A great many organisations are talking about the need to ‘Ride the Digital Wave’, or ‘Tweet on Twitter’, or ‘Like on Facebook’, or ‘Link on LinkedIn’, or ‘Have an App’.
I know this from speaking to, and networking with, a great many CIOs and people in IT Leadership positions across a large number of business sectors. I also know this as I look around at the online efforts of companies I research as I evaluate new roles.
There is an increasing trend amongst businesses in all sectors to start to feel uneasy about their absence from many of the digital platforms that so many of the population interact with so glibly and so frequently.
Sometimes the unease starts with a brave soul lamenting the fact that competitor x has an app during a board meeting one day.
This translates to an instruction to IT: ‘make us an app’. (NOW!)
This is the kind of interaction we can all remember in IT. It’s the way we used to work. It’s the “I met a chap at the Chamber of Commerce meeting and he has one of these ALREADY” kind of request.
But we need to pause.
We don’t want to go the way of many IT Projects over the years.
We don’t want to start something just to appear similar to our peers.
We probably already have a ‘News’ page on our website, that rarely gets updated, and gives the impression that there is nothing happening thats worthy of mention or note.
And that is the crux of the problem.
A Digital Agenda is not something that sits in the domain of a silo’d IT department. Its not something that IT can successfully deliver in isolation.
IT can provide the communication tools; the soapbox to stand on, the lights on the shopfront, the bells and whistles to help get your voice heard. But IT cannot be the sole voice. IT cannot speak with words that match the company brand, and speak with the company voice, embody the company view and promote the company’s products.
A Digital Agenda is far broader than the name suggests. In fact it is much more about the non-digital than it is about digital. It is about the company deciding what is important. What it hopes to gain in the future. Whom should be spoken to. What those people should be told. How often, and in what level of detail. Should there be elements of interaction? Does our company have a product or products that can be made more valuable by adding the capability to interact remotely?
Only when these types of questions have been answered can we actually start to look at Digital. The tools are simply that. Tools we can develop and deploy to help a company achieve its goals.
If our company wants to post on LinkedIn, it needs to provide resource to do so. There has to be sufficient resource to post during busy times, holidays, sickness etc. It can’t often be down to one person. Our company needs to also decide on how to tone it’s posts. What sort of voice will we speak with? How do we ensure consistency? How do we make sure our grammar is good and our spelling impeccable?
A great many IT problems are caused by deciding on a solution first, without looking at the problem.
To an idiot with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The best success stories come from evaluating the need in the first instance, and answering that need after.
If BoatyMcBoatface has taught us anything, it is that rushing into ‘Online’ or ‘Digital’ without measured forethought often fails to deliver to expectations.
So; do we need an App? Maybe. But if we create one, it must add real value.