Quite the wrong sort of training for a digital media agency

Which of the following questions do you think you would least likely ask a digital agency at a pitch meeting for a project to redevelop your website?

1. Would you like a cup of tea or coffee? Water, perhaps?
2. How do you plan to ensure that the website you design and build for us will reflect our brand values?
3. How much of your company’s staff training and development budget did you leave unspent last year?

I assume that you are a nice, friendly lot, so I take it for granted that you would ask the first question as a matter of courtesy.

I assume you would also ask the second question, as the optimal expression of your brand values would presumably be a major criterion in determining your choice of digital agency.

But, I think, you would be unlikely to ask the question about staff training and development.

Which would be a shame, as it is just the sort of question I’d suggest you should ask, or get someone to ask on your behalf, somewhere in the selection process? But, why?

In spending years sat on both sides of the agency selection process, working at different times as a client and for an agency, my experience has shown me that traditional agency selection processes tend to be far too narrow, focusing just on the agencies’ responses to the Request for Proposal, with just a little due diligence in the areas of financial stability and chasing references added for safety’s sake. Yet, experience has shown me that you have to dig a lot deeper than the usual questions to get a true, rounded picture of how a digital agency works.

If you are responsible for the online offerings of your organisation (or its Intranet, or online advertising) the performance of the digital agency you choose to execute those responsibilities will have an enormous impact on your career. You need to know that the agency you choose really is the best for you and the organisation you work for. Furthermore, you will need to form a lasting, mutually successful relationship with your digital agency, as engagements like these tend to last a number of years, rather than months.

So, you will want to choose a digital agency that does better than just answer your brief. You’ll want to choose an agency that sets high standards. And, I suggest, an agency’s attitude to staff development reveals a lot about the standards it aspires to.

Why is staff development so important to a digital media agency? Here are three reasons:

1. Digital media is a technology-driven industry. And, that technology is always changing. Do you want to engage a digital agency whose staff are aware and capable in the latest online and digital technologies; or one whose staff have skills which are growing older and less relevant by the day?
2. Few industries allow so many opportunities for innovation as digital media, and I’d be surprised if you were not at least hopeful that your chosen digital agency was able to bring some innovation to the table. Yet, innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. Instead, it is sparked-off by intelligent, creative people having their imaginations ignited by the innovations of others. The staff at your chosen digital agency will need time and encouragement to attend conferences, road-shows, seminars, and other events. They will need to see and experience the best work of their peers if they are to produce their best work for you.
3. When you choose a digital agency, you will do so, at least in part, because of its people. You’ll want those people to stay around for the lifetime of your project. Yet, the world of digital media has notoriously high rates of staff turnover. Studies and surveys on staff retention invariably indicate that the availability of training and development opportunities plays an important role in persuading existing staff to stay with their employer.

So, you get the idea – staff training and development isn’t just a nice-to-have: it’s a vital component of the ability of your chosen digital agency to do a really great job for you.

Which is why I’d ask that question about the staff development budget; and, why I’d be so interested to hear the agencies’ answers.

Photo used under Creative Commons from g-hat.

No one wants to be seen as someone else’s stooge, not even a business analyst, which I consider myself to be (among other things).

But this, I feel, is often the way BAs are seen by others. The reason for this is often where the BAs are situated within their organisation. In fact, the question of where organisations should locate their business analysts seems to have become quite a hot topic recently. Only a few days ago the question was asked in the Modern Analyst.com group on LinkedIn, and the question has come up time and time again among my own network of colleagues both past and present.

I was fascinated by the initial premise that some of the respondents used to answer this question on LinkedIn — that the primary role of a BA is to act as a bridge between the business and IT? Is it really? Surely, it is to accurately and impartially elicit and document business requirements. And, assuming that this is indeed the case, then BAs should be embedded within the business to the greatest degree possible, and kept out of either the IT department or the Programme Management Office (PMO).

In my experience, there is a danger that BAs who are located in an organisation’s IT department become compromised when eliciting and documenting requirements. Almost without pre-meditation or conscious thought, they find themselves immediately trying to estimate how the existing IT systems and processes could facilitate an expressed requirement.

While this may seem a good idea — even a productive one — the end result is that the elicitation and documentation of requirements become biased in favour of those requirements that can be certainly (or perhaps possibly) facilitated by the technical status quo. Requirements that cannot be satisfied by the existing systems, and especially those that challenge the organisation’s existing technical orthodoxy, are downplayed, de-prioritised, or even ridiculed.

The eventual fate of the BA is that he or she, within the business, becomes associated with a “can’t do” attitude, and is seen as a block to progress and innovation — a stooge of a conservative IT hierarchy. All this might be very unfair on both the BA and the IT department for which they work — but, that hardly matters when perception is more important than reality.

