I woke up thinking about a particularly complicated slide and how I could have articulated a story to illustrate its importance - because, let’s face it, it’s a pretty boring slide!

I began thinking about the “Wow”. The something that really good websites and services have that make them so special. I was thinking in terms of a charity - a Catholic Diocese - and why this slide was important in delivering that Wow!

What would be the Wow? Well, great visual design, superb navigation, well written and engaging content, Web 2.0 stuff - you know recommendations, tag-clouds and the like…but would that be the Wow? I thought not - the Wow would be in the User Experience (UX) and that it would be personal to the individual. To deliver a great UX, you need to know as much about that user as possible…and the Wow would come from something as simple as saying “Thank you”.

Imagine if Mrs Wowee has donated money to the Diocese - it could be in church, through a standing order with her bank, in a cheque to one of the big Diocesan appeals, or online through their website. Well we’ve got that information captured. Imagine if Mrs Wowee uses her parish microsite to look up local events and to subscribe to a Diocesan newsletter.

Wouldn’t it be great to say “Thank you” and to let her know what else was happening that might interest her? Putting what is important to Mrs Wowee in front of her - wouldn’t that be the Wow?

This is where the boring slide helps out. Without all the boring applications and the boring databases, the APIs and the web services, and the interoperability of them all, could you say “Thank you, Mrs Wowee…and here’s what’s upcoming in your local church (and these things might interest your kids)” when she uses the Diocesan website or her parish’s microsite? No. You wouldn’t know enough about her. You couldn’t tell she was from Edmonton parish, that she’d donated over £1,000 this year, and that she also supported other causes. You might know she subscribed to the Diocesan newsletter, but that’s hardly rocket science.

It’s the architecture, the foundations, the machinery behind everything that gives you the ability to build the picture of the user, and the picture for the user. You need to be boring to deliver Wow!

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang foresees the Web evolving from separate social sites into a shared social experience.

“Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems”. Eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

The key challenge for organisations at the moment is that information about people – the information they need to understand and access their customers and donors - their profiles, and their friends is locked away in separate networks.

But this is set to change according to Forrester report. “Portable” social identities and the changes they enable will almost reverse the traditional way that consumers, brands, and social networks interact. The social Web will evolve from a few social network sites into an ever-present environment in which every online activity occurs. The boundaries of social networks and traditional sites will blur, making all sites a social experience.

OpenID and Facebook Connect are technologies that allow people to wander the Web with their social connections able to come along with them for the ride. This is starting to happen now.

Ultimately, new browsers and identity technologies will let people see what their friends have visited and what they thought of the experience.

Forrester predicts that from 2010 we will see sites customising their visitors’ experiences according to their preferences, their behaviours, and who their friends are – not just with a particular organisation, but across the web.

Pretty soon social networks will become more powerful than corporate Web sites and CRM systems. Now that presents some pretty exciting challenges!

Thanks to Nick!

The ‘Recession Watch Panel’, which has been pulled together by the magazine, recently met to discuss what a recession may mean for not-for-profits across the UK. Their conclusion was that financial pressures were likely to subject the sector to ‘Darwinian Forces’, with medium-sized charities likely to be most hard pressed.

Why medium-sized ones? Because, the panel suggests, such organisations don’t have the capacity or agility that large or small bodies do in responding to reduced funding streams and weakening engagement from volunteers.

But now for the silver lining: some of these organisations will face up to these problems rethinking the way they do things and being willing to contemplate a few risks.

Fortune favours the brave, so to speak – especially for those wishing to take the ‘agile route’ through the recession and beyond. And it’s the ‘beyond’ that’s really the point here.

Let’s face it; in the good times – when the economy is stable and growing – it’s easy to get a little lazy and tolerant of sub-optimal ways of doing things. Come a recession, this can leave organisations in a fragile state, vulnerable to downsizing or even closure.

In today’s world we therefore need to be a bit harder on ourselves and root out waste and poor practice. In so doing, it’s possible not just to withstand the recession but to emerge leaner and fitter, as well as more focused.

So what might the high-road to agility look like? The panel of charities experts gives few clues, so we’ve put our hats on instead.

