Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Customers, Suppliers and the Need for Partnerships

That was a bit of a mammoth post – don’t know if I can keep that up for the next 2 days!

Anyway, on to talk 2.

First talk I’ve ever been to where we have the number of slides and the expected delivery time put up for our information!

So – starting with Customer focus – some key questions about who our customers are and what they want.

So – the speaker is just describing some ‘dimensions’ of customer server:
Tangibles – physical facilties and equipment
Reliablity
Responsiveness
Assurance – confidence/trust
Empathy

The speaker is now talking about ‘Customer Chains’ – but I’m afraid I’m not really getting to grips with what he means. He has obviously found it a useful way of thinking about the customers and their needs, but so far I don’t understand how it works.

OK – starting to make a bit more sense here – an example for the Academic Staff Publications Catalogue – basically seems to be mapping out a business process that looks at how information was flowing across the organisation from the content owners to the final publication on the web.

This analysis allowed them to think about how they would make it a ‘web first’ publication instead. It all sounds pretty good – but as he has just said – making the change in the work flow – especially changing behaviour of the content owners (academic staff) was incredibly difficult and painful.

In this sense the customer chain tool is not, for me, is not really doing the hard work – in this case, the analysis seems relatively straightforward – it’s how you change the workflow that is the difficult bit.

Just looking at a more complex customer chain – the publishing of the LSE website – perhaps this starts to show why you might do this type of analysis. The ‘customer chain’ way of looking things is simply a way of looking at the problem – essentially it is an analysis of the workflow, packages and people/groups involved in the process.

It might be interesting to compare our own print ‘customer chain’ versus our web ‘customer chain’ – I wonder how different these are – and whether they should be different?

Overall the idea of customer chains seems fine – there are plenty of ways of describing these concepts, and it is really just bringing some discipline to the analysis of your workflows – in this case specifically within publication processes.

A key point now being made – over the last 10 years we have seen the move from the systems being the important thing, and the focus, whereas now the basic technology problems seem to have been solved – so now the processes and people are the important things. This may be obvious but essentially web provision in HE institutions has generally (in my view) grown up around the technical problems and solutions – this movement to concentrating on processes and people is a very slow process.

What is interesting is that this workshop still seems to have an attendance which is predominantly technical – if the above paragraph is true, then shouldn’t we, at this point, be seeing many more people interested in the processes and the people? This is obviously happening some extent – but again, it is something that seems to be happening slowly… (just dropped in on some of the online chat – it is pretty much as geeky as it gets)

OK – some summarising the speaker is saying that the web teams should be at the end of the customer chain – not within the chain. However, not clear what a ‘web team’ is in his view.

2nd speaker – and both have apologized for ‘awful marketing speak/jargon’ – why? Neither have apologized for using ‘tech speak’ – so far xslt, java, cocoon, xml, blogging etc.

Just referencing http://www.effectingchange.luton.ac.uk as a tool kit for helping effect change in HE institutions – sounds interesting.