The organizational challenge comes as all stakeholders get together and hammer out common definitions. This might not seem like the kind of work that leads to disputes, but it is. In most companies, questions like the following would lead to heated discussions:

* Who's got the real customer contact information? Who gets to access it? Who gets to update it?
* What's the last day for bookings in each quarter? Is it the same all around the world?
* Do we have to do a credit check before scheduling every order for production?
* Who gets to certify approved vendors? What's the process for adding a vendor to the list?

Answering these requires a combination of diligence and tough-mindedness.

• Step 1 - know your goals - I hope I began the series by drilling home the point that your online strategy must be fundamentally grounded in your organizational mission and goals. Remember the Forum One mantra: "mission-focused, audience-centric." If the online strategy does not truly support these organizational imperatives, then its chance of success rests on just that: chance.
  
• Step 2 - know your audiences - If goals are the foundation for an online strategy, then audiences are the major structural supports. In my post on this step, I laid out process for defining who the most valuable audiences are for a given effort and learning more about them. The long and short of it? Target audiences are those types of people who have a strong ability to take actions that bring about organizational goals and who can be reached well online.
  
• Step 3 - know yourself - I argue that this is a critical - and often forgotten - step. You need to understand yourself as an organization - what you do well, what you do less well, what assets you have, and what you lack. These capabilities and deficits play a key role in determining what online services are and are not a good fit. The right services for one group may not be right for another, even if the two groups are trying to reach the same audiences to achieve the same goals, because they may have entirely different organizational dynamics.
  
• Step 4 - select the right services - I walk through, in this post, nothing more than a cost-benefit analysis. What are the benefits of possible services in terms of both the ability to attract target audiences and help them do what you want and in terms of helping navigate organizational dynamics? What are the costs in terms of technical development, content development, and resource time? Priority services are those that best achieve desired ends while having an acceptable cost.
  
• Step 5 - sell and effect change - New online services will entail new kinds of content, new processes, new staff skills, new management needs, etc. All this means that there will be significant organizational change required in order to make the services actually work. You need to be prepared to sell this change as part of the process and then help manage the change moving forward.
  
• Step 6 - monitor & manage - Strategies are frameworks and they need to live and adapt. You need to manage the services on an ongoing basis, reviewing performance against pre-set metrics and making changes after review of this performance. In most cases, you will find yourself maintaining essentially the same services, but tweaking them to fit unexpected uses and preferences. In some cases, the best-thought plans will prove untenable and you will need to move on. The strategy is, in short, and ongoing exercise and won't just happen on its own.
  
• Some additional thoughts - I end with some final thoughts about baseline analysis and competitive / comparative analysis, two additional activities which can be valuable.

• You need to make a business case that a large investment is necessary and need evidence of significant issues
  
• You really don't know what you have for online assets (e.g., the web team has all left and there is little institutional knowledge left)
  
• You want to make sure you focus on the biggest issues first (i.e., you need to stage the investment in a smart way)
  

• Site traffic statistics, with a focus on trends, not absolute numbers
  
• Site prominence, in other words, how likely it is that someone interested in your topic will find your materials
  
• Usability - a general assessment of usability issues based on best practices (or, ideally, true user testing)
  
• Content, looking at volume, types, trends in types and volume of content, etc.
  

But these standard traffic numbers provide a superficial view of your site's activities. Just because something can be easily measured doesn't mean it's instructive. For instance, how does one value total daily visits in which half of those represent single page visits? That makes about as much sense as tying success to an increasing volume of phone calls placed to its main phone number. It makes even less sense if a large number of those are wrong numbers.

Other measures that may be more useful — particularly to the executive team include the number of registrants, community logins, comments posted, online event participants, actions taken, donations made, online purchases made, etc. Most of these are not in standard web reports.

• Deliver the message, not the report - Don't drop each month's report on the appropriate desk and call it done. If everything is going as you hoped, these numbers are key evidence to support the change you are trying to effect. Make sure key players really see that. Try to set up regular meetings with key stakeholders (especially those who might oppose the required changes) to show how the services are contributing to organizational goals.
  
• Focus - Some summary are constant trends are important, but use your metrics check-ins to focus on particular questions and dive deep into those. This means investigating some area of metrics more extensively and highlighting that area as a feature in a single reporting cycle.
  
• Adapt to what the information tells you - At a high level a strategy needs to be fairly rigid over a long period, but under that, it will thrive because it can be adaptive. It may be, for example, that service XYZ is proving attractive to key audiences, but they are using it in a different way than expected. As you analysis tells you this, allow the service to bend to this new use (ensuring it continues to provide what you need of it). This may mean tuning content itself, content management, or collaboration policies. Obviously, don't react too quickly - wait for a trend to emerge rather than jumping at the first unexpected result. Ideally you metrics include ongoing user interaction - be sure to investigate these unexpected results with users (heck, just give a couple a call!) so you understand exactly why audiences are doing what they are doing.
  
• Remember sunk costs - So it happened - despite everyone's best efforts, you developed a service that just isn't working. You have tweaked it, talked with audiences, tweaked it again, given it time, and it just isn't flying. If it isn't costing anything going forward, you can just let it be (perhaps just lowering its prominence in the information architecture) in case it becomes useful in the future. If it is costing you something, though, don't be afraid to accept that the investment is sunk and should be written off by deactivating the service.