that once they have collected their debts in full (and some blood, just for good measure), their alienated and bruised customer keeps receiving SMS’s from the lawyers threatening judgements if they don’t pay up.

Many banks do not understand their customer’s footprint across their financial institutions. In fact some banks are set up on the Owner-Entrepreneur model, because in good times this facilitates the accountability and entrepreneurial behaviour that agile companies need to succeed.

In the past this was a risky practise because it meant that the bank would miss out of cross and up-sell opportunities. Today the risk is much higher. Many banks who noticed a change in consumer behaviour when the economy turned, panicked. They exacerbated the problem at every client interface, by freezing overdrafts and making them due immediately, or by freezing access bonds, so that the customers who could have made payments on most of the accounts or were at risk of falling marginally short on payments, (for example meeting 90% of their commitments to the bank) were tipped into the emotional and financial abyss of bankruptcy. Where they could have had the car repossessed and saved the house, they lost everything.

The banks did not consider that the inventory that they were “flushing” through their system, was the life and heart of their customer, their home, the place where they loved and celebrated, brought up children and created a lifetime of memories. Customers are not going to be so quick to forgive banks, the cost of acquisition and creating loyalty amongst customers has just escalated through the roof.

The breadth and depth of today’s reputational challenge is a consequence not just of the retail bank’s instinctive responses to the speed, severity and unexpectedness of recent economic events but also of underlying shifts in the importance of Web-based participatory media, or web 2.0.

The Modern Internet and the era of Social Media are promoting wider, faster scrutiny of banks and rendering traditional public-relations tools less effective in addressing reputational challenges.

It will be transparent, decisive action that builds strong reputations in the future. Doing so effectively means stepping up both the sophistication and the internal coordination of reputation efforts. Some companies, for example, not only use cutting-edge attitudinal-segmentation techniques to understand the concerns of customers better but also mobilise cross-functional teams to gather intelligence and respond quickly to far-flung reputational threats.

One key is to cut through organisational barriers that impede such efforts through committed senior leadership who have an opportunity to differentiate their companies by demonstrating real statesmanship. An energised, enlightened and empowered public will expect nothing else.

The proliferation of Web-based platforms, has given individuals and organisations new tools they use to subject banks to greater and faster scrutiny. This communication revolution also means that certain issues (such as poor customer service) can be picked up by “citizen journalists” or bloggers and generate outrage on a much larger scale.

As a result, what formerly were operational risks resulting from failed or inadequate processes, people, or systems now often manifest themselves as reputational risks whose costs far exceed those of the original missteps.

In this dispersed and multifaceted environment, banks must collect information about reputational threats across the organisation, analyse that information in sophisticated ways, and address problems by taking action to mitigate them. This requires significant collaboration, coordination, commitment and an ability to act quickly.

Many retail banks are structured around centralised corporate-affairs departments that can’t monitor or examine diverse reputational threats with sufficient sophistication. Moreover, traditional PR can’t deal with many concerns, which must often be addressed by changing business operations and conducting two-way conversations. Managers of business units such as home loans or credit cards, have a better position for spotting potential challenges but often fail to recognise their reputational significance. This is often an unintentioned consequence of remuneration systems designed by financial managers, not being aligned to marketing strategies. Internal communication about reputational risks may be inhibited by the absence of consistent methodologies for tracking and quantifying those risks. Accountability for managing problems is often blurred.

As a result, responses to reputational issues can be short term, ad hoc, and defensive, and therein lies a problem that companies must solve quickly: even as reputational challenges boost the importance of good PR, companies will struggle if they rely on PR alone, with little insight into the thinking and operational root causes of their reputational problems.

A logical starting point for companies seeking to raise their game is to put in place an effective early-warning system to make executives aware of reputational problems quickly. Most companies are quite good at tracking press mentions, and many are beginning to monitor the multitude of Web-based voices whose power is beginning to rival the mainstream media’s. However, doing these things effectively, while an important prerequisite for stepping up engagement with stakeholders, isn’t the toughest task facing organisations.

To prepare for and respond to reputational threats, we suggest that retail banks should emphasise these priorities.

• First, they need to assemble enough facts to gain a rich understanding of their customer base as it manifests itself across the entire organisation, not only their product preferences but also the psychographic profiles of segments of customers including propensity for risk, social media adoption and behaviours etc.

• Secondly, they must conduct a two way dialogue with their customer (segments).

Banks are still the heart of the South African economy. They pump the funds on which productive human enterprise depends. Banks must perform this role well, with all the diligence we would expect of any expert or custodian of an essential task.

They must refocus on those fundamentals that are unchanged by the financial crisis — their core purpose, customer needs, and capabilities — while recognising that profound market changes have occurred and will affect how these capabilities need to be delivered. Those leaders whose banks can respond to the times and enhance their capabilities will be to­morrow’s winners.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Pulling the Levers

Websites and applications are becoming more mainstream as marketing tools. Marketers are starting to realise that the modern website is becoming the strategic backbone to all their marketing activities and requires extensive investment in terms of thinking and management.

