In the last 3 weeks I have met with a number of Multi-National Companies (MNC) both in Singapore and in Shanghai all faced with the same challenge: lack of digital talent and the impact it is having on their Business strategy.

Many of those MNC are realizing the opportunities for revenue growth, higher gross margins and a lower cost base that a successful eCommerce strategy will offer them. Many of the same executives also realize that they are under-invested or lack the capabilities within the organization to drive that growth.

Some of them fall into the trap of over confidence because they as they are online consumers with experience of e-retailers such as 360go.com, taobao.com or Amazon.com that this provides them sufficient experience to shape or guide their company’s eCommerce strategy. Useful though it is to have personal insight or experience as a consumer this of course is no the same as having experience of setting up and running a multi-million dollar eCommerce business.

Many are smart enough to hire consulting companies who do have that experience to help them formulate their strategy. But that still does not overcome the challenge of how to run the business once it is set-up. And this is where the train starts to come off the tracks. There is simply not enough experienced digital talent – at all levels – to meet the growing demand.

This gap is not as severe at the graduate entry level of the organization. The new “digital” employee entering the workforce or with perhaps 2-3 years employment experience are at the very heart of this quiet digital revolution. Their whole life is online and having known nothing different, they merely lack the corporate experience and confidence to drive the required solution home.

The problem exist in the middle to senior management roles – those accountable for the strategy or execution of that strategy. There are many very intelligent, very smart and very experienced people in this group. But what they lack is experience of setting up and running digital business. And whilst the difference initially appears to be semantic, the reality is more fundamental.

Digital business have a different pace, culture, way of working than traditional businesses. They need to be more agile; they need to be more directly engaged with their customers; they need to understand that the customer “owns” their brand; that there employees are motivated differently and need to be managed differently. Furthermore what needs measuring, how and why they respond to situations and what Levers they can pull to drive a change in performance are fundamentally different form their prior experience.

In China, where the growth in eCommerce is akin to the dotcom revolution of 10 years ago, the situation is even more challenging. Not only is there a more formal and traditional business culture now being challenged by the more open style of the dotcom, but the need for talent that both speaks the language, understands the cultural differences (for example Payment by cash on arrival of goods) and have online experiences, makes the challenges even tougher.

One increasingly attractive solution is to look to organizations that can provide a “turnkey” solution. Collaborating with an organization that can Build-Deliver-Operate (BDO)” your eCommerce business, usually for a combination of fixed fee and revenue share, has a number of advantages.

Firstly the capital investment is reduced with most of the associated fess sitting in operating costs and theoretically paid or out of the results delivered y the agreement.

Secondly the talent is already in place, which means there is little or no delay in finding and hiring talent that could otherwise impact the project by 6-12 months.

Lastly all the experience in the middle to senior tiers already exists. It provides ample time and opportunity to retrain your existing talent to be more “digital”, ready to take over the running of the operation when the BDO contract expires.

Most of us who have flown or fly regularly with Singapore Airlines rate it as one of the best – if not the best – airline in the world

The staffs are immaculately turned out, efficient, personal and are the epitomy of great in flight service quality.

The fleet is being refitted with a new interiors that again catapult Singapore Airways ahead of tis competition, spearheaded by being the first airline to adopt the A380. Everything then about Singapore Airlines is an understatement in efficiency, quality and customer service.

I don’t mind declaring it. I am a fan.

Or I was – right up until May 25th when they relaunched their website. And 3 weeks later it still doesn’t work. The Internet is full of blog posts and comments about how customers are fed up with lost bookings, incomplete transactions, inaccurate pricing let alone the experience that the KrisFlyer members are having to put up with.

Now I don’t know the full detail of the decision behind this fiasco, though I am told the guilty outsource partner is a mid size specialist eCommerce consultancy that took on the work as part of their plans to establish themselves in Asia. You couldn’t wish for a more high profile or better reference than Singapore Airlines, nor could you get the implementation so spectacularly wrong. I suspect there are a few people unexpectedly chatting to headhunters.

But there are lessons here for CEOs, CIOs and CMOs. First and foremost for many bsueinss – especially an airline – the web is no longer a marketing tool. It is a major customer touch point. It is an integral part of the brand experience and of course, it is nowadays one of, if not “the”, the primary revenue channels. It is the crown jewels and you don’t outsource the crown jewels.