For a start in means being more:

• - Responsive (more receptive and reactive to customers’ needs)
• - Innovative (open to new ideas and ways of doing things)
• - Flexible (cutting out bureaucracy and rigid working methods)
• - Adaptive (able to quickly change systems and processes)
• - Resilient (acting robustly to cope with unexpected challenges)

These are not characteristics acquired over night, but need to be worked on over months and years. But they are the very means by which organisations survive and prosper, even in difficult times. So how do we make them happen? Let’s start with ‘organisational design’. We’ll then go on to talk about ‘lean processes’.

All organisations today (especially the hard-pressed medium-sized ones discussed earlier) need to be increasingly ‘networked and connected’. This is the case ‘internally’ (how people work together across the organisation), as well as ‘externally’ (how it links with volunteers, partners and customers).

In one sense, the agile organisation is the polar opposite of the traditional ‘command and control’ hierarchy – the old style bureaucracy where everyone knew their place and there were limited (and very formal) interfaces between work groups, departments and the world outside.

In 2009, only by working fluidly with the most knowledgeable people – those who can get the job done, solve the problem, and so on – can organisations respond quickly and efficiently to customers’ needs.

This also means having access to the information and collaborative infrastructure that allows individuals and work groups to share ideas, address problems and deliver services. Increasingly, of course, we can rely on internet technology and mobile communications here. But it also demands quick and easy access to integrated databases, which lets those individuals and groups work on the tasks before them without being impeded by technological and spatial barriers.

Having more agile organisational designs is only one part of the puzzle, of course. Agile working also demands adopting ‘lean’ approaches to the design and management of ‘processes’.

At its heart, lean approaches are all about ‘cutting out waste’ and focusing people’s efforts on ‘added value work’. In so doing, they also seek to improve the quality of work (eliminating rework) and increasing the value that customers receive.

Getting started with lean approaches is easier than you might think. While there are plenty of specialist consultants willing to help with this, there are some easy things organisations can often do for themselves.

To begin, you can ask each individual, work group or department to look closely at the work they do (and the time they spend on it) and ask where the real value is in it? Does it really need doing (could it be eliminated)? If essential, could it be minimised (if so, how)? If it’s really a source of value – either to internal or external customers – how could it be enhanced?

The next key step is to recognise that individual work tasks and business processes are usually part of a ‘wider whole’ – a process that (often) runs from one person or department to another, before delivering (hopefully) something useful to a customer (which could be someone internal, of course).

Processes grow over time, with multiple handovers occurring between individuals and departments. One key problem here is that work loads can often become unbalanced, with work in one part of the organisation slowing up work in another.

Further problems are caused by the ‘fragmentation’ of work: people lose sight of the end goal, and only local optimisation occurs.

By taking a ‘systems view’ – looking end-to-end across processes - it’s possible to remedy these problems. Work can be redesigned to improve the general ‘flow’ of what is done. Where hand-offs are occurring (particularly in paper format), IT can be used to support workflow management and to ease bottlenecks.

Taken together, better process designs, combined with more networked and connected organisational structures, can help reduce costs, improve responsiveness, enhance service quality and ensure greater effectiveness all round. To make this happen a range of other changes are needed, of course.

Management – from the top to the bottom of the organisation – needs to adapt, allowing for greater discretion and ‘self-organisation’ at the level of work groups and teams. Organisational culture needs to change, encouraging greater work flexibility, as well as more willingness to work across borders and in teams. And a more modern mindset is required, one that challenges established approaches and demands more progressive ways of doing things.

Organisations that embrace these ideas will not find the recession easy. Jobs may still be lost; people will still be unsettled by the experience of change. But they may emerge the other side of it with skills and capabilities that allow them to work more productively, effectively and responsively in the future. Being optimistic about it, that’s surely a prize worth having.

Space exploration is an expensive business. You need access to specialist equipment, as well as masses of computing power to track and guide your mission. But imagine this: supposing NASA (and other space agencies) were to throw open their doors and allow would-be space explorers to make use of their technology and infrastructure.

Okay, there might be limits on what they could use (and sometimes costs), but imagine what could happen if any would-be space entrepreneur could get his or her hands on technology of a quality and scale that would allow them to build and launch their own rockets and space stations. Sounds fanciful?

