My favorite strategy for getting my ideas implemented successfully is to get buy-in from the “thought leaders”, people in positions of power whether in terms of the organization or as power users who can set a great example. Nothing builds momentum like the people considered to be “in the know” advocating your idea.

Early on in the process of developing a social media policy, a couple of things became clear:

• There are not a lot of good examples in existence to base ours on.
• There is a lot of confusion about what social media is and how to use it properly.

So I developed a clear, easily understood message (http://tomdoepker.com/2011/02/10/social-media-policies/), and then used an opportunity presenting to over sixty of the elected officials, department heads and technical leads during a records retention training to cover the importance of having a policy in place and how it could be used successfully.

The above video is of that presentation. (Note: Pressing play will skip you to my portion of the presentation, which was the final piece of a two hour training.) While I am not the world’s greatest presenter, it really has served to get the County on board with our policy as well as to bring in new agencies with some exciting new ideas as to how we can better use social media to communicate with the public.

Existing Websites

A website that has been around for some time is a bit easier to define; you can get a better sense of what has worked and what has not. Ideally, you would have some analytic tools and reports that could at least tell you what was popular and what was not, hopefully even more.

In this case, the reports were pretty spare, but the team had a great relationship with their audience. We were able to conduct some informal surveys with potential users as well as staff members who had worked in the office for some time to figure out what was likely to be the driving forces of the website.

Without that relationship, the lack of analytic reports would have led me to replicate the site as best as possible in our system, where we would be able to track it moving forward. Usually, there is either someone who has at least gotten some informal feedback that can point you in a direction to focus.

New Websites

It’s surprising how many times the answer to “why will this website exist?” is because they have to have a website. Having your own website is now more common than having your own office, but the focus of the site will drive everything from the initial design and content development to the long-term goal tracking and site maintenance.

Some suggestions:

• Lead generation for sales prospecting and/or creating an email database
• Reducing support costs by providing self-help information
• Providing required forms or research materials
• Creating a customer experience that reinforces your brand
• To sell products online

Simple

I know it sounds really simplistic, but it works. There’s a great Jack Welch quote: “In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.” Now the team knows where to focus their time and effort. We have been able to develop short-, medium- and long-term goals to measure against because we know what is strong, what needs work and how to incorporate other goals for the site.

I attended the Google Apps Summit recently and was definitely impressed with what I saw, though I am fully aware that I was at a sales pitch. All the same, their team made some really strong and interesting points deserving of further review.

My organization is considering a switch from being a Microsoft house to introducing some of Google’s services and I have been named to the analysis committee, which means that I have some research ahead of me.

Here are the highlights from my notes during the initial seminar:

Interesting Points from the Sales Pitch

• New features and releases are immediately available
• Access from any device, anywhere
• 80% of current IT resources are spent simply maintaining a “digital dial tone” (this was a Gartner Group statistic the Google Sales Team cited) instead of actively pursuing new initiatives
• Cost. I am not sure of the cost per user to provide Exchange Services (their estimates were $300-600) and Google offers their email and other apps at $60/user/year.
• Scanned documents can be added to the cloud and would be searchable.
• Data would not exist on machines, but in the cloud. Laptops can be stolen, servers destroyed and all data would still be accessible from any PC, tablet or smartphone with a data connection.
• Security features. I would recommend further, more specific talks with the Google representatives, but the high-level overview of their security, additional features from their Postini offerings as well as offerings from outside vendors sounded promising.
• Interoperability. Works with Exchange (can with import PST email archives or even use an Outlook front-end), Active Directory, Cisco phones, Blackberry and more.
• A large and easily scalable amount of storage. Google’s base offerings are very generous in terms of storage space (i.e. Email users get 25GB of email storage) and additional space can easily be purchased and seamlessly added.

Other Interesting Points

• New college graduates are geared to cloud computing and it seems like a solid bet that technology will shift to it with the advent of tablets and smartphones. It is of course still accessible via laptops and desktops.
• Adopting Google Apps would mean that we would be entirely reliant on Google’s survival as a company, but we are already that way with Microsoft.
• Google does not collect business user information, more at www.DataLiberation.org
• Two-factor security authentication is available if desired, though from a third-party.
• The Google Apps marketplace offers a resource akin to the Android or iTunes Apps stores, and it seems likely that some very helpful solutions will emerge from here.

Doubts

• How well does it really integrate with an existing Microsoft set up?
• I have heard bad things about the “Groups”, that isn’t all that it should be. If you’ve got an opinion, let me know! My specific interest would be something I could use as a document library and knowledge base.

While it seems like a really viable replacement for Exchange-based email, I’m not yet ready to sign off on it as a replacement for Office. If you have experience using Google Apps in your organization, please let me know what you think of it.

Update

November 23, 2010: Google now offers an add-on that will allow you to sync your Microsoft Office documents into Google Docs. (via Mashable)

Launching in beta today, Google Cloud Connect is an add-on for Office that syncs documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 with the “Google (Google) cloud.” In other words, it takes data on the desktop and makes a backup copy in Google Docs (Google Docs), gives it a unique URL and constantly syncs the data with anybody else that might be sharing the same document.

That’s pretty big, in many ways a very viable replacement for using something like SharePoint as a document library.

