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Paul Bonneville

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Mind the Gap: Connecting creative and technical minds for more cost effective digital projects

Published by Paul Bonneville on July 27, 2010.

Mind the Gap

“Mind the gap” is a warning to train passengers of the gap between the train door and the station platform. It was introduced in 1969 by the London Underground. —Wikipedia

In all of my years in the Web & Interactive industry, there is a single recurring issue within many corporate cultures that almost always leads to major bottlenecks for interactive projects. That issue is the communication gap that exists between creative and technical stakeholders.

Whenever a new digital marketing concept or advertising campaign crosses the line from being a purely creative endeavor into one that seeks to leverage data and collaboration in a real-time and interactive way, folks get excited. The brand managers are excited about the innovation and “wow” factor that these types of projects bring to the table. CEO and executive teams beam with a childlike giddiness they can hardly contain. Interactive agencies get fired up about the opportunity to develop these types of projects that use bleeding edge technologies for the first time. Excitement, innovation and passion abound. This is the good stuff that leads to award winning campaigns that have a real impact in their respective markets.

All is glorious in the world, the birds are singing and the sun is shining until…the IT (as in Information Technology) groups are brought into the fold on what this new digital chicanery is all about.

Ohhhh how they just don’t understand. These information gatekeepers. The self-proclaimed omniscient digital gurus. The defenders of all that is good and wholesome in our companies’ digital infrastructures. The bridge trolls. Stodgy, anal-retentive process mongers who are ready to put the kibosh on anything creative that steps outside of the predefined infrastructure guidelines and standardized technology platitudes. They are the proclaimers of, “If it ain’t SharePoint, there’s no point.” Did I miss anything?

I just set the tone for the relationship, and that my friends is the gap.

While my over-exaggerated and inflammatory description of our IT brethren (a field from whence I hail) does hold some arguably true stereotypes, it is this relationship that can be one of the most challenging to evolve within organizations. On a rare occasion, you will find organizations that have figured it out. Creative and technical stakeholders have been able to set aside differences, agree to disagree and moved on to figuring out how to blaze trails on innovative digital projects. This is indeed lottery-win rare.

If your organization is not one of those that has already developed the bridge that gaps the chasm between technical and creative team members within your organization, I say to you that you have the opportunity to be an agent of change and forge new relationships within your organization that will ensure efficiency and increase the ROI in your digital projects.

Put down your coffee cup, get up out of your chair, walk down the hall into your IT department and hug a tech support team member. Ummm…awkward. Since hugs probably won’t do anything more than earn you a walk of shame up to the HR department, I’ll propose an alternative starting point:

When your latest and greatest digital project kicks-off and the highs of the kick-butt campaign concept are waning off for the day, call up your IT lead and loop he or she in on what you are cooking up before you sign on the dotted line for the project with your agency. Get your IT group and your agency’s development team on the phone together and hash out how this project is going to be built, where it is going to live and figure out who will be maintaining it going forward. Do this before your agency starts building your project.

The sooner you loop in your IT group before your project is set in stone, the more bottlenecks you will be able to avoid when it comes time to bring your project to market. There are definitive differences in priorities for creative and technical team members and the sooner these are on the table in the process, the more stumbling blocks and sticking points can be avoided over the life of the project.

Mind the gap. Avoid the cuts that come from stepping into the gap. Eliminate the need for a band-aid. Build relationships.

Loop in your IT team on you projects as early as possible. It may be painful at first but I guarantee this is one case that begging for forgiveness will not trump asking for permission when it comes to the bottom line for your budget.

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pbonneville

Reworking your digital projects

Published by Paul Bonneville on June 17, 2010.

Occasionally I hear cubicle chatter from folks around the office about the TV shows they watch, which they consider to be guilty pleasures. The most typical responses are usually some sort of reality TV show, none of them which I can recall or name off the top of my head (that I would willingly admit anyways.)  It does make me think about what my guilty pleasure equivalent would be that is on par with the reality TV genre. It wasn’t too hard for me to find one.

