Ten Steps You Can Take to Improve Your Web Analytics Program – Part 1

Web analytics can provide significant insight into how your website is doing as far as contributing revenue and leads to your company. Often times, a company will install a web analytics tool and simply use the “out-of-the-box” reports, including visits, visitors, unique visitors, top pages, average time on site, and so on. When used properly, a web analytics tool can provide you with the data you need to make decisions regarding web strategy, content, layout, usability, applications, paid media, referral partners, and personalization. If the goal of your website is to generate sales or leads, the bottom line is the conversion of visitors to customers.

To get more out of your investment in your web analytics tool and the personnel who are using it, and to increase your conversions, here is a list of ten ways to get the most out of your web analytics program. These questions will be presented in two parts. Part 1 will address  visitor behavior, and Part 2 will address converting visitors to customers. Here are the topics for Part 1.

1. Identify where your visitors are dropping off

If the goal of your website is to generate revenue, either directly from sales of goods or services on the site, or by generating leads that are followed up off-line, it is important to know how effective your site is in getting to that goal. One of the more useful tools that your analytics tool provides is a conversion funnel.  A “conversion” is loosely defined as the desired outcome of a visit. This can be a purchase, reservation, subscription, registration or a form completion to request more information or be contacted for an offline sale. Depending on your tool, a conversion funnel can be called a “fallout report” or “scenario analysis”. It is set up by defining a list of URLs that represent the desired steps that a visitor should take to get to the goal. In some cases, you need to tag each page ahead of time. In others, you set up the pages in your analytics tool.

Once you have your funnel set up, you can see the percentage of visitors who either make it to the next step or who “drop off” or “fall out” of the conversion process. At first glance, you can see which pages become “bottlenecks”, where you lose a large percentage of visitors. You can then study the pages to better understand why visitors do not go any further. With a proper A/B or multivariate testing program, you can make changes in these pages and then test their effectiveness in increasing conversions, and thus, revenue from your site.

The second item to analyze is where visitors go if they leave the conversion funnel. Here some of the questions you need to answer:

• What percent of visitors just exit the site?
• What percent go to the home page?
• What percent look for product reviews, privacy information, refund policies, FAQs or other content?
• Do they get distracted by having too many non-conversion links on a key conversion page?
• Do they have the opportunity to go back and change their mind instead of completing the purchase?
• Do they read some content then come back to the funnel?
• What percent use onsite search?

By analyzing the paths that visitors take from your conversion funnel, you can better understand your visitors’ behavior and thus make improvements to your site with the goal of increasing conversions.

2. Use segmentation to help you understand visitor behavior

One of the most common terms in web analytics is “average”. We have average pages per visit, average time on site, average revenue per order, and so on. While averages are very useful for trending purposes and comparing metrics from month-to-month or year-over-year, you must keep in mind that there is no such thing as an “average” visitor. Each visitor to your site is unique, and to better understand visitor behavior and how to optimize your site, you need to segment visitors based on something in common.

Some of the most common segments are as follows:

• New vs. return visitor
• Paid search vs. organic search
• Direct visit vs. referrer link
• Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo!
• Geographic location
• Returning customer vs. returning visitor
• Paid search vs. banner vs. email campaigns
• Online vs. offline marketing
• Weekday vs. weekend visits

One you have the appropriate forms of segmentation, you can then look at metrics such as average time on site, average pages per visit, average searches per visit, average revenue or leads per visit and so on for each segment. By analyzing specific group behavior, you can create more targeted action plans to better talk to each type of visitor. By using cookies to store segment categories on each visitor’s browser, you can later read these cookies to enable more personalized or targeted content, with the goal of increasing conversions.

3. Measure interactions with Flash objects on your site

Developing Flash objects can often require significant resources in terms of man hours and budget. With proper planning and tagging, you can track the usage of these assets and determine if they bring value to your site and business.

At the most basic level, you can insert tags in the Flash source to count the number of times an object is “touched”. You can also go further by tagging interactive buttons on the object and then links to other site pages. If the Flash object is playing a video or an animation, you can insert tags at key stages in the progress. These can be at percentage points, such as 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% viewed, or when specific topics are reached. Depending on your analytics tool, you can create “events” at these measurement points, pseudo pages, or conversion variables.  You may be able to correlate visits to particular points in the Flash to orders or leads. You can also see how much of your message was viewed by those who engaged with the application.