Well, it’s only an analogy. What I’m really keen to talk about here is about getting into the metaphorical world of ‘cloud computing‘. If you’ve come across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google’s developer-focused resources, you’ve already met the world’s biggest providers of cloud computing services.

Put simply, cloud computing allows you to build and host software, as well as store data (images, files etc) without having to own your own operating systems. Just by having access to the Internet, you - and your co-workers and customers - can run applications, operate business processes and access services, without the need for owning and managing the infrastructure yourself.

In a sense, it’s as liberating as being freed from an earth-bound existence. Wherever you are, as long as you can connect to the web, all the data storage and computing power you want is there at your fingertips. No more need to worry about capacity, maintenance and obsolescence, somebody else will do that for you (okay, at a price, depending on what you want).

Not only can owning your own systems and data servers be expensive and time consuming, few companies can afford to invest in the sort of infrastructure that allows them to scale up when demand surges. Consider a situation where you suddenly had a million customers wanting to download pdfs from your site, or view an online video; if you’re just your own little island of storage and processing, you’re going to get clogged up pretty quickly.

Which is where access to bigger providers comes in. But the paradigm of cloud-working also goes for smaller providers offering outsourced Internet services. We would say this, of course, but why would you want to maintain your own creaking infrastructure - often difficult for staff to access - when someone else can host and deliver the data and applications you need across the web?

And here-in lies some of the complexity of the ‘cloud’ metaphor. In truth, the movement we’re talking about here is about ‘clouds’ - some bigger than others; some with different properties than others. But the underlying principle is the same: access to technology that an individual organisation (especially small and medium sized ones) could only dream about.

It’s a world that’s enabling developers and micro-business to create and deliver a host of new online services, secure in the knowledge that is has a platform that is powerful and scalable if demand hits a spike. NASA might not be opening the doors to such people and organisations; but the infrastructure providers of the cloud certainly are.

This blog is where we’ll be sharing our thoughts on what’s going on and what really matters - talking about anything that we think is interesting for smart organisations, and documenting our journeys and discoveries.

The Fascinating World under the Surf

It’s a complicated but wonderful world - web-side. So complicated it can be difficult to work out how best to exploit the web for your own organisation. It’s even more difficult to predict the future, let alone guess what the next “big web thing” will be. But we’ll be keeping our eyes and ears peeled so that we can let you know what’s going on, helping you think about how to exploit the opportunities of the web for your organisation.

We’ve got big plans for the blog and for Insiteability as a whole, so stay in touch with us here! We’ll be bringing you:

• Our personal views - Keeping up-to-date with things going on in business and on the web
• Things we like - Sharing our top choices of web resources
• 3rd Sector - A focussed view of what’s happening web-wise in the 3rd Sector and what innovations charities and not-for-profits can use to improve
• How to’s - Our tips and tricks for anyone managing websites and services

We’d love to hear what you think, so please do get involved and suggest new areas for us to cover.

In the meantime

Here’s a video from Candid Camera that Joshua Porter played during his dconstruct talk “Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design“, last September - it’s a classic!

He refers to an essay by Meg Hourihan (of Pyra Labs that became Blogger) that argued the atomic unit of digital media is no longer the publication, section, page or article, but the blog post of which there may be millions. He explains that having to sift these isn’t enough to work as an organising principle for informing, and that we need “order atop” these countless atoms. The most important tool for creating this order atop is the link. “The link becomes as important as the brand in news”.

However, links by themselves are not enough, and we need a structure, a landscape - or as he puts it “magnetic poles” - to gather news around and to organise it. Newspapers traditionally use topics, but these are usually just lists of their own content and designed for Google’s SEO, not specifically to help or attract the audience. What’s needed is more than these topic pages that essentially act as an archive.

What would be attractive is a resource that is created, curated, edited and discussed. It will be a new form of aggregator mash-up - bringing together articles, blogs, wiki’s in a way that treats topics as ongoing, cumulative processes of learning. These ideas remind me of some work we did a few years ago for the National Enterprise Workflow Project for the UK government, where we created “learning logs” (this was before Blogs became mainstream) that encouraged recording of learning, structured that information and provided tools to dig and search it, and ultimately lead to the creation of the Workflow Toolkit. Extending those ideas by mashing-up social web services such as blogs, twitter feeds, wiki’s and newsfeeds, but with a “human” topic curator could be a good start.

