Thus far in this series of follow-up posts to our Web Executive Seminar "Six Steps to a Successful Online Strategy", I have discussed the key inputs to a strategy. Now we finally get to what many will think of as the strategy itself: what is it that an organization should actually do? Hopefully I have convinced you that you rush to this step at your peril, but, if you have followed along, congratulations - you are here! Let's talk about the right online services.

First, a point on semantics that is, I promise, bigger than that (aren't they all?). I use the term "online services." One might say "what's that about - I am just doing a web site." We very deliberately us terms that imply a larger focus that a public web site. It is easy to get caught up in your public web site as you entire internet presence, when, in fact, it ought to be a piece. You should also be thinking about e-mail services, extranets, an intranet, third-party online services (look at the rush to Facebook), and, perhaps, services for other internet enabled media like mobile devices. Doing a strategy for a web site can leave you blind to these other opportunities that may, all things considered, be more valuable. This we use "online strategy" or "internet strategy" and "online services" or "internet services." I recommend adopting this convention when talking to stakeholders and peers.

Defining the services and their benefits
Determining the right mix of online services is really about doing an old-fashion cost-benefit analysis. In talking about audiences and organizational dynamics in the last two posts, I implied that the right services grow out of these two inputs, and that is initially the case:

• You ended your audience work by creating a list, for each audience of implications for online services. This list was based on a) giving audiences services that they want (attractor services) and b) introducing them to services that help them or entice them to do what you want them to do (motivator services). The ideal service does both, but sometimes you need to do a little of each.
  
• You also used the organizational dynamics analysis to develop another set of online services implications. This list drew up assets to leverage and weaknesses to navigate - or overcome. For this part, the ideal service leverages an asset and runs up against no weakness. A valuable service may also, however, help navigate or overcome a weakness. A service that help catalog and distribute internal knowledge could be important to an organization that needs to break through organizational silos in order to have greater overall impact. In some cases this may be more valuable than any external service.
  

It is pretty easy to take these lists of implications and create a list of actual services that might fit. A good plan is the following:

1. Consolidate the audience implications lists across all audiences. Note those ideas which overlap multiple audiences.
   
2. Turn the implications into actual services. An implication might, for example, be "make it easy to find key training materials relevant to a particular need." The service might be "a training materials library with topical filters. At the end you should have one list of services that grew out of all the different audience implications. Keep track of which match to which audience(s).
   
3. Make sure your list is complete. The best way to do this is to let yourself fly free of the here and now. Do a "blue sky" exercise, where you learn about highly innovative or unique online services that others are offering. Go beyond your sector and into the corporate world, absorbing all the wild "Web X.0" ideas you can find. Set no limitations other than the idea must be "cool." Let the list percolate.
   
4. Return to the here-and-now and review the wild ideas you found. Think about whether any have applicability. Maybe none do - you certainly shouldn't feel compelled to add three just for the sake of doing them. Some, however, may lead you you to a new idea that fits the criteria for consideration. This exercise should help expand your boundaries and foster creative thinking.
   
5. Note services on this new list that leverage organizational assets. It is possible that there will be assets that have no matching audience-focused service. These ought to provoke some thought. Is there an audience-facing opportunity you missed? This is where "out of the box" ideas originate. Don't force something in - make sure you don't add a service that has no value for audience interaction. Does the asset of no online value but does have offline value? If so, leave it be and move on.
   
6. Look carefully at the list of services implications from your organizational weaknesses. Develop a list of services - or note services on the list above - which help overcome weaknesses.
   

With this list you can now rate the benefit of each service (1-5 or H-M-L is fine). Again, a service is most beneficial if it reaches multiple audiences as both an attractor or motivator or if it helps navigate critical organizational dynamics. Weigh these factors and also the value of particular audiences. It is, of course, better to focus on the highest value audiences. When done you should have a rating of the benefit side of the equation for each of the service ideas. Time to think about costs.

Thinking about costs
You can address costs along for dimensions:

1. Note on the consolidated service list any services that might be made more difficult because of organizational weaknesses. Making these services work will involve organizational change, and that will be extremely costly. Check the benefit ratings for these services - unless the benefit ratings are high, you should probably just drop the services to the bottom of your list right now; if the benefit ratings are low, no harm in sending them straight to the cutting room floor.
   
2. Work with knowledgeable people to determine the technical complexity of implementing each service (again, 1-5 or H-M-L orders of magnitude are fine). This is the basic cost range to design the service and do the programming.
   
3. Think about the content you need to support each new service and rate each service idea for content complexity. The more you need to create content you don't have, the more complex the dimension.
   
4. Give a rating to each service for resource complexity - basically how much time it will take staff to manage the service outside of creating content for it. Does the service, for example, require moderation or management of user accounts? Those are more complex.
   

By tallying the combined complexity dimensions for each service, you can now compare benefits to costs. That cool but medium value idea the V.P. had? Highly complex technically - does it still seem so necessary? That interesting but low-value idea? Its cheap and easy to manage - why not? So here's the punch line: your priority services are those that have a benefit level that justifies all their costs. Note that this doesn't mean only do low cost ones; it means do high cost ones if the benefit is high (and their aren't equally high benefit ones that have lower costs).