If your Flash application has a “Call to action”, you can measure what percent of those who engage with the app take the next step to reach the action page. By tagging this as the start of a conversion funnel, you can determine the conversion rate of those who take the desired action, compared to your overall site traffic. By developing metrics around your Flash objects, you will be able to provide data on the effectiveness of the application, and whether to refine it or ditch it.

4. Use tagging to tell you how visitors are using your site

Many sites have tools such as onsite search, and some have third-party tools such as click-to-talk and click-to-chat. If these links are not tagged, your reporting can provide inaccurate or incomplete results. For example, if you have a reservation-based site, and on the payment page there is a click-to-talk or click-to-chat button, it is important to tag these links as pages. If not, your reporting may show that the “abandonment rate” is higher than it really is. If the visitor decides to click to speak with a representative and completes an order over the phone, or through a chat interface, your reporting will show that they simply exited the site. It would be more accurate to report that the visitor “visited” the chat or talk page instead.

It is also important to track where visitors are either clicking on click-to-chat or click-to-talk buttons along with using onsite search to better understand their behavior.  If there is a high use of these services on particular pages, it may indicate a usability issue on your site, or missing information that is needed to continue. In the case of onsite search, if you can capture the search terms associated with each step in the conversion funnel process, you can gain some insight to where visitors may be lost or missing information they need to continue with their purchase, reservation, registration or other desired action. By looking at patterns, you can make adjustments to your site and reduce these distractions, increasing conversions.

By properly tagging these actions and other events, you may also be able to look at pathing from these stages to see where visitors go after they do an onsite search or click to talk or chat. By understanding their behavior, you can make the needed improvements. You may also be able to measure what percent of these actions still lead to a conversion, and which ones do not.

5. Determine if visitors are seeing your key messages

Content managers for websites often spend significant resources to create their brand message or “Why Us” message to differentiate your company from its competition. The question is, are visitors seeing it and how can you improve its visibility? Key message pages can be important in creating your company’s unique selling position and convincing visitors to do business with your company. In a typical analytics environment, a “Top Pages” report will be generated that shows that the key message pages received “x” visits and “y” page views, and that they were the number “z” page in ranking. While this top-level information is nice to have, you can go deeper and provide more insight into how these pages are used.

If your site has multiple key message pages or pages that focus on different topics, you can group similar pages into defined content groups. For example, a branded drug website may want to know how well their site does in the following areas:

• Information about the disease and complications
• How the featured drug provides benefits
• Clinical studies and other physician-related information
• Call to action (talk to your doctor, request more information)
• Engagement (user tools, calculators, worksheets)

Instead of providing reports on all these page visits and views, you can simplify this by tagging these pages to place them in different content groups. You can then provide high-level metrics or KPIs that show what percent of visitors take part in each of these content areas. This will be more meaningful to those who manage the site’s content. There are several ways to tag pages, including hard-coding each content group onto each page, using JavaScript to identify the group based on the URL, using a content management system to place tags automatically, or even by filtering the content with your analytics tool.

Along with tagging content groups, your team can also identify “quality pages”, or pages that they deem important to either the site, brand or company, then tag these pages as a “quality page”. You can then create a metric that shows how many quality page views per visit your visitors see, and what percent of total page views are quality pages. If these pages are not resonating with your visitors, you can then look to identify reasons why. Some of these reasons can include:

• Links are positioned “below the fold”, especially on laptops (link is below the initial visible screen area).
• Links are hard to find
• Links are embedded in Flash navigation that is not user-friendly

By tagging and testing link placement, you can improve the visibility of the links to the key message pages.

This completes Part 1 of this two-part look at ten ways to improve your web analytics program. In Part 2, I will take a look at five ways to use your analytic tool to measure the process of converting site visitors to customers or leads for your business.

The Promise of the Real Time Web for the Enterprise

Real Time Web is the latest trend to capture the media’s attention over the past few months, and indeed seems to encapsulate well the effect that Twitter and the social networks are having on the flow of information. The ability to get up-to-the-second information about people, news and activities around the world is a foundation for a new wave of startups and services and is being integrated into search and other services.