Jeff Jarvis suggests a few improbable names for such an interactive aggregating mash-up - Topic Table, Beat Bliki, or News Brain. I think I prefer our original name - Learning Logs, or maybe Learning Blogs - but I’m open to suggestions!

What stood out for me was the opening key-note, by New Yorker Steven Johnson, much of which focused on his 2004 book The Ghost Map.

Johnson took us back to London in 1854 and the city’s most deadly outbreak of cholera. This was a time when convention followed the “miasma theory”, that disease was spread through the sort of foul-smelling air that was common in London at the time.

The heroes of Johnson’s story are the local doctor, John Snow, and Vicar, Henry Whitehead. Snow challenged the thinking of the time by positing that cholera was in fact water-borne. Helped by Whitehead - a man well connected to the community around Soho hit by the outbreak (what Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point referred to as a connector) - Snow was able to map the incidence of cholera and tie it back to a particular water pump.

This mapping of disease to locality was, suggests, Johnson, one of the first occasions where data was effectively “mashed” with a geographic representation of the area affected. Looked at through the prism of Web 2.0 concepts, this looks rather trendy: different technologies and knowledge sources being shared together to give new ways of looking at the world - an emergent property that wouldn’t have been possible left to the individual elements.

If you’ve followed Insiteability’s own work in recent times you’ll know about some of our own innovative mash-ups, particularly those done with faith communities - see here how we’ve built a ‘virtual diocese’ for Westminster. What’s interesting about Steven Johnson’s work is the way his Internet company, Outside.In, now works on solutions to create the “hyper-local” web - a means by which the buzz of Internet traffic (newsfeeds, blogs, web pages) linked to particular localities can be picked up and displayed, emailed or otherwise used to alert registered users.

The key service here is Outside.In’s Radar - as the website puts it, something that gives a “whole new way of seeing the world around you”. Sounds good, and something we’re currently looking into to extend our own services.

How might this help people in the UK, especially our Third Sector clients? Imagine, for a start, you’re a community organiser, perhaps a volunteer worker in a particular neighbourhood, or maybe a social worker or even a priest. You’re keen to have your ear to the ground to know what people are talking about - perhaps at that very moment. Web tools like Radar can bring that to you. The Internet may well be great in making the world a smaller place, but sometimes you want to focus like a laser beam on the pulse of your local community.

Imagine being a local ‘connector’, working the social networks in your community, supported by the hyper-local web; just think of the power that might bring to you. What a wonderful world (wide web)!

I had seen Jeff Veen (of Google and Adaptive Path) at dconstruct in 2006 talking on “Designing the Complete User Experience” (listen to the podcast), and he talks about a top-down and bottom-up approach - and using “Mental Models”. Being passionate about user-centred design, I have been thinking about the practicalities of building mental models for some time, so jumped at the chance for Indi Young to explain her experiences to me.

In her own words…

“First, reach out to actual users and have a conversation with them, collecting their perspective and vocabulary. Analyze all of those conversations and compose them into a diagram called ‘the mental model diagram.’ Then compare all of the things your solution is supposed to do with the different parts of that mental model diagram. Align them with the concepts that they support. You can do this with functionality just as it exists, or functionality being planned, or you can play around with brainstorming new ideas. When you step back and look at the whole picture with teammates and stakeholders in the organisation, you can develop a design strategy - a vision - to follow over the next decade. Then you can start devising tactical solutions for high priority areas of the mental model” .

Apart from all the really practical tips I picked up, what was really interesting to me was the models are so useful in so many ways. They don’t stifle creativity - in fact they help by getting you to understand and empathise with users - this is clear. They help identify area of highest priority, strength and weakness, and by doing so reduce the risk in designing services - vital for the executive with stuff to deliver. And because they involve users and stakeholders in their manufacture they become a neutral artefact - they are powerful tools for joining up the vision - de-”ego-ing” the vision - for communicating, thus allowing everyone to visualise and share the mission.

What I’m wondering is how to accelerate the process - I don’t yet know if shortcuts are a good idea, but in the third sector - time and cost matters!