This is easily the best book I have read all year, thought-provoking and entirely underrated. Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Age of the Unthinkable is geared towards international relations, but its lessons can easily be adapted to modern life as a whole. He suggests a revolutionary new way of thinking that is both challenging and effective.

People are looking for a straightforward, linear way to define and solve problems. While this approach may have worked in the past, it is no longer effective. Broad solutions to big problems really are not the answer. Things have become an order of magnitude more complicated in recent years and we need a new, creative mind-set to adapt and survive. This mindset must be radical, revolutionary and ready to toss out any assumptions.

Cooper’s research covers a wide range: from tried and true scientific theories to the information technology and organizational structure of terrorist groups like Hizb’allah.

“…the main problem of this book, which is about how we can best navigate an increasingly complex international order…”

In addition to the sand pile effect I have mentioned earlier, here are three suggestions that really struck me.

Slow Variable Policies

Ramo attributes the success of Hiz’ballah not only to their continued focus on being able to evolve, but to unglamorous, long-term initiatives like ingratiating themselves with the people:

“Why was it when people in southern Lebanon had a problem with plumbing or noisy neighbors or a child who wasn’t interested in the Koran, their first call was to Hiz’ballah?

The answer was that by living in places where Lebanese Shia most needed help and support, Hiz’ballah had become inseparable from daily life — and deeply connected to the slow variables of Lebanon. They drew no distinction between plumbing and making bombs; often the same fighters did both jobs. They had gone deep, and this gave them everything from information to gratitude to quiet spaces where they could engineer their latest terror gadgets or bounce back from Israeli poundings.”

Many books in this genre emphasize flexibility and keep the focus on being able to quickly adapt to change. Cooper does not disagree; he simply adds that there are some low-hanging fruit we need to remember as well.

The “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency strategy of David Kilcullen and David Petreaus that was credited for the success of the surge in Iraq is a perfect example of this in action.

Closer to home, it serves as a great reminder to take good care of our staff and remain focused on good customer service.

Augment our instinct for direct action with a new sense of the incredible power of an indirect approach

The indirect approach is a method of seeing the problem from a different, broader perspective. Bring yourself a bit above the immediate focus of a project to see where it  – and it’s completion – fits in to the larger scheme of what you and your superiors are trying to accomplish. Ramo asks us to see our goals not as the end result, but a part of the larger system. He acknowledges that it is a more complex way to look at things and warns that the different effects you will find are not always what you will have hoped for…

“But the benefits of such an approach is that it forces you to touch as many parts of the system as you can, constantly hunting for signs of unexpected and dangerous echoes bouncing back at you. And in a fast-changing system…that’s a huge advantage.”

So we might not always like what we get, but this more comprehensive approach allows us to spot trouble earlier, and to connect many important dots.

The Revolutionary Spread of Power

At some point, we have all been in a situation where someone else would not give up their control to let someone more capable handle a problem. Usually, we notice this because we think we can better handle the problem than they can.

Maybe so, but it is that same mindset that likely causes us to do the exact same thing to someone else.What Mr. Ramo proposes is to change our focus from what we can control to where we can encourage the growth so often encouraged with the “crowd-sourcing” idea that has begun to really gain acceptance.

“We can’t control the sort of growth we need to foster, can’t dictate what it will look like or force it into existing models.”

This shift will not be easy to accept, maybe an easier way to justify it to ourselves would be to remain focused on the outcome and look at this as a way to free ourselves up for more important tasks. A little vain, but whatever works!

Conclusion

Look at how your current issues fit into the bigger picture. Be ready for unexpected results. Accept that you won’t always like what you get, but with the resilience you have built up by doing the little things, the relationship building, team building, delegation and due diligence you will be better able to absorb new challenges.

For example, my team and I developed a Content Management System from the ground up. The time line for the main functionality took us out over two years and there were a countless amount of small details that we had to keep in order.

We identified a small group of our users who offered to help us test things in exchange for becoming the first ones to get to use the system. With our user group in place, we determined the smallest possible amount of these mini projects that would still get us the results we wanted. We had two types of projects, both were focused on generating quick results:

1. Testing individual tools
2. Creating different types of web pages

It is important to note that the projects are not designed to conform to a preconceived notion of “how I think this will work”, but instead to achieving a small part of the final result with a focus on identifying potential problems, giving the team real success they can see along the way and generating excitement among the future users.

We began with the tool testing. One project had six people try out an uploading tool that became the basis for how our users add and edit PDFs and images. Not only we able to customize the interface to what they felt would be the easiest way to use it, we also were able to then set realistic limits for file types and sizes based on actual user need.

Once we had a solid amount of the development done and could start tying pieces together, we began the second type of mini projects in which we asked our users to create different types of web pages. A page of downloadable forms in bulleted-list format or a page with multiple text boxes in which the user changes the template.

That last one brought up the question of what happens to the content of a third text box when the user switches to a template that only uses two text boxes? In hindsight, we should have identified the issue from the beginning, but we managed to save ourselves and catch it here. We were also able to poll our users to find out what would be the most helpful for them.

The management system is now successfully running 98 web applications, all of which continue to do a wider variety of tasks than we originally conceived. Our mini projects allowed us to rapidly test as we developed, gave us real time feedback from actual users and gave us some great success stories along the way to share with upper management. The additional major benefit for me was that it helped to create training documentation along the way, which proved invaluable during the final large roll out.