As many users of the real time web will attest, its constant stream of information can be overwhelming and disjointed but at its best, it allows awareness and insight to emerge as the confluence of information takes a clearer shape.

Can this be useful in the enterprise? (I’ll be careful about using the term “The Real-Time Enterprise” that Gartner coined a few years ago; it means something else).

Companies generate huge amounts of data that rarely sees the light of day. Let’s consider the following scenario – you are an account manager for several key accounts in a particular vertical. What information are you getting? Most likely direct and indirect emails consist of 90% of the information while the rest is verbal, non-documented conversations. But what if you could get real-time updates on the following:

• Client specific news
• Client brand related blog posts, discussions, videos and tweets in real time
• Vertical news
• Client services updates about milestones reached
• Customer support alerts about open service tickets and their resolution status
• Internal discussions and email regarding the client
• External email communications with the client by different team members
• Etc..

Not all of these would constitute information that someone will send a specific email on. Being aware of the stream of news, discussions and information can be invaluable for an agile and responsive approach.

Our current document and email centric information systems are not built to provide this level of constant details. Using the new generation of web mashups and aggregation tools are beginning to offer reasonable solutions.

As Jennifer Martinez had recently observed in GigaOm, there is a huge potential for tools that will help sift and provide context for all of these huge streams of data.

What surprises me is that most of the discussion looks at this as a new phenomenon while there is an industry that has been using this method very successfully for a long time. The Bloomberg (and other) terminals provide bite size financial information in a continual stream that can be filtered, sorted and analyzed. It combines company news, industry news, transactions, price changes, etc., in a way that for a novice seems indecipherable but for the experienced broker is a goldmine.

Providing the right tools are put in place, the potential business value seem significant:

• Accelerating cycles of decision making
• Pushing all relevant information to you rather than pulling from multiple sources is a great time saver
• Decreasing the unbearable email load
• Increasing and broadening awareness to domain knowledge

For more information on the real time web and the type of tools that exist around it, ReadWriteWeb has compiled a great list of top 50 real time web companies and services.

6 ways to get your web presence and infrastructure in shape for 2010

In this lingering recession, everyone is looking for new ways to better position themselves to compete and grow revenue. A lower level of consumer and business spending will require efficiency, careful optimization and leverage of low cost assets and methods. It’s time to get into shape! Here are 6 ways to revamp and strengthen your web sites and infrastructure on a modest budget:

Revamp your web strategy for a web 2.0+ world.

The internet world has dramatically changed in the last 3-4 years. Social networks, user communities, user generated content, twitter, the iPhone and other mobile devices, GPS and location aware devices and the other components of Web 2.0 completely altered the way businesses and users communicate and transact online. Each of the Web 2.0 components come with their own set of opportunities and challenges. They provide new channels that enable communication at a fraction of the cost while demanding a new approach to openness, transparency and interactivity. Regulatory, security and governance concerns are not always easy to address. Chart a path in these new waters by rethinking your Web Strategy and redefine the role that the web and other digital channels will play in the company’s future and put a plan in place for its execution.  

Implement a social media strategy and measure its value

Social media tools are a great way to build honest online relationship with customers and other audiences. Doing it right is not always easy. A social media strategy will force you to think through and define where to be and what is to be communicated, set the tone and nature of interactions, set guidelines on how to respond to negative feedback, factor in legal and regulatory implications, address intellectual property and security issues and many other aspects need to be thought through. In addition, measuring the impact of these activities is not always easy. Building a model that can assess and provide value guidelines is very important. 

Reduce costs by Leveraging open source and Cloud web infrastructure components

We have a client who recently came to us asking advice after a planned $3M Oracle e-business implementation turned into a projected $15M 3 year project. We recommended they look at OfBiz and other open source e-commerce frameworks. Open source enterprise level software , SaaS and Cloud Computing have matured to the level that major organizations are leveraging these low cost scalable solutions to build a robust infrastructure that can replace big investments in hardware, software licenses and data centers.  