If you do outsource it – and many companies simply don’t have the depth of experience or the familiarity with the latest software to do a project of this magnitude, then you have to outsource with a series of contingency and fallback plans in place,

My first question is did they need to make any changes anyway? Most of the comments on the web hint that the old site worked very well and customers were happy. I loved it . In fact a couple of times I used it as a case study in good user design principles, brand reinforcement because is was intuitive, simple and it worked.

Now we have a website that is slow, clunky, takes over 14 clicks to place an order, doesn’t render properly on all browsers and leaves you with too many error messages or incomplete actions for you to have any confidence in it.

The impact on Singapore Airlines reputation – on their brand promises of quality, reliability – is significant. I suspect the lost revenue both in terms of actual orders placed via the web (ie those that were successfully completed) as well as the hundreds or thousands of Business travellers now trying other airlines outweighs the cost of the Consultancy fees.

The basic principles of running a project of this magnitude seem to have been thrown out of the window. Any new functionality – let alone a relaunch- should be the result of customer research, insight and a strong business case. Once approved, as code begins to be delivered so there needs to be full functional and user acceptance testing way ahead of any launch.

Indeed with such a catastrophic launch there should have been an immediate rollback and the new site removed until it was fixed followed by some targeted marketing explaining the issues, and what was being done about it.

So who is to blame? Well, sadly both the consultancy undertaking the work – who clearly bit of more than they could chew – and the Airline CIO (or the Executive accountable for the project) should probably be in the firing line. The former because the basic tenets of project management, testing and website launch appeared to have been ignored. The later because it seems that the programme lacked due diligence, robust RFP process or contingency plans. Worse still there has been little or no marketing activity to welcome back disgruntled customers or to keep frequent flyers abreast of the issues which is having a dilutive effect on Singapore Airline’s brand equity.

Together this smacks at ineptitude or complacency – I am not sure whether it is either or both.

It is such a shame because once you get on board – which is after all why we book our ticket – Singapore Airlines remains in a class of its own

I am sure all of us have walked into an office and seen one of those corporate pictures with a strapline such as “The customer comes first” or ”the customer is king” emblazoned across it as a mantra to help us remember what is important.

Yet all too often companies are just going through the motions – they just pay lip service to this critical component within their strategy.

Chief Executives, Managers indeed all of us often get caught up in the challenges of daily corporate life. Proposals, project plans, chasing the numbers, maintaining margin, writing reports, attending workshops – all essential operational activities to look after the health of the business and implement the strategy

But when it comes to creating that strategy, how many of us really take a step back and start with the customer? In business where digital marketing plays a fundamental part, this activity becomes imperative.

All too often companies focus on products, technologies or an internal perception of what we believe the customer wants. Granted, many companies go through some form of “voice of the customer” survey or customer review as part of their strategic review or planning purpose, but very few really leverage the insight that such activities provide and use it to analyze or challenge themselves around what their customer really wants.

Which is madness because in a world increasingly dominated by social media and the web, the customer “owns” your brand, your reputation and is the key to your continued success. Turning customers into advocates because they love both what you do and how you do it is what is differentiating between success and failure in an economy where digital is both disruptive and a force for good.

Last week I was invited by Dominic Hawes-Fairly to work with his executive team of a fascinating young company that is looking to revolutionize how digital content is licensed. The implications for sectors such as the music industry or sports industries will be profound when this company comes to market.

Why?

Well simply put they are starting by identifying what the customer would want and then making that as simple and as easy as possible for them to get it. They joked about creating the People’s Republic of Music – a world in which the current blanket licensing is removed, where you and I can legally broadcast for free and where everyone in the chain from unsigned recording artist to consumer can make money.

I won’t spoil their thunder by outlining anything more about their business in this post, but what was refreshing was to work with a young business that was thinking truly digitally. By challenging their own processes, their own assumptions, they were able in the course of a few hours to refine their strategy to something that was truly compelling, differentiated and exciting.

Suddenly their whole process of how to monetize their products, what to charge and who to charge it to became crystal clear. 6 months of technical deliberations and wrangling with product propositions suddenly melted away in to a crystal clear vision and a sequence of clear next steps.

The lesson here was not the choice they made, it the process they went through. By asking themselves questions such as “what would I have to believe for this to be true” or by using simple “Situation – Complication – Resolution” thought processes they were able to challenge some of their old assumptions and focus on what would make simple, compelling proposition to their intended customer base, allow those customers to become advocates, for the news to spread virally and for them to accelerate their business model as a result.

