The public website or intranet that keeps screaming for attention with useless images and vain content will get little from the impatient and sceptical customer.
The needs of the organization are great, and the larger and older the organization gets, the greater those needs become. The problem is that the internal needs of the organization rarely match the needs of customers.
Organizations grow strong because they’ve done something right.
Dell is a good example. It grew as a customer centric
organization, but as it got bigger it began to lose that true
customer focus.
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Around 2001, you had two options on the Dell homepage: navigate
by product (laptop, desktop, etc.) or navigate by audience
(home, business, etc.). Every test I have done indicates that
about 90% of people prefer to navigate by product in buying
computer stuff. In fact, audience navigation makes many people
cynical. “Do businesses gets better deals than me?;” I just want
to buy a laptop, why do I have to select what group I belong
to;” “I’m a home business. Which should I select?”
By about 2003, Dell had gotten rid of the product navigation,
forcing the customer to choose an audience. I am told Dell did
this because the audience types mirror the powerful business
units within Dell. These business units could not agree how to
share revenue if someone simply selected “Laptop”.
Dell was once young and customer-centric, but like nearly all
organizations, it grew old and organization-centric. It began to
suffer from organaritis. Similar to arthritis in humans,
organaritis afflicts mainly older organizations. A stiffening of
the joints makes it hard for the organization to change and move
quickly.
There are signs that Dell is trying to recover from organaritis.
Recently, I noticed that it is publishing reviews of its
products on its website. Yes, it allows negative reviews. That
to me is impressive and makes it more likely I will buy a Dell
again. (After what Lenovo has done to the ThinkPad, the choices
have become more limited.)
Does your organization have organaritis? If you answer yes to
one or more of the following questions you probably need to seek
medical help:
• Do you have pictures of very important people within your
organization (your needy children) on your webpages?
• Do these needy children require messages from them to be
published prominently on the site?
• Do you have big pictures of smiling actors pretending to be
customers? (Shiny, happy people.)
• Do you have needy departments whose stated objective in life
is to get some real estate on the homepage?
• Do you have needy, powerful managers who demand that their
latest programs and initiatives get prominence on the
homepage?
• Is your culture one that believes that the primary purpose of
the website is to get customers to do what you want them to do,
rather than help them quickly and easily do what they came to
do?
• Does your organization embrace verbosity atrocities?
Headings such as: “Start your way to a clear new world”.
Sentences such as: “We are delighted to announce that our holistic approach
embraces 50,000 ft thinking which is unparalleled in its reach
and depth of understanding of the globalization challenges that
must be embraced holistically if we are to thrive in
ever-changing, shifting, hazy, somewhat unclear, cloudy, and
sometimes downright quite difficult to see through clearly into
the must be embraced holistic future scenarios.”
Gerry McGovern
Content management solutions: Gerry McGovern
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com
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