"...boundaries of organizations are less clear, the ownership is much more community-based...."
-Dion Hinchcliffe
Dion hits the nail on the head in his Web 2.0 blog . And this may be the greatest challenge for those of us working to create interactive agencys that offer better strategic consulting and innovative ideas . Most of the legacy processes that I have found which inhibit this are fed by an organization where leadership is clearly defined to be owning all of the great strategic ideas the company feeds to its clients.
So if you are implementing new processes for innovation and strategic consulting in an organization, you may need to revisit this mandate by going to the core of an organization and rebuild job descriptions.
In other words, before a consultant can successfully role out a new web development methodology based on innovation through collaboration, they must ensure leaders in the agency are rewarded when the participate rather than ideate alone. They may need new measurements of their success. A consultant or internal process Tsar can't just start cranking out process diagrams in Visio. Metrics that support collaboration have to be in the account manager's and strategist's JDs (job descriptions) and in the words of praise they get from their superiors and ultimately from the president or CEO of the company.
You could say that how the president doles out praise day-to-day will either make community based innovation succeed or will break it.
Hierarchy is still needed, but we need a hierarchy that supports marshaling output not just driving ideas down into task groups to implement.
Account managers and strategists would do well to not go to far in replicating a traditional ad agency model in an interactive studio. All to often I have seen account managers coming up with an idea for the client alone or with a Creative Director and then handing it off to a production staff like it is Kinko's down the street. This is like a car running on one cylinder when it could run on four (or 8 ...or 12 if you really have something special).
They now need to facilitate mixed discipline teams that - as a collective unit - are responding to RFP's, defining the documentation templates needed to capture web development project requirements, creating "blue sky" strategic responses to client business needs etc. Having only a Creative Director along for the ride is fine for print work but for interactive a more comprehensive team is more often than not needed.
I have seen the print ad model work well for projects that are focused on text - marcom - but this is a limiting process for creating new websites or anything that requires sophisticated interaction design or really moving a client forward against their online competition. Even branding suffers under that ad agency model when we are working in the interactive space.
But back to JDs (job descriptions). We need JDs to free us from the agency model, if the agency model prevents a leader being praised by upper management when they facilitate a team that comes up with great ideas - not when they themselves solve the problems.
Leaders now need to be evaluated on the killer ideas they have facilitated through collaborative processes; processes where they might not generate the killer idea that finally solved the problem.
I do remember the old days (1996?) when leaders were evaluated on their ability to come up with killer ideas. Account managers that came up with the killer strategy to solve the business needs of the client where sought after and heralded as heroes.
But this now works against an organization focused on the interactive space.The head of an organization that wants to change its methodology needs to clearly state that heroes are not what the organization needs.
That president or CEO needs to make clear that what is needed are teams that generate great ideas AND they also need to rewrite job descriptions, rebuild bonus guidelines and give praise regularly in a way that makes perfectly clear that being a "guitar hero" is not what is necessary to advance in the organization. Otherwise there will be resistance in the account management and strategy teams to new processes that drive better strategic consulting in the interactive space.
With this support from the highest levels, the client services staff is opened up to lead processes that will drive higher margins, client satisfaction and employee retention by facilitating collaboration between geniuses within each discipline.
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