So when you are next involved in a strategy session, don’t be afraid to challenge about who the customer really is (it could be internal or external customers), what They really want (not what you think they want because that fits with your product or business model) and be open to changing your strategy to accommodate this new perspective.

In my last post I talked about why the war for talent and why the Employee Value Proposition (EVP) was so important, in effect setting out the rationale for an organizations need to concentrate on the Employee Value proposition. In this post I want to focus on the what: – the components of that Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that we need to manage and take care of.

Wikipedia define the EVP as “a term used to denote the balance of the rewards and benefits that are received by employees in return for their performance at the workplace.” It must be unique, relevant and compelling if it is to act as a key driver of talent attraction, engagement and retention. Wikipedia continues that it has become closely related to the concept of employer branding, in terms of the term EVP being used to define the underlying ‘offer’ on which an organization’s employer brand marketing and management activities are based. In this context, the EVP is often referred to as the Employer Brand Proposition.

We can group the main components into 5 categories that together have a number of both attraction and a number of commitment benefits. Attraction Benefits such as rewards can allow organization to reach up to 50% deeper into the labour market to reach ”passive” candidates and can reduce the compensation premium needed to hire by up to 50%. Commitment benefits can increase the commitment of new hires by up to 29% and of existing employees by up to 37%.

The five main categories that an organization must manage and measure around the EVP are:

• Rewards
• Opportunity
• Organization
• Work
• People

For us to manage these components we must first understand hat the mains sub components are and below we briefly describe each of these

REWARDS

OPPORTUNITY

ORGANIZATION

WORK

PEOPLE

As an organisation we should have robust policies and answers for each of these components. THe EMployee Brand is increasingly important for organisation to manage proactively. In a recent review I did for a large multinational I interviewed nearly 80% of their eCOmmerce ad Digital marketing talent. The feedback was uncomfortable reading. But what it gave the leadership was insight into exactly how their key talent were feeling. In this case since the Leadership had commissioned the review they already understood the importance to their organisational future and profitability, so they are now taking actions to “fix” those aspects of the proposition that was broken.

But brands – especially employee brands – are all about perception. Brands provide a short-code for decision making. We make emotional connections with brands, and they influence greatly our decision making. Seldom do how brands wish to be perceived actually match the perception that a customer has. This is especially true of Employee Brand perception where the employee has much more personal outcome committed into the relationship and as a result the reaction tends to be more emotional driven than rationally.

By focusing on the key component that we have outlined in this post, by listening more to your workforce, by understanding the changing attitudes and perceptions in the market place, you can help close the gaps between how you wish your employees to view your internal brand and how they actually currently do. And that will help you to attract , retain and mange your talent netter, and that will lead to better growth and profitability.

There is an over used phrase ”The war for talent” that through it’s over use hides a key message that Corporations must address.

Put simply, the value of your corporate brand internally – to your employees – is as critical to your companies success as the value of you attach to your brand with your customers and suppliers. I wonder how many of you allocate a similar amount of time, money and resources to that internal brand – what I am going to refer to as the “Employee Value Proposition” – as you do to your external brand?

Talent chooses where to work. It always has, many of you will argue. Sure, but in today’s workplace this is ever more so – it is almost like this particular hypothesis has taken steroids. Talent chooses not only with whom to work, but where and when. Technology has liberated the worker from the workplace and help shift power from the centre to the edges – to the individual. To you and to me.

Well the rules of this so called “war” have changed. Subtlety, but changed they most certainly have.

No longer is this a “war” where the protagonists work 9-5. No longer is this a war where the talent receives a gold watch after 30 years loyal service. No longer is this a ”war” where hierarchy, titles or salary are the factors that determine power, authority or choice. No longer does your external brand act as a sufficient attractant to talent

The reality is that many middle to senior managers were born outside the digital age. At worst they were educated in a world of slide rules and log tables and to them technology is something that their grandchildren or children show them. At best they come form an age where when they were at high school, computers were something that those who did not play sports spent their time locked away in bedrooms or computer labs doing. And as a result many of us from that generation used derogatory terms like geeks or nerds to label those that that did not conform.
Organizations now have a tough call. It is no longer the corporation that – to extend our analogy – is the sports jock or the conformist. That power has shifted to a younger generation – a digital and connected generation – who loyalty is no longer to the company but to their own values, ethics and desires and who have grown up in a world enabled by rather than suspicious of the technology and where choice, immediacy and opinion are the currencies of value.