Take control of your content – Deploy a Content Management Solution

For many companies, fresh content is key to repeat visits. As sites scale, managing and maintaining them becomes an expensive and difficult task often dependent on IT or external resources. Content Management Systems (CMS) provide business users with the ability to modify and update sites and global structures that make graphical changes easy to implement. They also provide ability to segment users, add personalization and social features such as Blogs and community without the need for additional software and services.

User Experience Redesign

If your website has not gone through a redesign in the last 3 years, chances are that it looks dated. What looks fresh and relevant changes all the time and the key in the last few years has been incorporation of user engagement and interactivity, quality content that speaks more directly to the users, content targeting and using sites as relationship building tools rather than one way communication streams. Sites need to add rich content, video and mobile support as well as dynamic interfaces. All these changes contribute substantially to improved website ROI

Optimize sites for goals and conversion

It’s crucial that every marketing and search dollar is well spent. To do this, websites need strong web analytics so that sites can be continuously optimized to maximize conversion and be careful to avoid the main pitfalls. Web analytics capability allows businesses to test new ideas, layouts and promotions and to quickly refine them to drive sales and traffic as well as optimize search and marketing spend. With Google analytics and other low costs services, setting great analytics does not have to mean big bucks.

Measuring the Business Value of Twitter

Twitter has just released a new useful guide covering the basics, best practices and case studies for using Twitter for business. 

They are trying to stress that Twitter should be viewed as a tool for building relationships rather than a tool for broadcasting announcements, PR, etc. in their words:

“Instead of approaching Twitter as a place to broadcast information about your company, think of it as a place to build relationships.”

It is still a great vehicle to get coupons, deals and specials out, but the long term value will come for said relationships.

Another interesting subject they address is measuring the value of Twitter. 2 things are important in this regard:

1. Twitter ( as other social media activities) links should be tagged and reported in web analytics tools using special tags embeded in the tiny URLs so they could be seamlessly rolled up along with all other measured media
2. As an engagement tool, it brings to focus the tracking and value placed on brand engagement as part of the value of the web activities and interactions. Think about the value that can be assigned to a user reading branded messages several times a day.

For more information about best practices in using Twitter for business see our previous post on the subject: bulding the collaborative enterprise.

Fresh! Content is King

Up until few years ago most companies were satisfied with creating websites that were largely static.  A website designer would organize largely pre-existing content into a collection of content buckets, slick graphics, and flash presentations and a website developer would bring the website into existence. New content would be added when either the old one became obsolete or new products or services were created. This model is essentially one step above the electronic brochure style websites of yesteryear, when companies essentially copied their existing paper brochures to web and called it a website.

In today’s environment of social networking, blogs, and collaboration, static content is not only passé it prevents companies from driving advantage from their internal and external user bases and communities of experts. Fresh and timely content helps drive new traffic to the website and is an effective marketing tool. Unfortunately, most companies do not realize the need for fresh and rapidly evolving content on their website and the role it can play in engaging their customers and prospects. Even companies whose products and services remain largely stable overtime need to think about their websites differently. It is not just a one way medium to push static content outwards, it is in fact one of the most cost-effective mechanisms to engage customers and prospects and turn them into a long-term asset. If you believe that the nature of your business is such that you don’t need to think about using your website to engage your customers and prospects, chances are you haven’t fully explored the possibilities. It may take some effort to figure out creative and effective mechanisms to drive advantage from your ability to create fresh and meaningful content and interactions with your customers and prospects, but the rewards are well worth it. From local doctor’s offices to insurance companies to Fortune 500 companies, all can benefit from large, loyal, and engaged communities of customers and prospects.

However, most likely your existing static content-based website can’t support the type of content and interactions needed to support what we just discussed. If your website infrastructure still relies on IT staff to update the content chances are you won’t be able to morph your website into a hub of fresh and dynamic content that attracts new and repeat visits. The business users or the content creators must be able to update the content easily and as frequently as needed.