To that end, a few weeks ago, I finished reading (actually, listening to) Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals. Yes, I am an entrepreneurial, self-help, success-story, get-rich-quick, fight-the-man, outside-the-box, small business book reader. These books are my guilty pleasure. I’m no junkie by any means, just an occasional reader / audio book listener. I often find it to be like panning for gold. It’s sometimes a lot of work, but when you find a nugget of knowledge or two it makes the whole venture worth it.

Rework had one of those nuggets that came to the surface after much panning. The concept I found useful had to do with hobbies versus businesses. To paraphrase, the idea is that if you don’t not have a plan to profit for your “business,” then it is just a hobby. You can take that idea a long ways if you roll it into you digital and interactive projects.

How many time have you needed to crank out a digital project because of an immediate need? The ideas flow, timelines get crunched, work gets pumped out and viola…your new digital widget is created. New needs arise, more ideas flow, shorter timelines get crunched, work gets pumped out…another standalone widget is created. Rinse and repeat. Now slap yourself on the back for creating a series of unrelated standlone, nifty but limited-life nuggets of digital eye candy.

Are you treating your digital projects as a fad or a passing hobby or have you already headed back to the drawing board to rework your digital strategy to include consideration of developing some standard tools and frameworks, even custom built software products, to truly make your digital business investments measurable and successful? Is digital a hobby for you or an actual part of the business. Have you embraced digital beyond the project-to-project approach and looked at ways to streamline some of your external sales processes while simultaneously exponentially increasing their impact using interactive design?

There is much more to digital and interactive beyond the eye candy which unfortunately can often be as far as these projects are received. Collect all these stand alone projects together, pull out the common functions and tools and start assembling a digital platform for delivering your interactive projects.

What is all this jargonizing yip-yap I’m spewing? Here’s just one example of our approach to a digital product platform here at GSW: Segue.

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Conventional innovation

Published by Paul Bonneville on May 24, 2010.

Within the last year I’ve had an opportunity to attend four different medical conventions as part of the support team for projects we’ve created for our clients. Before my travels to these events, I’d spent most of my time behind the screen, programming the touchscreen kiosks and interactive stations that line the booths that are usually prevalent at these types of meetings.

Seizing the opportunity, at each of these conventions I made it a point to take in the variety of interactive experiences that were being used at all of the other exhibitor’s booths. Partway into the second convention, while once again taking in all the interactive attractions, it hit me. There was a lot of keeping-up-with-the-Jones’ going on between the various companies and brands but very little true innovation. Status quo was the norm and any unique or out-of-the-box thinking on how to engage conference attendees was rare if not altogether non-existent.

In recent years the industry has had to shift away from being able to hand out a bevy of marketing items that used to cause such a frenzy when convention centers opened there doors. The throngs of attendees turned temporary tchotchke-hunters were now being redirected back towards the original mission of these conferences: dissemination and access to value-added product information. In the wake of the fallen conference tchotchke market, it seems that all that remains are the ravenous sales reps and their clipboards, ready to dive upon any conference attendee that dares to venture into their exhibits. Well, the reps and their ho-hum touchscreens and video walls anyways.

It goes without saying that our industry has an extensive amount of legal limitations and FDA restrictions, but that should really not dictate how far outside the box that innovation is allowed to wander. It leads me to wonder how often ideas are squashed based on the assumption that legal will nix them before they have a chance to grow any legs.

Now is the time for innovation. As conferences and exhibitors are still settling into ever more stringent rules and regulations on what they can say and hand out, there is a massive opportunity to reinvent the exhibition booth that few companies are taking advantage of.

A lot of the opportunity lies in creating a toe-dipping experience for attendees. Engage them with self-guided interactive stations that are engineered to entertain and educate (otherwise referred to as edutainment) with interactive experiences that ultimately evolve into a conversation where the sales reps and product experts get involved.