A couple of years ago I went to Palo Alto to understand what was going on in leading edge the world of web 2.0. I interviewed a Ramesh from a company called PB Wiki, and he talked about “pulling the levers”; testing different combinations and variables to see which elicited the best response from their target audience, and optimised their web application’s usability.

With the modern web enabling our audiences to participate in our business world using the web, there is also a high level of risk if we get our digital marketing wrong. It is therefore important, not only to ensure that we get the right people to find our website, but also to have it optimised so that the target market’s behaviour is most beneficial to our company in terms of sales conversions, loyalty or even just ensuring that they get the information that they need.

In internet marketing, multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment to determine which of multiple content variations performs better.

Multivariate testing is used in order to ascertain which content or creative variation produces the best improvement in the defined goals of a website, whether that be user registrations or successful completion of the buying process.

Dramatic increases can be seen through testing different processes, workflow, content, form layouts and even landing page images and background colours. However, not all elements produce the same increase in conversions, and by looking at the results from different tests, it is possible to identify those elements that consistently tend to produce the greatest increase in conversions.

Testing can be carried out on a dynamically generated website by setting up the server to display the different variations of the site in equal proportions to incoming visitors. Statistics on how each visitor went on to behave after seeing the content being tested are be gathered and analysed.

Multivariate testing allows website visitors to vote with their clicks for which content they prefer and will stand the most chance of them proceeding to a defined goal. The testing is transparent to the visitor with all commercial solutions capable of ensuring that each visitor is shown the same content on every visit.

Some websites benefit from constant optimisation as visitor response to creatives and layouts differ by time of day, week or even season.

Multivariate testing is currently an area of high growth in Internet marketing as it helps website owners to ensure that they are getting the most from the visitors arriving at their site. Areas such as search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising bring visitors to a site and have been extensively used by many organisations but multivariate testing allows internet marketers to ensure that visitors are being effectively serviced once they arrive at the site.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Knowledge Management on the Intranet

The success of organisations depends as much on their ability to manage knowledge as it does on the other competitive differentiators such as the strength of its brand, the skills of its employees and depth of customer relationships.

When a knowledge management strategy that delivers on specific business objectives is built into the Intranet, it makes an important contribution to realising organisational value.

Knowledge Management is more than the classification of all the documentation that resides on hard drives, Outlook in-boxes and filing cabinets. It includes the strategies and processes of identifying, capturing, creating, surfacing and leveraging knowledge. Knowledge management also includes strategies to foster a culture of information sharing, collaboration and the implementation of tools that make it easier for employees to share what they learn and, in turn, to learn from each other.

In the past, Intranets have been information repositories, that were not appreciated nor used effectively by employees. Corporate Intranets are gaining new prominence in many organisations, and many companies are revisiting the opportunities provided by knowledge management.

As organisations recover from the economic downturn by consolidating their operations, revisiting their product road-maps and positioning themselves as being more customer-centric, they will start looking to their company Intranets as the backbone for delivery on their business objectives and operational strategies.

Organisations are also discovering that investing in a robust, functioning Intranet is a resource intensive endeavour and that they must look for other benefits when making the business case for an enterprise-wide intranet.

KM initiatives are intellectual capital investments and should be aligned with specific, long-term business goals, as part of the Intranet Strategy.

Communities of interest are groups of people within the organisation who have common interests, work functions or strategic objectives. They share their insights, experiences, learning and knowledge amongst each other for mutual benefit. They are typically loosely structured, decentralised, fluid and built on personal relationships. Communities of Interest are perfectly positioned to support knowledge management projects.

Collaborative environments such as enterprise Intranets force employees to be focused, thoughtful and careful in their contributions. Knowing that what is published may potentially be viewed by the whole organisation, or that other users may have the ability to rate the article, forces the participants to be more disciplined in their contributions. The collaborative, real-time feedback environments of a company Intranet encourage self-policing and more strategic information sharing. The downside is that it can also discourage participants from sharing any information whatsoever.

Well-planned Intranets make perfect platforms for knowledge management initiatives. But most Intranets aren’t deliberately planned; they start out as divisional efforts that are leveraged across the whole organisation. Many of these Intranets hold valuable information but are so decentralised and unstructured that they do not support the organisational requirements.

Knowledge management is becoming immensely important in today’s business environment. Teams that share knowledge perform better. By approaching knowledge management in a simple, tactical fashion where the emphasis is placed on the application of knowledge is the key. Identifying the organisation’s priorities, focussing the communities of Interest on these priorities and upgrading the Intranet to be a more of a knowledge platform will help develop a relevant, meaningful and beneficial knowledge management initiatives.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Configuring the Intranet to deliver on the organisational objectives

The Interactive Intranet is an Enterprise-wide web application which provides the underlying web based support to employees across the organisation. It is the digital manifestation of the business and should form the strategic backbone of everything the organisation does.

In order to ensure that the Interactive Intranet delivers on the organisation’s key business goals and strategies, there are some considerations for the business scoping of the Intranet.

Organisational Design

The Interactive Intranet should be configured in the same way as the organisation in order to deliver on the same business objectives.

Interactive Intranets extend beyond the boundaries of the traditional Internet with its content around the organisation, policies and procedures, employee ordering, general communication forums.