Of course, you would want some sort of approval workflow and a content publishing process to manage rapidly changing content. Fortunately there is a category of software that is designed to do just that. Web content management systems (WCMs) such as Drupal, Joomla, Microsoft SharePoint, DotNetNuke, etc., are designed to give business users and content creators control over the ability to update content easily and frequently. In most cases, users can manipulate the content by logging into the administrative version of the website and updating the content in a WYSIWYG environment. Content creation and updates can be brought under customized workflows and approval chains which are quite important in a fast moving environment. WCM systems also boost many other capabilities like:

• Content Categorization
• Document Management
• Delegation
• Audit Trails
• Content Creator Grouping
• Content Templates
• Discussion Forums
• Blogs
• Reviews and Ratings
• Etc.

Discussion forums and blogs can be used to create vibrant user and expert communities that revolve around your products and services and continuously create new content that keeps customers and prospects coming back to your site. These tools not only provide a mechanism for external parties to contribute new content but also provide a mechanism for them to communicate directly with you about what is important to them. Insights gleaned from such content can be quite valuable in creating new products and services or improving the existing ones.

Now that we’ve talked about the virtues of fresh content and using your website as a two way medium, you are probably wondering if you would be able to afford it. A little known secret about good WCMs is how cost effective they can be. Creating a custom website from scratch can be a very onerous and expansive proposition. However, most well respected WCMs offer out-of-box templates and web components that actually make is much faster and cheaper to build a website if you take advantage of their off-the-shelf goodies. If you are considering investing in an upgrade of your website – even if you are NOT (consider the cost of lost opportunity) investing any money in your website —  it would behoove you to look at the benefits of upgrading your website using a WCM system.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2009 – What’s New?

It was interesting to visit the Web 2.0 conference last week and see the progress and trends compared to my last year impressions.

Here are some of my thoughts:

• SharePoint is the de-facto standard for Enterprise 2.0 While other vendors have compelling products and features, a CIO that is looking for an internal, comprehensive, secure and maintainable solution has almost only one choice (unless you are on an IBM stack..). Other tools focus on providing point solutions, hosted environments, plugging current SharePoint holes and extending functionality. Microsoft had the biggest and most impressive presence and were heavily promoting the next version SharePoint 2010 that will be launched in the SharePoint conference in October. (Some preliminary details here).
• The field has definitely matured over the last year. There are more case studies and research about usage, benefits and trends although most companies are not sharing explicit ROI numbers. Some vendors have disappeared while others are growing and establishing themselves at a level where they may be considered long term players and safe for the enterprise.
• The experts are still frustrated with the slow rate of adoption and the seeming growing gap between the prevalence of social tools and technologies used by marketing and sales to communicate externally Vs. they almost complete absence internally. The rapid adoption of tools like Facebook and Twitter for customer communication not just in retail but in Healthcare and other industries creates glaring discrepancies where the same companies have no tools internally and sometimes even block their own marketing teams from external use of these tools under some outdated IT policy.
• IT is still not part of the discussion. That is unfortunate because as Steve Wylie, the conference director expressed in a guest post at ZDNET last week, large scale adoptions will not happen without IT.

  “While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board.  Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers.  They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed.  They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT.  With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases.”
  

• Tactical view. One of the most frequently asked questions was “what is the best way to get started?”. The pretty universal answer for vendors and corporate users was to approach it in a tactical manner and find a specific business problem you can solve using collaboration tools. Be it an HR portal to boost morale, tools to help virtual project teams work more efficiently, sales best practices portal or any of many other ideas. Define a narrow business case and implement. So far, trying to approach this in a strategic manner makes finding ROI a herculean task and as noted above, puts IT on the defensive. I hope that this trend will start to change as these tactical solutions rarely provide long term sustainable benefits.
• Rise of the Community Manager. The most active forum was the one where the newly created function – community managers shared their challenges and tricks for getting people to take part in the social activity. First, It is great to see that many leading organizations have realized the importance of such a task although many had it as a secondary responsibility they volunteered to do rather than a full time position. Creating and maintaining a vibrant and active internal community requires skill, passion and process and the focus should rightfully be as much on that as on the tools that enable the community.

Additional impressions:

Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference: Aggregate and Organize

The Magic of Mash-ups: Co-browsing

What is co-browsing?