The inherent problems associated with placing BAs in IT seem to be one of the reasons why they now often find themselves located in the PMO instead. But, the same problems of compromise exist. The BA who is answerable to the PMO will likely, and again almost without pre-meditation or conscious thought, find themselves immediately trying to estimate how an expressed requirement can be realised within the existing budgetary and temporal restraints of a given project, programme or process. Again, elicited requirements that challenge these orthodoxies will be de-emphasised, and the BA will become viewed in the business as the stooge of the PMO.

Of course, prioritisation, an assessment of technical fit and capability, and time and cost implications are vital considerations, but to the BA they should not come first, before the real requirements are honestly elicited and documented. And, apart from prioritisation, I would contend that these tasks are actually better carried out by technical architects and project managers anyway.

So, where to put the BAs? The idea of a RMO — a Requirements Management Office — is an enticing and exciting one, but it would seem to me to be possible only in the largest organisations. I have often wondered why BAs are not located in the planning, strategy or CEO’s office. These seem far better locations for BAs than either the IT department or the PMO.

But, wherever located, the BAs should always be sent out into the business whenever possible, and see themselves primarily as the impartial elicitor and documentor of the business’s requirements, unfettered by the compromises of IT, the PMO or the CEO.

Ultimately, the answer might be for most organisations to stop directly employing BAs at all, and instead outsource the work of eliciting and documenting requirements to external consultants. This would seem to have two major benefits: firstly, the BAs so engaged should, if managed and deployed correctly, owe allegiance to no particular special interest in the organisation; and, secondly, the organisation need only engage BAs when required, potentially realising considerable cost savings.

Related reading (from Amazon.co.uk):

• Business Analysis, by Don Yeates
• Mastering the Requirements Process, by Suzanne Robertson, James C. Robertson
• Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs, by Ellen Gottesdiener

iPhone 3GS displaying the Nearest Tube app

While I’m still feeling some pangs of guilt about my recent desertion from the Windows Mobile platform and my conversion to the iPhone 3GS, those pangs are becoming less frequent and less painful the more I use my iPhone (it’s magnificent) and I become more and more convinced that the platform currently offers by far the best apps, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

One such app is the soon to be released Nearest Tube from acrossair. The app shows the user their nearest tube station via their iPhone’s video function. With the iPhone held flat, all 13 lines of the London underground are displayed in coloured arrows. By tilting the phone upwards, the user will see the nearest stations: what direction they are in relation to the user’s current location, how many miles away they are, and what tube lines the stations are on. As the user continues to tilt the phone upwards, they see stations further away, as stacked icons. Take a look below at acrossair’s demo video on YouTube.

As well as being a great iPhone app, this also seems to be a genuinely useful application of the concept of augmented reality, one of the hottest buzz phrases of the moment. To me, most of the augmented reality applications currently being showcased in the digital media area seem to be undeniably eye-catching but pretty shallow from a purely functional perspective. I’ve never been able to imagine finding something like BMW’s Z4 AR microsite as the killer-app for the technology. In fact, I began to fear that augmented reality might suffer the fate of becoming merely a plaything of marketing and communications.

Thankfully, then, I think Nearest Tube shows just what can be usefully achieved using augmented reality on a digital media platform; to me, it feels more like a killer app than acrossair’s previous AR offering on the iPhone, the acrossair browser. I certainly can’t wait for the release of Nearest Tube. And, it’s only available for the iPhone 3GS.

See the app in action below via YouTube, or by following this link to YouTube if the embedded video is not working.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2uH-jrsSxs

Related reading (from Amazon.co.uk):

• Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide by Stephen Cawood
• New User Interfaces for Mobile Devices Using Augmented Reality by Peter Mihai Antoniac
• Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK by Dave Mark, Jeff LaMarche

My first threaded discussion in a tiny thread website

Twitter has many attributes, not least the fact that it has a very limited, but very compelling, feature set (yes, limited is a plus when it comes to functionality), but regular users, especially those who use the service to hold conversations, have missed the ability to hold those conversational tweets together in a thread.

So, the news that was broken yesterday by TechCrunch that a new service had been launched to provide such threading was sure to generate comment. Sadly, the initial reactions showed just how low a priority some people place on functionality, and how obsessed many on the web have become with graphic design as being the sole yardstick of quality.

The service – a tiny thread – has been developed by Joshua Schachter, best known as the creator of social bookmarking service Delicious. He later sold it to Yahoo! for, it is rumoured, anything between $17-$40 million; so, we are talking about someone who has a pretty spectacular record of creating value from providing useful online functionality.

A track record, I would have thought, that would have given those who commented on the TechCrunch story reason to judge Mr Schachter’s offering on its functional merit. Some hope: here was the very first comment, from “MJ”:

“that is the ugliest site i have ever seen”

That was it. How profound. And, here is the second comment, from “Sen”:

“I like the collours the white and blue do it for me.”

Good grief. Which is why my award for “actually getting it” goes to contributor Matt Lawson, who becomes my hero of the day for commenting:

“Ha! Its not ugly……

“This is 1st stage of development. You dont worry about beauty when building web apps. You grow and change the idea and it morphs and comes alive. As it becomes something that can be turned int a real product you then ass all the templating and graphics and make it all pretty. So it is really not good to concern yourself with graphics and styles in phase 1 of development.”