Great Interactive Intranets are also structured in a portal format that supports the unique organisational design of the enterprise, whether it is functional teams, matrixed reporting, teams, divisional structures etc. The related information, documentation, tools and applications for each function, reporting team, division related information and workflow are incorporated within these portals. For example, booking IT training in the IT portal, leave management on the HR Portal, cross divisional product development tools in the product teams.

Organisational Communication

It used to be that internal communication was centralised and hierarchical and from the desk of the CEO.

Modern web based communication is highly customised in order to ensure that it is relevant to each audience and doesn’t result in communication fatigue. This is achieved through audience segmentation.

The employees can be segmented in a variety of different ways, by role, EXCO, Frontline, or by seniority, manager, supervisor, labourer or by function, marketing, HR IT, or by focus, product development, debt collection etc. The optimal segmentation is determined by the organisational requirements.

Each portal manager is responsible for his communication across the organisation. This can be managed using a series of wiki’s, blogs and instant messaging, for example when communicating software upgrades or changes in policies, or sharing the new corporate image guidelines.

Environmental Scanning as a function of creating competitive advantage

Employees need to be able to find sector specific news through RSS feeds, company news as well as industry trends and other useful information on the relevant Intranet portal. The employee needs to be able to “share” and comment on all relevant information with the right individuals on the Intranet. For example, if an industry trend is identified in employee wellness, the HR team should be able to “share” this and their views on it with the Line of Business managers and other HR teams across the organisation.

Collaboration and Knowledge Management

Interactive Intranets are more than “Facebook for Business”, they can be used to manage projects on wiki’s, collaborate on client service and capture the implicit knowledge of the employees through the conversations they have on-line.

Collaboration hinges on an environment that is motivating and inspiring and where people work together to help one another succeed. A key trait of high performing organisations is shared power and high involvement where participation, collaboration, and teamwork are the way of life. This is facilitated through open dialogue and project collaboration using wiki’s RSS feeds and blogs on the Intranet.

Employees must be encouraged to join collaboration forums where they share ideas, documents and knowledge around each project.

Employee Profiles

As far as the employees go, they each need an individual personalised profile, with both public and private sections.

On the public portion of the employee’s profile, the organisation should be able to see the employee’s contact details, skills, experience, projects, awards, education etc. This will help source internal skills more easily throughout the organisation, and enable employees to build their personal brand within the organisation.

On the private portion of the profile, personalised dashboards can be used to link the work that employees are doing to the macro-strategic position of the organisation in a very visual way. The vision of the organisation should be made explicit using tools such as the Balanced Scorecard, and the individual’s key performance areas linked to the organisational scorecard and visualised on the employees’ personal profiles.

Employees should also be able to manage their leave, pension and medical aid options through shared spaces with the HR or Finance division, depending how the organisation is configured.

A word of Caution

When building Enterprisewide Interactive Intranets, it is wise to question both the existing organisational design and the existing processes and workflow. If these are not conducive to delivering on the organisational strategy, then an Interactive Intranet will exacerbate the problem. At Digital Bridges we recommend that the Intranet form part of a larger strategic initiative which reviews the organisation’s direction, destination and how it is going to get there.

The opportunity

The Interactive Intranet is the perfect opportunity to connect with the job, the organisation and the employees, to gain commitment and grow the organisation. It needs to become a strategic asset to the organisation, because it is a key component to the modern organisation’s success.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Employee Engagement using the Interactive Intranet

The Interactive Intranet is an Intranet that has been enabled with web 2.0 tools in order to facilitate interactions between the organisation and its employees and communication and collaboration between the employees themselves.

It is important, as an organisation, to use the Interactive Intranet to engage with your employees rather than merely using it as a tool to communicate at them. By engaging with your employees, you enter into a meaningful conversation with them that is based on a deep understanding of their needs, interests and behaviours. This improves morale, motivation, productivity and loyalty.

The Interactive Intranet is a complex and fragmented environment that offers you multiple channels to create relationships with employees, for example in their communities of interest, forums, eNewsletters, blogs, on Twitter, Linked-in and more.

One of the ways that an Interactive Intranet facilitates this engagement is through the use of profiling. Employees throughout the organisation from the CEO, communication managers, personal assistants debtors clerks etc. should have profiles on the Intranet which they create with their photographs, contact details, qualifications, skills and experience.

These profiles should be, in some part visible to the entire organisation, in other parts visible only to those people who need to see it. For example, leave management on the profile needs only to be visible between the employee, her boss and the payroll team, whereas, when the employee is on leave, everyone needs to be able to see it so that they don’t make assumptions about what is getting done.

As employees work on specific projects, their profiles could be linked to these projects. Awards and commendations could also be featured on their profiles.

Employees should also be given the facility to blog and comment on other people’s blogs. These profiles are an important way for employees to build up their personal brands within the organisation, and for the organisation to understand the skill-sets and experience they have within the employee base.

Employees also need to be enabled to create or join communities of interest, for example a CRM forum, or an employment equity forum. Here they can share ideas and knowledge which improves their ability to do their job more effectively.