Where those values overlap with a company’s values then sustained employment will co-exist. When they deviate the talent moves on to find a closer match, their resume untainted by the regular moves, and secure in the knowledge they are creating value in their own brand.

What this means is that this “war for talent” is now more potent, more unstructured and more difficult to win. The criticality of that Employee Value Proposition to an organization’s ability to attract, and retain the talent is now evident, yet few companies are giving it the management time or budget to address it.

The strategies, plans and processes that all those “old fashioned” leaders or senior managers tuck around them as comfort blankets are in danger of being undermined by the spotty twenty something year old with skills, attitude and choice. Worse than that. Those managers have no idea how to lead a team who think, respond and are motivated entirely differently. The managers’ world of spreadsheets, metrics and meetings may still exist, but they are often unsure how to measure or interpret the information that is being shared, as they do not have the basic knowledge in place.
In a bizarre twist, the very dissolution of those old values of hierarchy, loyalty and trust that were perceived to be the bedrock of corporate success and employee aspiration have been replaced by more updated values of social responsibility, ethical policies and a desire to be responsible. The old values are still evident, but the weight applied to them by this new generation entering the work force is different.

And unless a corporation recognizes this and adapts its policies and rewards together with re-educating its leadership to manage differently, then its own brand, value and survivability will be undermined.

In many ways this new generation – we can put labels on them such as Gen-Y, Gen–Z or Gen–C if that helps – are more principled. They are less concerned by money and more concerned by doing the right thing for the right reasons. The portability of their skills, the portability (literally) of the technology required to do their job, and the demand for their talents means that your corporate brand has to be a tight fit for their own personal brand, before they will consider investing their time with you.

This subtle shift of power is possible because of the social media networks, low cost of technology and pervasive understanding within this generation of how to utilize the two for personal benefit. In effect everyone – especially for the talent we all hanker after – is now the CEO of Me.INC and every decision, every action they takes about reinforcing that brand’s profile and reputation, is at the heart of why the Employee Value Proposition is so critical to review and adapt to these disruptive times.

So where does this all leave us?

Well, in the next series of posts I am going to dig deeper into the Employee Value Proposition. What its constituent elements, requirements and benefits are as well as how we measure it or fix them if it is broken.

If I was a catholic, I would be chanting “Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa, Mea maxima culpa”!

I can’t believe it is six months since my last post here. It is a case of the Cobbler’s children – you know, the cobbler is so busy repairing the shoes of customers that he doens not have time to repair the shoes of his own children! Perhaps this post should read “How to lose authority and reputation with Google by not blogging for six months!”

The truth is I have been absorbed with a mix of client work, personal projects (including the launch of Focus for Humanity - a not for profit that help NGOs and photographers work together – and some mentoring and angel investments in Cairo, Egypt, where I now live – check out the Cairo Photo group (which consists of the Cairo Photo School, Cairo Photo Tours, Cairo Photo Studio and Cairo Photo Services)

He observant amongst you will notice that I have also moved service providers and changed blogging platform away form Squarespace to WordPress. Why? Well I think it is mainly familiarity. I now run a combination of 10 other websites or blogs on WordPress and it just is easier for me to focus on one platform. I think Squarespace is good, but I think the open source and extensibility of WordPress far outperforms anything Squarespace can offer.

For Photographers – my other passion which you can see more of at marcoryanphotography.com – there is much tighter built in integration with key online Stock agencies and archives such as Photoshelter and themes from Graph Paper Press – all of which make it a no-brainer for me to use WordPress Personal opinion – so don’t fill up the comments box with rude comments!

So what is in the pipeline?

Well I am currently rewriting an eBook for photographers about online branding and influence – more of this in the next few weeks – but much of this will be pertinent to small business and individuals who are not photographers too.

I continue to do client work with Premier Farnell plc and to work on helping them build their eCommerce proposition to both their internal customers – the employees – and to the wider market.

I am thrilled to see the eCommerce strategy that I created over 4 years ago delivering all that we hoped. The percentage of eCommerce revenues as part of their global revenues has moved form about 12% when I arrived 5 years ago to nearly 60% globally, and in some regions and countries this is around 80%.