Thank you, Matt. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Let’s hope there are many more Matts than MJs and Sens out there, or a tiny thread is doomed from the start – because it doesn’t look good enough. Just think, if MJ and Sen had had their way, we’d still be using Yahoo!, and Google would have never got off the ground.

As a test, I’ve started my own threaded discussion on atinythread.com – feel free to join in.

HSBC's advert for UK mortgages showing a US-style house

How significant is cultural relevance to a successful advert? Well, not at all, it would seem, if we are to assume that HSBC’s advertising agency hasn’t made an enormous gaff.

If cultural relevance is important, then HSBC may feel that its advertising agency has handed it a bit of a pig-in-a-poke with the bank’s latest advert for its fixed-rate mortgage. Take a look at it, especially that tethered house. Notice, that it’s an American house.

You’d be forgiven for asking how I can be so sure it’s American. Well, I suppose I can’t be absolutely sure. It could be a Canadian house, I suppose. But, it certainly isn’t British – have you ever seen a house that looks like this anywhere in Britain – ever? But, actually, I’m pretty certain it’s American – I lived in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania for three years, and that style of house was everywhere. Aluminium (or, rather, aluminum) siding, the chairs on the porch, the mock-shutters, the beige colour. I’ve seen hundreds.

Of course, my interests lie in online rather than billboard adverts, and so I followed the link shown on the advert – hsbc.co.uk/ratematcher (note that .co.uk domain, obviously geographic relevance matters sometimes) – to see what imagery was being used there. Bizarrely, however, this address confusingly redirects to www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/ (the HSBC home page), which seemed to have no content directly relevant to mortgages, apart from one link, at all. Why put up huge adverts quoting a web address that doesn’t exist? I didn’t bother browsing for the relevant content.

HSBC describes itself as “The world’s local bank”. Not that local, it seems. How do you think it ended up advertising UK mortgages using images that are synonymous with middle-America, sub-prime mortgage misery: in fact, just the kind that largely led to the recent banking crisis? Is this really the image that HSBC wanted to portray? Did it use a US-based advertising agency? Or, did the creative genius who put this ad together not realise that architectural styles, especially domestic, are deeply redolent of national identity? Or, did the agency just run out of money and couldn’t afford anything but a stock photograph – even so, has it not heard of Flickr?

My guess would be that what we have here is another example of visual design triumphing over function, the function in this case being the transmission of a relevant message to a geographically-specific audience. I bet that image of a house was just the right colour, just the right shape, and just the right size for the creative treatment. And, that’s probably all that mattered.
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I know that some of of you are still plagued by Internet Explorer 6, usually because of the demands of your IT department. You should look at this site, HEY-IT, which will help you launch your campaign to get rid of it now.

Google's design-light, ultra-simple interface

Why do you use Google? Don’t bother to answer, as I’ll take a wild guess. It’s because you want to find something. Am I right? It wasn’t the most difficult job I’ve ever had.

It’s a blindingly obvious reason that almost doesn’t need stating (I’m sure that won’t stop some university department applying for a research grant to spend two years finding this out). Its function is implicit.

Do you use Google because of its brand? Or its creative design? Think really hard before you answer these questions. You might just be tempted to answer “Yes”, especially about the brand.  But, without wishing to seem dictatorial, you really should answer “No” to both questions.

Some of you – especially the branding and creative types – might now be fuming, making your lattes extra-hot just by snorting your fiery derision into the paper cup stuck just beneath your nose. Surely, Google’s brand is a vital element in encouraging us to use its services, you’ll say. And that minimalist design – it’s inspired, and “drives” users to its site.

Come off it. We use Google – and always have – because it provides great functionality. Remember back in 1996, when Google first came online. If, like me, you were alive then, you were probably using Yahoo! to search. Did Google look better than Yahoo! when it launched? Did you give a stuff about Google’s brand? Did you even know that its informal corporate motto was “Don’t be evil”?

No, of course you didn’t – all you cared about was that Google seemed to bring back more relevant search results than its competitors. And, that happened because Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google’s founders) developed a new algorithm for searches, not a brand or a creative design – it was functionality, pure and simple.

This should give some people in digital media reason for thought. Too often, an agency’s response to answering a client brief is to get the creatives in a room – meaning only those who are visually creative, of course – to get them to craft the response without a single thought to functionality. The result is invariably a response that is pure eye-candy, initially tasty but ultimately unsatisfying.

Unless it’s an art project, no one uses a website just because it looks good. It has to work. For nearly all sites, true success comes from a marriage of functional and creative design. Yes, Google is now a powerful brand, but only because it initially provided great functionality, and continues to do so. Yes, the Google logo is now a brand icon, but only because we look at it every day as we type in yet another search phrase.

Photo used under Creative Commons from Spencer E Holtaway.