When communicating with employees you can segment your communication into groups such as “Frontline Staff”, “The Executive Team”, “Marketing” “The HR Payroll Team” etc. However with your employees’ profiles you can also use these to see the way they conduct their profiles, the projects they are involved in and the communities of interest they join. This makes the Interactive Intranet an extremely powerful tool for understanding your employees’ behaviour. This will give you a better idea of where to engage with them and what they’ll respond to.

Initially you will need to focus a lot of your energy on experimenting to understand exactly what works for your organisation and its employees. The important point to remember is that every interaction with your employees is an opportunity to learn more about them, to strengthen their relationship with the organisation make the most of each interaction.

You’ll need track the success of your campaigns and conversations to see which message employees are responding to. You also need to be tracking the employees’ routes through the Intranet once they’ve logged in so that you can understand their on-line behaviour, where do they go first, what is popular, where do they stop using the functions available to them, do they create communities of interest, collaborate on projects, search for skills, share documents, instant message etc. The use of business intelligence tools and analytics could surface some important employee behaviour patterns. You could develop a mood indicator to measure the state of your organisational culture

What is the content of employees’ public communication with the organisation? One of the most important words in on-line employee engagement is ‘relevancy.’ You need to understand their needs and interests so that you can target them with messages that are relevant to them in the work context within the time frames that they are thinking about what they are doing.

Armed with this information, you are able to filter employees through a conversion funnel that begins with communicating meaningfully with them and ends with a loyal, productive workforce aligned behind your brand.

Interactive Intranets give you the tools you need to understand your employees better so that you can constantly tweak your engagement process and address them with the right messages at the right time to deliver on your strategic mandate.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Creating Social Strategies

Social networks are living, organic communities which display evidence of specific behavioural patterns and “network” effects, because of the “biomatrix” effect.

• “Network” effects refer to the fact that social networks grow in value to the individual members as membership grows, the more people in the network, the better the network is; and

• The “biomatrix” effect is similar to systems theory and has to do with the overall behavioural patterns of networks which are comprised of independent and yet interrelated individuals.

The important lesson from this is that Social Networks are dynamic and subject to influences from the environment and from within. In order to create successful social strategies the Marketer has to recognise that she is a network influencer, from both the inside and without. She is part of the community, and yet it is an outsider at the same time.

Marketers often struggle with how to use social networking sites to reach potential customers because they treat social networks as just another channel to get people to click through to a site, i.e. they try and excerpt an external influence. People seldom click through on advertising on social networks, unless the advert is relevant to them in the context of the network, i.e. an internal influence. Generally, ads are network disrupters, while their presence might reinforce brand awareness, people are not going to leave their networking space to explore purchasing and advertised product.

Marketers need to shift their mindset from Social Media as a medium to Social Strategy as a behaviour.

Social strategies are all about building and becoming part of the community and communicating with them, rather than advertising at them. A good social strategy essentially uses the same principles that made on-line social networks attractive in the first place, enabling people to network better, build their own personal brands, reminisce, build strong business relationships etc.

To execute on social strategies, the Marketer needs to re-look and make the necessary changes to her real world and digital offerings to make them more social and leverage group dynamics. There are a lot of businesses saying, ‘Let’s tweet or create a Facebook page or let’s advertise.’ but this is not a social strategy. The fact that someone can become a fan of your business on Facebook, or follow you on Twitter doesn’t mean that you have engaged with them or part of their community. Engagement is all about creating value, you need to provide a digital platform for them to validate themselves, network with others, find useful information etc.

A social strategy recognises that you are a part of the community and as such you have to respect the rules of the community which primarily go around “what’s in it for me the community member?”.

The offering or communication must therefore appeal to the community member’s psychographics (reviving that wonderful memory, remembering that smell) as he encounters your social media campaign. The Marketer should provide value to the community, whether it is disseminating information, enabling members to communicate with each other, or providing them with a way to share their memories.

The key to making social media work is to have a specific plan and a goal for the behaviour you want to elicit. You cannot expect tweets and YouTube videos to equate to more traffic and more sales. Marketers need to understand the desired metrics of a successful social media campaign, are they more traffic to the website, building brand equity or greater brand awareness etc. Social Media can also be used to prevent bad press before it happens, ensure that a loyal community rallies around a cause or create a community that will generate good press.

Once a goal has been identified then it a plan must be developed, just like for any other business objective. Metrics must be set to measure success and tools implemented to measure ROI.

This is an experimental world, nobody has all the answers because it is so new and constantly changing as different consumers and late adopters come on board. Marketers should not be afraid to reach out, make mistakes and be vulnerable. Even if you blunder, tourists will forgive you if you’re transparent. Most importantly, recognise that this is the tourists’ terrain and the you are a guest in their world. Don’t patronise you host, rather constantly look for value to the audience.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Using BI to analyse organisational networks provides valuable insights

Organisational network analysis is the use of Business Intelligence (BI) on the relationships, processes, workflow and exchanges between employees. It can be used by businesses to identify potential opportunities or disruptions.

Work is routinely conducted between employees, partners and customers without a clear understanding of the roles that people play in the organisational network or quantifying the exchanges that occur.

Interactive Intranets provide employees with their own profiles and access to web 2.0 apps such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, document sharing and other collaborative tools. Companies that have interactive Intranets, can capture and analyse data as their employees work and use it to understand the hidden economic patterns within the organisation.

