A sceptic's guide to web strategy

I've recently joined the Strategic Services department in my newly merged company where, I've been told by my new line manager, "there's no place for cynicism". I think he meant scepticism, but contrary to the perception you may have of me, I wasn't being anything but positive at the time. In fact I uttered not one negative word.
But I have to challenge the perception of companies like ours that they're somehow going to challenge the leading consultancies, break into their markets and offer clients incisive advice about their business strategy. There's such a level of naïvety about how clients may -- and should -- react to some jumped up person in their 20s or 30s who has just read Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage and thinks that no one else has, despite the fact it's been taught on almost every business course in the western world in the last ten years.
So we're selling our intellectual property in Situational Analysis, Business Intelligence, Strategy, etc. as though our clients were inept gits who don't know their own business. I say we're selling this, but of course we're not. What we are selling is user research, usability, and brand development because most businesses haven't ever addressed these issues and are confused by them. If our clients really wanted Business Intelligence and felt they couldn't read all the books produced by McKinsey, they'd go out and hire one of the Big 5 or an individual who used to work for them. But to think that anyone with any experience of a consultancy would ask us to come in and tell them how to run their business is foolhardy, to put it politely. We should be finding a niche that clients have limited exposure to but know is important: content management, for example.
This is all borne out by the "strategy" project at the moment, which is probably the least strategic project I've ever worked on. One of those where I say, "I wouldn't have started from here if I were you".
Our web strategy offering should be:

• Are you expectations from your web applications realistic? This applies to both websites and intra/extranet-style applications.


• Does your brand work on-line?


• Which technologies should you be using to deliver your requirements?


• Do you understand what's easy or difficult to do on the web?


• What else can you achieve on-line that you hadn't thought of before?

That's it. Web stuff's not that complicated, but if your head's out of the web, it can be daunting. But thinking you can persuade clients to part with thousands of pounds each day without being sceptical is about as far from a strategic approach to our value proposition as you can get.

Let your hair grow long...

I'm a big fan of the Hippy Shopper blog, which is full of good ideas coming up to Christmas time. But this particular article is a cut above the rest...

Guardian of good intentions

How can a newspaper that distributes so much unsollicited extra paper now recommend to us how we should recycle their bloody wallcharts?
Similarly, having been sent a scare-mongering brochure about people stealing my identity from Morgan Stanley that will be ok if I buy another product from them, they then sent me loads of credit cheques that I'll never use that I now need to shred in order to prevent my identity being compromised.
Fucking hypocrites.

Information's not free

This story's been in the offing for some time and is likely to go on for some time longer. The Department for Constitutional Affairs reckons it's too expensive to process Freedom of Information request, so is now going to refuse any request that would take more than 2.5 hours to process.

What's a little rich however is that the DCA reckons it costs £254 an hour for someone to consider a request, which tells me that the government has very poor information handling processes and very well paid staff. Of course, when this figure was questioned by a campaign group, the government refused to reveal how it calculated this amount.

If the cost of a particular request is so significant high, why doesn't the government charge the person requesting a fee? Or better still, why doesn't it just accept that this is a cost of government which we should be - or are already - paying for in taxes?

Quite a long way from Cairo

Lots of miles from Vietnam.
Spent the last couple of days in Finland, which has been significantly warmer than London this weekend. In fact, it hasn't snowed in the south for three weeks. Even Moscow is experiencing a winter heatwave of +7 degrees. This hardly constitutes climate change, but the Scandinavian experience is a little weird without snow.
The country came across as pretty quaint, without wishing to sound too snobbish about it. Wooden houses and birch forests (keep all those children in check), very sparsely populated, with lots of homemade Christmas trinkets being sold in outdoor markets; all contributed to the sense that you had stepped back in time 50 years.
Do you know what the two most popular Finnish names are? Matt
& Gloss.

Arsenal stadium mystery

Police investigations today cleared Ashburton Grove of any danger to the public. They had suspected contamination by Graham Poll-onium 2-pen, but only eleven people from Tottenham appear to have been affected.