As a final step, work with your technical experts to determine how to break the ideas into reasonable technical releases. Assume that you will only do high priority items in the near term and accept that low priority items may be best left for dead (if and until the cost-benefit equation changes for some reason at a later date).

So are you now done? NO!!!! You have only created a strategy - now you need to make it work. Yes, the fun is just beginning...

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...

In last week's first of my series of follow-up posts to our Web Executive Seminar "Six Steps to a Successful Online Strategy," I talked about correctly identifying core goals in line with your mission. With that key foundation in place, you are now ready to turn to audiences, specifically those target audiences on which is is most critical to focus online. Most groups have an intuitive sense of who they should be reaching - this is often defined in program design documents - but priorities can get skewed and opportunities missed if one doesn't take the time to identify the most important audiences for this medium and also understand what those key audiences want and need. This is a juicy topic; so let me dive in...

Think about last week's goals discussion - the statements that end up being true goals describe ways in which you want the world to be different (less hunger, more peace, enhanced opportunities, etc.). Simply put, mission-focused organizations are all, fundamentally, in the behavior change business. In all cases, for the world to be different, some group of people needs to do behave differently than they now do - they need to make different policies, learn more about a subject, use their influence in certain ways, and so on. From this truth flows your audience analysis.

Given the foundation above, here are the major steps in knowing your audiences:

1. Turn goals into actions - Following on the point above, first determine the major actions that need to be taken in order for each of your goals to be achieved. I deliberately used passive voice there - don't think about what your organization needs to do, but instead focus on what actions need to occur, somehow. For example, if a core goal is "raise levels of childhood literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa," then some goal-attaining actions might be: "more schools get built in outlying regions," "road infrastructure to existing schools improves," and "local universities turn out more and better teachers." Make a list of all the major actions that need to occur in order for your goals to come about.
   
2. Derive actors from actions - With a list of actions defined, look at each one and figure out what actors could bring it about. It is critical not to think too narrowly. Remember that actors can bring about the actions in three ways: directly, by making decisions that bring about the action; directly, by directly implementing others' decisions in a way that brings about the action; and indirectly, by influencing decision-makers and implementers. For each action, then, make a list of all the actors that could effect it, remembering to consider decision-makers, implementers, and influencers. For example, start with the action "more schools get built in outlying regions." Actors might be: Minister of Education (decision-maker), ministry staff (implementers), head of provincial education dept. (decision-maker and implementer), village leaders (implementers and influencers), local journalists (influencers), NGOs (implementers and influencers) and so on.
   
3. Determine power of each type of actor in each context - Look at each actors you have listed and determine their relative power to effect the desired change. In the example above, for instance, the Minister of Education has a high level of power to make key decisions; local journalists probably have only a medium level of ability to influence those decisions. With this step taken, you should have a clear idea of which types of people matter most to you and why they matter.
   
4. Define which actors are target online audiences - You have effectively just ranked actors in terms of their importance to you. Some actors, however, will be important to reach, but will not be very reachable online (or at least not optimally reached in this way). The Minister of Education, for example, is valuable to reach, but probably isn't a good online target - limit consideration of this actor online (but make sure to think about reaching these individuals through other means and think about ways to reach them indirectly). The ministry staff, for example, may be better targets and may act as influencers on the Minister. Consider them more seriously for the online channel. Rank all actors for your ability to reach them online. Punchline: those actors that have both a high level of power to bring about desired actions and are highly reachable online are your target online audiences. Focus your online resources here.
   
5. Learn audience wants and needs - As I indicated above, knowing who your target audiences are is only part of the puzzle. You also need to know about them. This generally means doing significant research - surveys, interviews, and/or focus groups. Tying the research together with a persona for each target audience helps crystallize findings. Pay particular attention to what the target audiences need in order for them to be successful at what they do (i.e., getting elected, doing a good job, living comfortably, etc.). Your offering to each audience will need to be a blend of things they want form you and things you want to provide them. In the best cases - and the ones you want to leverage most - these objectives are not in conflict. By all means, of course, don't just focus on wants and needs you now can meet! List them all - you may identify opportunities to serve these audiences online in ways you never have before.
   
6. Define online services implications - As a final step, review your lists for each audience of what you want from them and what they (could) want from you. Brainstorm a set of implications for online services - not necessarily actual functions / features, but more general implications with some possible tools. You will use this list later to derive possible online services for prioritization.
   

One question that might emerge right away is "I know all the types of people I need to reach - why can't I just focus on them all?" As I said in the last post, the overriding principle must be "mission-focused, audience-centric." Online initiatives will be successful only if they have a tight tie to an organizational mission and focus on key audiences. The reason you need focus is that you can only do so much; if you try to reach many different groups with many different services you risk diluting the entire set. As we suggest above, some audiences are more valuable - focus energies and services on them to maximize your efficiency.

Up next, your organizational dynamics...