Organisational network analysis explores the constraints, connections, communication and information flows between individuals, or nodes, in a network. Businesses can use organisational network analysis to develop strategies by identifying, amplifying and exploiting business patterns and capitalising on opportunities that emerge.

There are three variations of organisational network analysis that organisations can use to develop strategies.

• Employee Analysis

Determines which employees are critical to business performance, overcommitted or bottlenecks to getting work done, or untapped sources of insight. Companies can identify which employees are maximising their performance by collaborating effectively across the functional silos in the organisation.

They can also understand the real processes as they actually manifest themselves during the employees’ working day, rather than as they are designed to work. Very often employees adapt processes to work for them, this may suggest more practical ways to get the work done, but it might also indicate hidden risky practise.

• Influence analysis

Here we identify influential people, associations or trends. This can help an organisation understand which employees are most influential or competent so that they have a higher presence in the organisation. It can surface recruitment and attrition patterns which could influence the culture of the organisation and the effectiveness of its design.

• Economic Analysis

This examines the transactions and relationships that create economic value. It can help an organisation understand which stakeholders in their value networks (suppliers, partners, coalitions) are meeting their performance commitments. The relationship between value and time can be examined and greater efficiencies be built into the work environment.

This is analysis can be used to optimise the allocation of people, processes and information as new patterns emerge. It also supports a performance-driven culture, by focusing on lead indicators and using measurable results to drive behaviour.

Organisational network analysis provides intelligence about the networks on which businesses depend to achieve performance goals by providing tools with dashboards that summarise key parameters.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Approaching Social Networking from a Social Sciences Perspective

Social Media is restructuring society, marketers need to adapt if they are going to participate in the opportunities this offers us.

Throughout time, communication systems have formed the foundations of society and have determined the development of civilisations. The parameters of communication have always been time and geography. Some communication occurs over time when the transmitting party and the receiving party are not in the same time dimension, for example reading books. Other communication requires the parties to be in the same geography and time, for example face to face. There are many permutations in between.

Witness when people wandered the earth in tribes, much of their communication and therefore cultural development was related to the welfare of the tribe and restricted to their direct contact with one another. The communication was primarily face to face in an instant of time and very little evidence of what was said remained except in the individual memories. Then mankind developed iconography to communicate over time and distance by leaving messages for each other that could be interpreted despite the intervals of time.

The printing press extended peoples’ ability to share ideas and enabled anyone who could read to participate in society’s dialogue. This was an early form of mass, one directional communication over both geography and time.

Imagine how big the world became with the advent of network technologies like telephones, where numbers of participants and geographies were no longer the constraining parameters of civilisation. As a communication tool however, telephones are primarily immediate. People speak directly to each other and the telephone does not automatically capture the conversation in a format that can be analysed over time.

When a society shifts from one communication model to another, all institutions in society get reinvented according to the new logic of the medium. The advent of web 2.0 means that mass communication is no longer a broadcast communication, instead we have multiple people participating in network communication, unfettered by time or geography, on a scale we have never seen before.

Markets are systems where people and businesses are connected and influence each other. As businesses, we will benefit from approaching social networking from a social sciences perspective, and using metrics and visualisations of the dynamics of the system, which can be translated into action plans for communication.

For the first time we can capture and analyse data about network communication, because we are freed from the constraints of time and geography. We can use visualisation to understand the structure of networks in the market, how individuals are connected within their communities and how communities are connected. By understanding these structures, we can design strategies to move messages, products or ideas backwards and forwards through the network efficiently. Instead of using pure segmentation based on the psychographics and demographics of our audience, we can now enhance our marketing with the behavioural analysis of networks and patterns of communication.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Revitalise your Personal Brand

Have you ego-googled yourself recently?

For those of you who are wondering what an “ego-Google” is, it is when you do a Google search for yourself, and it is an essential part of the management of your professional (and personal) brand. Of course there are a lot of other search engines out there and it won’t do any harm to “ego-bing” etc. yourself.

Ego-googling is your professional mirror to your digital brand, in other words it reflects your on-line profile, in the same way as your business cards, CV and behaviour reflect your professional brand. When we leave home in the morning, most of us take care to look professional for work because we recognise that first impressions count. The Internet makes it so much easier for us to discover things that many people now Google someone before meeting, hiring or doing business with them. It is important that our professional off-line brand that we have crafted for success (all be it unconsciously in some instances) matches our digital brand, because the digital brand is rapidly becoming the new first impression.

If someone Googles you and they don’t find any indication of your expertise, or worse still, they see evidence on your Facebook profile that you are a drunken reprobate, chances are you won’t even know that you have missed a business or job opportunity.

Finding New Business

Many people start the business process by using search terms to identify the players with whom they may do business. If your potential client is looking for a CRM consultant, say, chances are that they will search for “Customer Relationship Management Consultant in Gauteng” etc., and if you emerge as the pick of the CRM bunch (by appearing in the top three results) then you have done a fantastic Search Engine Optimisation job. But constructing your brand so that search engines can find you is more than having the right technical tags on your website. What if the business hasn’t realised that your services are available? How do you make sure that opportunities come your way?