In the age of the Internet’s anonymous access to nearly unlimited knowledge, creating booth experiences that can bridge the gap between self-guided product explorations that users are familiar with from Web surfing with the benefit of access to qualified experts that bring much more to the table than tchotchkes is where the opportunity for innovation lies.

With self-guided edutainment as a foundational concept for the exhibition booths of the future, let the brainstorming begin.

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Technology folding: combining digital technologies for more cost-effective communications and training

Published by Paul Bonneville on April 23, 2010.

I don’t recall the network I was watching, but at some point last year I channel-surfed across a program about Japanese sword making from around the 13th century. Hearing about the intricate process that was developed more than 700 years ago really sucked me in.

Making swords less brittle.

The swords that the show was covering were made of steel that, despite its inherent strength over other metals, if struck at a certain angle by another sword or object, would actually break. The process used to give steel its superior hardness at that time also brought with it a rather limiting side effect: brittleness. The conundrum of the day was finding a way of making a stronger steel sword without that nasty brittle weakness.

The Japanese sword makers found a solution.

Without exposing the ancient secrets of sword making in this post, I do want to share a concept I derived from part of the sword making process that I believe applies to the use of technology for rep communications and training. The process that caught my attention was referred to as “folding” and I haven’t been able to stop using it as an example when brainstorming new digital projects.

Japanese sword makers developed a method for combining layers of steel of varying hardness by hammering them out to very thin layers and folding them back onto themselves. Reheat, hammer and repeat. Reheat, hammer and repeat again, and again, and again. You get the idea. The end product was a sword whose new found strength came from the lamination of varying types of steel that contained thousands of layers. You’d have the durability of hard steel combined with the flexibility of softer steel bonded together with the strength of lamination . A lethal weapon consisting of unified layers and multiple strengths.

Using folding for digital planning.

In the GSW Digital Wave group we are constantly solving digital information and communication problems for our clients. In some cases it’s creating a digital “playbook” that let’s sales reps educate themselves on what digital and print resources  are available to them (let’s call this solution A), other times it’s introducing new products or materials to them using interactive multimedia to deliver the information with more impact and retainability (solution B.)

Other solutions we’ve provided ensured that the reps are always up-to-date on pertinent information and events that are imperative to their day-to-day activities (solution C.) In a final solution scenario, we’ve had to create a means for making resources available offline so that they could still review materials when they were not connected to the Internet or a company Intranet.

Quite often, given timelines and launch schedules, solutions are developed rapidly and released out in the field. First comes solution A, then a month later B, C and finally D a few months down the road. When the next digital solution need arises, we develop it and release it. Build, release and repeat. Build, release and repeat again, and again, and again.

Stop.

Instead of creating more and more individualized solutions with limited uses, why not create a tool that combines the connectedness of the web and the impact of rich media with the immediacy of a desktop application? Combine these digital solutions into a unified platform that can grow or shrink in line with the real-time information needs of your brand and sales teams. Fold your digital content investments back onto themselves, taking the best features of each technology and combining them with the strengths of the others. Push your content out to reps when they are connected and remove outdated content automatically, all without the rep having to sort through files and hunt for updates on disparate and lifeless SharePoint sites.

Standardize your digital solutions with a dynamic digital content container that functions as a scalable communications portal and can simultaneously handle the delivery of your rich media interactive training materials and simpler digital documents. Why not deliver the new sales resources and training at the same time, through the same tool, allowing your team to access their resources and accompanying educational material on their own schedule? Invest in a consistent delivery platform incrementally with the release of each new piece of digital content rather than incrementally investing in individual and unrelated projects.

Standalone single-purpose solutions are limited in their shelf-lives and usefulness. They are brittle tools that are quickly broken and discarded as your business needs rapidly evolve.

Start practicing Technology Folding today and increase the ROI on your digital projects.

Curious? Our digital sword makers are standing by…

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