I am running a little late in this third - and juiciest - of follow-up posts to our Web Executive Seminar "Six Steps to a Successful Online Strategy". Please, no one look at the time stamp, or, if you must, you should infer that Forum One is such a "Great Place to Work!" that I willingly and happily blog professionally at this particularly hour. In fact, I did feel a great need to get this post out because I believe that, of the six, this step I describe here contains the greatest opportunity for ensuring success for a strategy - or dooming it. And, this step is the one that tends to be forgotten. Have I whet your intellectual appetites yet?

It is easy to cruise through the first two steps, goals and audiences, and believe you have nailed your inputs. It is tempting to look at your desires and audiences needs and go to work at putting together online services to fit. In so doing you would forget to look at a key additional input: what is your organization capable of offering? Thus I call this key third step "know yourself." You need to take a hard look at your organization and understand its key capabilities and assets - those things you want to be sure to leverage - and also, and more painfully - its weaknesses - those things it does less well that you need to work around or change.

A case
Let me explore this in detail by way of an example. Imagine a hypothetical NGO that has as a core goal to "raise levels of childhood literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa." One of its goal-attaining actions might be "local universities turn out more and better teachers," suggesting a good audience might be "university education program leaders." It is likely this audience would have, as key needs, better training on the best ways to run their programs and better access to others in their position who have had notable successes. One online service that it might reasonably thin about would be an online professional network to build capacity in the audience and ensure members better recruit and train teachers (this would be one piece in a much larger puzzle, to be sure). Such a service would be goal-aligned and audience-aligned - great move, right?

Strengths
Well, as a wise man once said, it depends. Let us first think about assets and capabilities. It is pretty easy to imagine some strengths of our hypothetical NGO:

• Widely regarded experts (asset) and means to disseminate their expertise (capability)
  
• Top flight research / publications / materials (assets) and processes for creating these (capability)
  
• Network of key contacts (asset) and understand of how to leverage it (capability)
  
• Large, dependable stream of funding (asset, probably built on a capability)
  

There may be others, though, that are of great importance, but which are easy to overlook. Think about:

• Do staff have particular skills / knowledge, especially related to use of technology?
  
• Does the organization generally demonstrated innovativeness in other efforts?
  
• Does the organization have internal processes or communications channels that make it adept at staying focused and learning?
  
• Does it have a culture that values technology and new approaches to solve problems?
  

If this does describe our mythical NGO, we have part of an answer as to whether the online network is a good idea.

Weaknesses
The other area to review is weaknesses. This is hard - no one likes thinking about, much less talking about, things they aren't good at. It is here that there can be proverbial land mines, though. Common ones such as poor funding have likely already had an impact; think about:

• Does the organization have expertise, but have trouble putting it in the right hands (as evidenced by lower-than-expected levels of recognition)?
  
• Do staff work in independent silos, rarely cooperating and even working at cross-purposes?
  
• Does the organizational culture value the tried-and-true and fear the new-and-different?
  
• Do key staff lack knowledge and skills in key areas related to technology?
  
• Is there only a lukewarm commitment to devote staff time to a new initiative?
  

I could go on. Suppose some of these are in place for the NGO - they could spell trouble for an online network. Such an initiative will require staff time - if it won't get that time, the initiative will die on the vine. It will also require online community management skills - if those do not exist or the organization is unwilling to build them, ditto. And so on. The prudent NGO will see these issues as a warning sign on this idea.

Wait - a warning sign? Shouldn't they put the idea in the circular file and move on to something simpler? Again, it depends. It depends on how valuable the initiative would be and whether the organization is willing to change itself to make the idea work. Maybe the initiative represents a fundamental shift in how it works, but the benefit is massive new impact. In that case, the organization should swallow hard and prepare to press forward with the initiative (if all other pieces look good), knowing it will have to work very hard at some change management exercises to support it. This can have huge benefits beyond this single initiative, but it is a topic for another day...

The value of organizational dynamics
Organizational dynamics can be hard to sort out, but it is the key to success or failure, in technology and beyond. There are myriad reports about 70-odd percent of technology projects failing. The main reasons tend to be organizational in nature: poor commitment, poor direction, etc. More broadly, a recent McKinsey study looked at factors associated with organizational performance at 230 global companies. In their words:

The team eventually arrived at one winning combination: clear roles for employees (accountability), a compelling vision of change (direction), and an environment that encourages openness, trust, and challenge (culture). Nothing else came close in improving organizational performance.

In other words, organizational dynamics leads to top performance. This stuff matters, and it matters a lot.

Next week: the right online services...