In order to ensure that people who are searching for professional services find you, you need to leave a digital trail of evidence that you are an expert in your field. In the real world, you would speak at conferences and network at business breakfasts. In the digital world you can participate in on-line industry forums, or upload presentations that you have developed on the subject.

Managing Client Relationships

Today, with web 2.0, the boundaries between businesses and clients are blurring, and organisations are increasingly experienced as a collection of people, rather than an institution. People and businesses can enhance their future success by ensuring that the individuals’ professional brands are carefully built and maintained on the Internet. This is a pretty labour intensive exercise in the beginning, filled with more introspection than many of us have undertaken in a long time. The maintenance of a professional profile is a relatively pain free discipline.

Steps to creating a personal professional digital brand

So you have recognised that you need to maintain your professional profile on-line, what do you do next? Do you register yourself on Plaxo, Ning, Linked-in, Facebook, Twitter etc.? This is the equivalent to getting someone to design you a logo and thinking that you have created a brand.

Personal brands are all about how people experience you, what they believe about you and what they expect from you, it talks a lot of thought to craft an personal brand.

Step 1 Who do you need to be in your professional life to be successful?

We all have CV’s of experience that we have built up over the years (some more comprehensive than others). We used those CV’s or experiences to get to the professional position that we are in now. The first thing to do is to dust off (metaphorically speaking) and update that old CV. This is the starting point, your collection of skills, education, awards, experience and competencies. The next step is to ask yourself what your CV should look like for what you want to be professionally, and to update it to be the framework of your professional brand. You may also identify that you need to acquire more skills, or register with more professional bodies etc.

Step 2 Prove it

Once you have understood who you are and who you need to be, you can set about creating a strategy for creating your professional brand on-line.

If your CV indicates that you are a great writer, include proof of your writing skills as collateral in your professional brand strategy. Ask yourself what you could blog about that proves that you have fabulous writing skills. The same goes for blogging to demonstrate innovation, thought leadership, creativity, management and leadership etc.

You need to design some evidence that you are as good as you say you are. At the same time, look for public endorsements of your professional brand, do you have recommendations from clients or bosses, have you won any awards for projects you have managed?

Step 3 Select your Social Media

There are many choices of Social Media out there for you to choose to create your digital brand. Because you know what you want to achieve, you can select them to support your strategy.

If it is important for you to be seen as a fun loving guy, because you are a tour operator, then Facebook and Twitter are perfect mediums for you to upload photographs and provide ongoing commentary on how much fun people are having around you. If it is necessary that people trust you, let’s say you are a doctor or accountant, then by all means, use Facebook, but ensure that the information about you and the updates are all about wholesome things like family rather than debauched parties. Make sure that your updates are thoughtful, not silly.

Look for communities of interest like the 702 ad feature group, where if you are an advertising professional, you can demonstrate your knowledge of the advertising world, by commenting meaningfully on the latest advertisements.

If you are a professional, either self employed or working within a large corporate, choose Linked-in and Plaxo and pro actively surround yourself with people that you want to be associated with. Link up to industry leaders, join in relevant conversations and discussion groups.

Blogging is an incredibly good way to express yourself, many of the social media platforms enable you to pull in blogs that you have written on other sites, so that no matter where a potential opportunity encounters you, you will be equipped with the professional collateral that demonstrates your professional brand.

Step 3 Maintain

The modern internet is all about dynamism, we no longer create brochureware once and leave it for an annual review. Our professional profiles are ongoing manifestations of our personal brands and need to be kept active so that we don’t run the risk of an out dated (read unkempt) personal brand.

Many people will be reading this article and thinking “I couldn’t do this, it would be like boasting, or vain”.

The reality is that in the same way as you wouldn’t dream of leaving home inappropriately dressed and you engage with people in the real world (through phone calls, eMail or in the boardroom), on the Internet people are assessing the professional value you have to them, and in the plethora of noise on the web, you have to stand out as a professional brand to be taken seriously.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Using the Balanced Scorecard to design your Digital Strategy

The Balanced Scorecard¹ was developed by Kaplan and Norton as a strategic approach and performance management system, which enables organisations to translate a company’s vision and strategy into implementation. It works  from 4 perspectives:

• Financial perspective;

• Customer perspective;

• Business process perspective; and

• Learning and growth perspective.

These perspectives are a useful departure point for translating Organisational Strategies into implementable Digital Strategies.

The Financial Perspective

Timely and accurate financial data is always be a priority, but the emphasis on financial issues can lead to an unbalanced situation with regard to other perspectives, therefore we use the financial perspective as a quantification of the success of the other elements of the Digital strategy and programmes.

The Financial perspective is satisfied when we are able to capture financial information to report on the period. Generally, when implementing a Balanced Scorecard Digital Strategy, we determine which numbers we will be interested in seeing at the end of the financial period and how we will quantify the success of the implementation and applications.

These numbers could include ROI on the digital investment, percentage increase in sales, reduced cost of attrition and recruitment, increased margin on innovation, R&D etc. The numbers are determined by the organisational strategy and the metrics which the organisation choose to report on. They could be as simple as Balance Sheet and Income Statement line items.