Co-browsing lets multiple users work together in their respective browsers through what look like shared screens and communicate via telepresence including video and audio.  The impact of this technology is enormous as companies become more virtual and the need for serious collaboration increases to be competitive in tough times.  To be able to share, interact and see the body language of your collaborator in real-time without extraordinary downloads to your PC or expensive third party solutions could simply change the way we work.  This innovation comes from not Google, or Yahoo but from IBM in a proof of concept project called Blue Spruce, a Web browser application platform that IBM is working on to allow simultaneous multiuser interactions enabled by AJAX and other standard technologies through the Web browser.

The Blue Spruce project is IBM’s solution to the classic one-window, one-user limitation of current Web browsers.  The application is a mash-up that combines Web conferencing with voice and video and other data forms to let people share content including existing Web widgets – at the same time.  Two different users, possibly anywhere, are able to move their respective mouse pointers around the screen in the browser to click and make changes on the shared application, with the platform enabling concurrent interactions through the browser without disruptions.  Despite the appearance, the co-browsers aren’t actually sharing content. Both collaborators obtained a Web page through the Blue Spruce client, but the “events” enabled by the mouse are what is being sent to the Blue Spruce Co-Web Server.  The idea is that no matter where the two users are in the Internet world, they pick up the general data caches on both personal computers and react to the events.

The applications for co-browsing collaboration are numerous, especially for knowledge workers. In healthcare, IBM has used Blue Spruce to create an online “radiology theatre” product, currently at the prototype stage, which allows teams of medical experts to “simultaneously discuss and review patients’ medical test data using a Web browser.” The project is being run in collaboration with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Boston.  According to IBM, it has created a secure Web site that allows select medical experts at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to access and collaborate on data such as CT scans, MRIs, EKGs and other medical tests. Each medical expert can “talk and be seen through live streaming audio/video through their standard web connection, and have the ability to whiteboard over the Web page as well as input information to the patient’s record.” Basically it is a secure multimedia experience running inside a single browser window, using Blue Spruce as the platform.

It is important to note that Blue Spruce is not your typical “fat client” or downloaded application, but it is a fully browser-based application development platform, currently in development, which is being built on open Web standards. The main feature of Blue Spruce is that it allows for a combination of different Web components – data mashups, high-definition video, audio and graphics – to run simultaneously on the same browser page. It’s important to note that the Radiology Theatre app only requires a standard Web browser – so there’s nothing to download for the end user, in this case, doctors.

This is how IBM described how the new online radiology theatre will work:

 ”A group of doctors can log into a secure Web site at the same time to review and analyze a patient’s recent battery of tests. For instance, a radiologist could use her mouse to circle an area on the CT scan of a lung that needs a closer look. Then using the mouse she could zoom into that scan to enlarge the view for all to see. An expert on lung cancer could use his mouse to show how the spot had changed from the last scan. And then, a pathologist could talk about patient treatments based on spots of that size depending on age and prior health history, paging through clinical data accessible on the site.”

“The theatre allows all these experts to discuss, tag and share information simultaneously, rather than paging through stacks of papers, calling physicians to discuss scan results and then charting the results. This collaborative consultation brings together the personal data, the experts and the clinical data in one physical, visual theatre.” 

The impact on rural medicine and the need for telemedicine for key healthcare experts is significantly advanced with this technology.
Perhaps the biggest potential benefit of the online radiology theatre is that it will enable experts from all over the world to consult on cases. The ability for multiple users to “co-browse” means they can interact in the browser in real-time and see each other’s changes.  Of course, since this is medical data, there are significant privacy implications involved in using the Internet to collaborate.  The time and cost savings from collaboration is important, but better and faster decision making is the key.

The need for inexpensive and minimally invasive techniques for real collaboration over the Internet is real and the backlog of potential applications is fun to consider.  Imagine reviewing your health care or insurance claims with a live person (and their reactions) at the insurance company to reduce cycle time, or collaborating on new product engineering drawings from the U.S. with your Chinese manufacturer.  Imagine the potential for teaching or training with key experts and a worldwide audience using a live whiteboard. Finally, imagine not paying big monthly fees for basic meeting collaboration needs on a daily basis.  Blue Spruce is really a technology to keep an eye on.

Know Your Customer: How Web Analytics can save your IT applications team money

We’ve all dealt with requirements that were written by well-meaning, but technology-confused procurement departments, or business users who believe that people still use the Mosaic Browser (my first graphical browser!). Few authors of quasi-technical requirements put much thought to the actual cost of implementing a modern, rich, dynamic web application on decade-old technology.

