Six months into a new startup we thought it would be good to look back and analyse the non core skills and activities that have been needed. I don’t think words get the message across so here’s a picture of what we found instead:
Non core startup skills and activities map
There are so many things wrong with my HSBC business banking web site that I’m just going to have to start blogging about them as therapy. But of course underneath this there is a fundamental issue on why some of the most cashed up customer facing organisations in the world have such appalling investment in their customer experience with new generation technologies. They do care about broadcasting the right words in their marketing campaigns but I’m not interested in being on the receiving end of such broadcasts – I’m interested in a great experience, particularly when I’ve got work to do!
Let’s start with what we all want to do when running a business – check our balances and recent use across our accounts, this is the most basic journey I do on a regular basis.
Logon:
I like the secure ID token that HSBC use it’s much easier than Barclays key generator to carry around and use, and its secure enough for my level of banking. And the logon process itself is fine to use but I’ve only got one business and I have to keep telling HSBC this each time I log in, as it stands they don’t show me my accounts until I select my business. You might think it’s only one click but it’s more than that – they don’t bother to get to know me – they don’t care. And besides I think single clicks all add up too, just give me my accounts next time I log in please!
Balances:
I get straight to my Account Balances screen but how’s this for an experience?
The first 70% of the screen is used to display information I’m not interested in. I want to do business banking and I’m confronted with a header that offers me tabs for everything else to the point that my banking is the last tab to the right. There shouldn’t even be any other business banking tabs as they offer exploratory routes for people who want to discover information about other business services, whereas I want to get on with some work. Give over the screen to my work please!
There’s a huge red title screaming at me ‘Balances’ when I know I’m there, but apparently I need a subtitle as well ‘Overview of balances’ just in case I don’t recognise what the information below actually is, which is sort of impossible given that the word “balances” turns up 7 times on this one screen where there is very little else to read.
But how about putting an advert in the most useful area of the screen for me to interact with when I want to work, particularly when there is a huge empty column area to the right of the screen not being used for anything? Simply move the ads to the right – even Google understands this basic courtesy! And thats where its all wrong isn’t it – no courtesy, no thinking about the customer only about what the bank wants to sell, well that’s one sad brand statement!
More space gets wasted on telling me the same information every time I visit: “Please select an ’Account number’ to view more details on the account balance.” The fact this piece of advice has to even be displayed tells you that they have so little faith in the design of the site they can’t expect people to know how to find and click on the account link!
Then I get the most useful warning statement: ”Please note: Balances on all other currency accounts (not GBP) are as at close of business on the previous working day.” But I don’t even have any other non-GBP accounts and my bank of all people should know this! A quick look at my account list and yes I can confirm that I have no foreign currency accounts, so if they’re displaying my list to me why don’t they know? Of course they do know and it’s a simple task in software development to dynamically remove the statement from my balances screen but it’s obviously deemed of little value to the bank. But for me, the customer, it’s another demonstration of how they don’t care to know me, reminding me that I’m of little consequence, and the fact that my balances get shoved further down the screen is not of any interest to them.
As a result of all this misappropriation of space my balances turn up at the very bottom of the screen – and I have a decent 1280×800 screen – where the balances are displayed like an afterthought with no clear visual separation from other text. They’re also displayed in the extremely poor choice of RED text making each account appear overdrawn (and with similarly twisted logic the letters “DR” beside my credit card balance are displayed in black)?! After finally getting there – what a mess! Am I in the Red – the Black ?!*
I had intended to get onto looking at my recent account activity but that’ll have to wait until part 2 as I’ve been logged out twice already (there’s a bug in the site that randomly logs you out regardless of the standard inactivity timeout – makes you wonder about the testing and technical standards employed?).
When social software is introduced for use within an organisation it improves organisational capability but the type of organisational culture that exists also affects the uptake of social software. Here I present a way of dealing with this catch-22 by matching relevant social software to different organisational cultures.
I was lucky to hear Peter Duschinsky talk recently on his book, The Change Equation, and realised he was sharing ideas that helped explain the issues of adopting social software within the organisation. He asserts that change projects that fail to deliver their intended results, (estimated at more than 70% failure: McKinsey & Company Global Survey, 2008 N=3199/ Hamlin 2001), happen when organisations don’t have the ‘capability’ to cope with the change they desire. Capability is explained as a balance between cultural maturity on one hand and process maturity on the other.
Peter goes on to identify nine levels of cultural maturity and outlines a route map to improve an organisation’s capability by progressively stepping up these cultural levels.
| 1. Pragmatic Anarchic | 2. Structuralist | 3. Dialectic | 4. Aligned | 5. Pragmatic Aligned | 6. Empiricist |
| individual focus, micromanaged, little sharing, few formal processes | department focus, formal rigid processes, silo working | inter-department focus, formal processes, individual networking | leadership focus, formal flexible processes, aligned staff & organisation goals | team focus, flexible task groups, flexible processes, high level of staff trust | real-world focus, flexible resources & processes, real-time information gathering |
We know that social software can help an organisation to climb up these cultural levels, microblogging, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, question and answer facilities, embedded application feedback, all improve culture. They’re brilliant for just-in-time learning, for emancipation of knowledge, for bypassing organisational hierarchies when they’re not relevant, for encouraging participation, for enabling staff as content producers, for gathering feedback, and spreading ideas.
But introducing social software is in itself an organisational change, it involves sponsors, infrastructure changes, new technology, learning, adoption, etc. For this reason it is subject to the same issues of failure as any change project. Peter also outlines how we risk slipping back down cultural levels if we skip steps, as they build on each other. So when is the right time to introduce what types of social software?
By introducing tools that align and match the organisations cultural maturity we can avoid issues of introducing a step change too much. This minimises issues of adoption, over-estimation of benefits, and general project failure whilst maximising the benefits from the social software itself and the resulting improvements in capability.
We can define appropriate social media tools for the level of culture within an organisation by matching the types of activity that are supported to those sought by that culture. Mapping this gives us a way of progressively introducing these new ways of working with minimum risk of failure.
This matching method provides a roadmap to introduce social software based on your organisational culture. At the same time the new ways of working provided by social software act to strengthen culture so that the next level is more easily obtained. Each step also amplifies the organisations ability to accept change making each step progressively easier. Moving up this scale will help to establish a self-learning organisation that has the agility to manage proactive changes and hence open the door to more security and success.
Note that this roadmap specifically outlines the introduction of social software for use internally across the organisation. Many organisations are deciding to use microblogging to talk to customers within a very restricted team – this is a separate discussion and not what the roadmap above aims to advise on.
If you’re interested in more detail on the matching choices made for each step then please email me.
Article References:
Peter Duschinsky: The Change Equation
Kate Ehrlich, N. Sadat Shami: Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace
Martin Böhringer: A Full Range of Reasons why to Adopt Microblogging for the Enterprise
Ross Mayfield: Power Law of Participation
Charlene Li: Social Technographics