The Customer Perspective

Using the Customer perspective to develop digital strategies should be the most lucrative aspect of the digital strategy.

The customer perspective elements of the Digital Strategy include providing information through the website, sales enablers including eCommerce applications, customer self service where customers can manage their own portfolios through extranets, building communities of value where customers can network and engage with each other, crowd-sourcing initiatives so that the customer can help the organisation design products, using social media such as blogs to educate the customer, social tools to create and retain relationships and a host more applications.

When developing customer facing applications it is important to note that these are not just transactional applications and that the their value is also derived from the data that we can collect around the clients which may be lead indicators of future value. For example on-line community satisfaction is a lead indicator; if members are not satisfied, they will find other suppliers that will meet their needs. Poor performance is a lead indicator of future decline.

The Business Process perspective

This perspective refers to internal business processes. Key applications for digital strategies include the development of collaboration tools, document management, content management, online project management, leave management and in-situ knowledge management tools to name a few. These applications are more successful when accessed through the Intranet, and perceived by the employee to be part of the Intranet, rather than a stand alone application.

Learning and Growth perspective

This perspective includes employee training and corporate cultural attitudes related to both individual and business improvement.

The Intranet is the key application for managing employees, programmes that can be run through the Intranet include employee relationship programmes, on-line learning and education, strategic behavioural alignment, succession programmes and performance management dashboards.

Management by Fact

The use of the Balanced Scorecard enables us to measure our Digital Strategies, applications and implementations effectively.

The goal of measuring is to see more clearly and to make wise long-term decisions. Measurements are derived from strategy to provide critical data and information about key processes, outputs and results. Data and information needed for performance measurement and improvement could include: customers, sales, market, competitive comparisons, supplier, employees, cost and financial data. Analysis uses data to determine trends, projections, and cause and effect. Data and analysis is used to support a variety of company purposes, such as planning, reviewing company performance, improving operations, and comparing company performance with competitors’ or with ‘best practices’ benchmarks.

A major consideration in performance improvement involves the creation and use of performance measures or indicators. A comprehensive set of indicators tied to performance requirements will align all business activities with organisational goals.

¹ Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. (2006) Alignment Using the Balanced Scorecard to Create Corporate Synergies Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Enhancing long term sustainability through 2.0

Sustaining corporate performance is a challenge to most businesses. Many senior executives find it hard to shift their attention away from today’s share price and the next set of results. Fluctuations in exchange rates, rising interest rates, the demands of shareholders, Eskom’s load shedding and the talent crisis has intensified the pressure to focus on short-term performance.

In a series of articles written by McKinseys¹, they describe the way companies could take steps to ensure that they perform well in the years to come. Underlying these actions is a mental discipline which they express using the metaphor of human health, which improves when cared for and deteriorates when neglected.

Mental minefields

McKinseys describes three sets of impediments block the way to nurturing health in a corporate context.

The Mindfulness Trap

This is the tendency to be pulled back into a short-term performance perspective by the pressure of daily business.

The Cognitive Trap

This is the preoccupation with the belief that organisational health is soft and intuitive and therefore lacking the tough rigor and precision needed to drive performance. Another cognitive trap assumes that corporate health problems will arise in the unknown future rather than taking hold in the present.

The Self-Knowledge Trap

This is our tendency to say and believe one thing and do another. Managers often see themselves as strategic visionaries, although in practice they spend a remarkably small proportion of their time on anything related to strategy.

Attributes of health

What characteristics must companies have to be truly healthy? It’s important for executives to develop a clear picture of what sound health looks like before they try to embed healthy thinking in a company’s processes and people.

McKinseys identifies 5 characteristics of business health: resilience, execution, alignment, renewal and mutual reinforcement.

These 5 characteristics are not isolated from other influencing factors, such as the macroeconomic environment, the attractiveness of different industries, or luck. They represent a coherent and interrelated set of ideas.

Resilience

Markets can be tough, clients capricious and competitors relentless. Managers must contend with unpredictable disruptions such as financial-market fluctuations, inflation and crime. Healthy companies are practised at spotting and managing key risks, and they build mechanisms and have the resources — cash reserves or backup IT systems — to get through difficult periods.

Execution

Even as companies hedge against external shocks, they need to make good decisions, and perform essential tasks. Brilliant products, clever promotions, or surging markets can obscure sloppy execution for a while. But sooner or later this kind of fragility will be exposed.

Companies that execute well share certain attributes: distinctive capabilities, the ability to make sound and timely decisions, strong forecasting skills and employees who understand their roles and responsibilities.

Alignment

Healthy companies, achieve a cohesive purpose because they have a compelling vision of the future shared by everyone connected with them. They articulate a shared identity that rises above individuals, functions and business units; reflect stakeholder concerns in corporate values; and reinforce the sense of common purpose with formal mechanisms, such as performance contracts.

Renewal

Healthy companies invest in their future by expanding into markets where existing assets and competencies provide real leverage, usually with the help of a winning formula that has been honed from experience and facilitates smooth integration across the entire value chain and the efficient extraction of synergies.

Renewal requires attention to softer issues, such as the ability to attract and retain talent, innovate and adapt to change, both culturally and strategically. Markets and industries move quickly; most companies do not.