Their brand is evolving They have created the pre-eminent Community for Design Engineers – element14 – they have focused on content and on commerce. Their systems and internal processes are being revitalized to cope with their digital strategy and they continue to outperform the competition as a result. It is very satisfying to have played a major role in such an exciting transition and a privilege to still have some involvement. However the real heavy lifting has been done – and the credit for these superb results – must go to the teams that I was privileged to help establish and to work alongside.

So what can you expect on this blog in the coming weeks and months?

This week I will be posting on the Employee Value Proposition and how this can drive the bottom line, especially in an eCommerce centric company. I have some new reports and insights to share over the coming weeks, and an exciting project that I hope will come to fruition as a Book and course around helping non-eCommerce Managers cope with the digital waves that disrupt their business and giving them the tools to cope.

Speak soon!

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Google’s recent beta launch of Google Wave has created its own wave of opinion, discussion and excitement. A truly innovative product that has the potential to disrupt our thinking and behaviour around communication, collaboration and community.

What is Google Wave?
Wave is not just a new product or new service, but a fundamental new way of working.

According to Google, Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

Is it more than email or wikis on steroids?
Unquestionably. Whilst it allows IM, blogs, wikis, images, documents etc to be grouped into waves, it is the real time update, and the way that these concepts seamlessly link and update that is truly innovative. It breaks down traditional boundaries or restrictions of those individual projects and re-engineers them into one seamless, open platform that allows us the User to determine how to use them.

Think of the Wave components as a series of high quality cake ingredients that allow you to create any type of cake recipe, with the added flexibility of being able at any stage of the process to duplicate, rollback, replay or morph any part of the recipe, yet still come out with perfect cakes each time! Compare that to current products or services that resemble more restrictive cake mixes – with different and arguably lower quality ingredients.

So has Google stolen a march on competitors?
I believe so. The Demo is impressive (if long at 1 hour 20mins) and shows that the impact on Consumers will be significant and be the driving force for adoption. The impact on the Enterprise is perhaps less obvious initially, as typically organisations tend to follow consumer behaviour once the technology is more proven or stable, but the ripple or waves into the Enterprise will follow, as Google Wave gets increasingly sticky and viral.

Why is it so disruptive?
The main argument is that it is a green field design – it is truly innovative and has been designed from the ground-up to be different. Other existing services and products are unlikely to be able to morph or to emulate Google Wave.

It is disruptive because it marks a new approach. This is not about Google creating a new product that will dominate or disrupt on its own – though it is likely to do both of those. It is disruptive because it is so innovative and because the Google brand is attached to it. By making the product Opensource from the start, the likelihood is that new products and services will emerge that utilise Google Wave very rapidly. The concept and the use of the Google WebKit (the technology used to develop the product that is in itself innovative and disruptive) indicate that the potential it is creating is huge. A good comparator would be the iPhone and the concept of the Google App. The app technology itself is not the disruptive element – it is the quality and variety of apps that are produced by third parties that is disruptive, on a standardised platform. The backbone of the App is the iPhone and iTunes and a similar backbone opportunity potentially exists for developers with Google Wave and the Google Web Toolkit.

Tom Austin at Gartner suggests, “The design may fail. Someone else may evolve and perfect it. In the end, what matters is bold innovation that addresses many of the vexing problems posed by current product offerings.”

It supports the latest thinking around disruptive technologies (see my previous blog on Information visibility). It now allows users to determine how they will work and with what tools. Google Wave breaks the constrictions of the previous few decades that focused on process standardisation and cost optimisation – usually by implanting “best practise” solutions such as enterprise CRM or ERP or even basic software such as Microsoft office.

In those generations Competitive advantage happened not because everyone implemented these tools in a best practise standardised way (although that was the goal and sales pitch), but because they failed in varying degrees to implement the best practise. Differentiation then was caused by degrees of implementation success.

Google Wave is truly innovative. It breaks down the concept of “best practise” or standardisation and focuses on the true driver of competitive differentiation – user discretion and information visibility. The ability to collaborate in any way imaginable, safe in the knowledge that the technology can support it rather than restrain it is truly disruptive to how we think and work today.

Google Wave to me is an impressive and disruptive innovation that breaks the mold on how we might decide to communicate and collaborate online. And as we get overrun by Twitters, blogs, wikis, RSS and other Web 2.0 concepts, Google Wave hints at an island of calm amidst this disruptive storm.

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