Mutual Reinforcement

Organisational practices, such as hiring policies, training programmes, and consistent and mutually reinforcing behavioural incentives act in concert to deliver on the strategic objectives of healthy companies.

Effective communication and collaboration are crucial to ensuring that assets, processes, relationships, and management practices act in concert. Typically, information flows across the organisation, as well as from top to bottom, tapping into social networks beyond the formal organisational structure. Web 2.0 based IT platforms reinforce this kind of communication.

Healthy actions

The discipline of managing tensions among the different characteristics of health requires willingness by the organisation to view the performance system in its full complexity. Vital corporate and individual processes are highlighted by breaking down a company’s resources into separate performance and health components, ensuring a balanced portfolio of strategic and tactical initiatives, integrating that approach into planning and budgeting, identifying metrics for assessing health, and building health into formal performance mechanisms. This will help an organisation to focus routinely and instinctively on the health imperative.

Monitor the way you allocate resources

McKinseys recommend that organisations break down resources into two categories—those devoted to driving performance and those devoted to deriving health. One easy indicator is labour costs: executives should know how many of their employees work on delivering the current operating plan as opposed to looking after the underlying health issues. That way, they can have well-informed conversations about whether or not they are investing resources in a balanced way.

Another indicator is financial spend, by taking all the money going out of the business during a quarter and splitting it into two piles: payments for current operations (expenses necessary to generate that quarter’s revenue) and payments for everything else. The first stack can be defined as performance related; the second represents longer-term investments, excluding in-kind capital replacements. Regularly making these calculations allows executives to see how much IT expenditure, goes toward innovation and R&D (health) and how much toward improving labour productivity (performance). It also allows them to compare the company’s investments in health-related activities (such as brand building, lobbying, and community outreach) with the cost of outsourcing operations to boost profitability (performance).

Balance the strategic portfolio

Companies can keep an eye on their health by regularly assessing their business ideas and new initiatives — projects or programmes to change or improve something in the business. They evaluate these projects both by mapping the point when each would be likely to create the greatest value and by looking at whether a project involves familiar, routine work that plays to their strengths and experiences or is a novel departure, which could be riskier and consume additional resources. Healthy companies keep a balance between the two and know that investing for the long term means action today.

Integrate into core processes

Extending health-oriented strategic thinking into detailed planning and budgeting processes is the next step; an analysis of the underlying health of cash flows should inform traditional budget reviews. Initiate, as a formal part of the performance-management process, a health dialogue that touches on the relevance of investment priorities or the product pipeline to a company’s future performance. Review human-resource allocations and the way executives spend their time .

Have the metrics to match

Many businesses make a religion out of counting their new customers, the growth of their revenues, their financial ratios. But these metrics don’t necessarily measure corporate health, so executives should develop a number of health variables for each of the attributes vital to the health of the business. Resilience, for example could be tested by tracking credit fraud volumes or customer lifetime values. Execution skills could be measured by determining the turnaround time. A company can monitor its alignment by calculating the proportion of its senior managers who disagree about strategies and corporate priorities. To concentrate the minds of its executives, it can test its capacity for renewal by tracking the share of its revenues from new markets and new products and its mutual reinforcement by calculating how much of its revenues come from products and services that span business units and from integrated solutions, or by understanding which policies are counterproductive to strategy. In South Africa , we often see a commitment to BEE undermined by a policy of employing internally first before going to the market. This policy maintains the status quo and doesn’t engender diversity and change

Reinforce through performance

Once a company has redesigned its regular strategic, budgeting, and planning processes to inject a strong dose of “healthy” thinking — and appropriate metrics are in place — executives must embed health in formal people-management mechanisms, including performance contracts, incentives, career path planning, and staffing decisions. Managers at all levels should know the expectations set for them. Companies should use the metrics discussed earlier to structure evaluations ensuring that employees reap rewards as much for doing health-building work as for enhancing performance.

The precise weighting of targets depends on the situation of the individual company and the extent to which it already has struck the right balance between performance and health. The early — and full — involvement of managers in any discussion about adopting this approach is a key prerequisite for success.

Implement and Enterprise 2.0 architecture

Enterprise architecture is the practice of applying a comprehensive and rigorous method for describing a structure and behaviour for an organisation’s processes, communication, IT systems, personnel and organisational structure, so that they align with the organisation’s core goals and strategic direction.

Web 2.0 is a trend in the way we design technology that changes the way we use the Internet to facilitate creativity, information sharing and transparency through collaborative processes and communication. These tools ensure that everyone is exposed to the organisation’s vision, thinking, perception of risk and experience. This mutual understanding leads to greater organisational resilience, execution, alignment and renewal, which in turn leads to healthy organisations which can sustain their performance.

Notes

¹ Robert L. Cross, Roger D. Martin, and Leigh M. Weiss, “Mapping the value of employee collaboration,” The McKinsey Quarterly, 2006 and Robert L. Cross, Salvatore Parise, and Leigh M. Weiss, “The role of networks in organizational change,” The McKinsey Quarterly, April 2007.

About Digital Bridges

Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication.

Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI.

Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors.

To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.