A purposely over-the-top hypothetical quote :

The application must support Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0+, Netscape 4+ at a minimum graphical resolution of 800×600 pixels.

While you may at first chuckle at this obvious bit of anachronism, think back to the last system requirements you spec’ed out for a web application.

What browsers did you ask to support? Were you shocked when the development team told you you couldn’t have that cool AJAX drop-down because your browsers didn’t support it? Were you suprised when compromises had to be made to the look and feel, or flow of the application? How many users really use those old browsers, anyway? How many of your users do?

“They shoot browsers, don’t they?” — Jeremy Keith

Don’t know the answer? Don’t worry, it’s pretty common. A lot of businesses make requests for web-based applications without first doing internal due diligence to understand their target market. Sure, you can build a web application that settles for the lowest common denominator — but why sacrifice when you might not have to?

Understanding your users’ browsing platform should be one of the first steps to building requirements for projects that involve a significant IT spend on web application development, whether it be enhancements to existing applications, or greenfield development.

Here’s 4 reasons why skipping this important step of due diligence will cost you more money, or users, or attention:

1. You’ll Be Too Conservative. Fearing that you’ll lose the 0.5% of users who may be on Internet Explorer 5.0, you’ll insist (against your CTO’s recommendation) that all users are important, and if it means sacrificing a few bells and whistles, so be it.
2. You’ll Be Too Boring. You’ve heard about rich internet applications, Web 2.0, AJAX? If you’re trying to support these new technologies on browsers that are 5+ years old, forget it.
3. You’ll Spend Too Much. The 80/20 rule will be in full effect when you realize late in the development cycle that no one tested with Netscape 7.2. “But it’s in the requirements document!” cries the project sponsor. Frantic testing will unveil the fact that half the functionality is broken or visually skewed. You fire the designer, and the project goes into a death march to the lowest common denominator.
4. You’ll Be Unhappy with the Final Product. You’re building the web application to replace your mainframe claims processing system. Or your billing system. Or your financial forecasting package. And the final, boring mess will look exactly like what you had on your old green-screen system, except it’s different. Users are complaining that it’s not easy to use, and your CFO is now revisiting your ROI projections. Projects aren’t supposed to end like this… are they?

Fortunately, judicious use of web analytics and good old fashioned business analysis can provide you with concrete data to build a solid foundation of business cases and technical requirements. The chart below illustrates browser market share over the past 9 months:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats, April 2009

You can see that the bulk of market share goes to a very small percentage of very modern and powerful browsers. How can this information help you? In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore how up-front legwork in web application development can lead to a happy outcome for all.

Why CEO’s must care about Enterprise 2.0 as a Strategic Imperative

One of the strongest and most misguided arguments expressed online and in many companies we speak with about Enterprise 2.0 is that it is not strategic.

That this collection of tools, technologies and ideas is not yet mature enough, lacks proven ROI, introduces a myriad of security and governance issues and even if successful is not a priority in today’s soft economy. It is too often delegated to IT managers to experiment with and report back in a few years.

Here’s where the difference is: Enterprise 2.0 is not a technology. It represents first and foremost a new way of thinking, interacting and communicating that includes attitude and cultural changes, empowered by IT. Is there anything more strategic than that and more important to a business future success?

It is arguably the biggest opportunity for IT driven cultural change facing organizations since the introduction of PC networks more than 2 decades ago.

One of the C suite most important tasks is to shape an organizational culture that will make their company innovative, competitive, efficient and successful not just now but in the future. Embracing Enterprise 2.0 now and guiding their employees through this transitional period should be one of their top priorities.

While in a few cases adoption started from the bottom up, a change of this magnitude usually needs to come from the top accompanied by the matching set of values and actions that prove the seriousness and commitment to change.

It requires leadership that is able to see that transparency and increased visibility into activities throughout the company will finally enable them to know what is really happening and will create a culture of trust. That openness and exchange of ideas will lead to innovation and efficiency. That collaboration will enable a diverse workforce to work together in emergent ways while being physically and geographically dispersed.

In short, it requires vision that will set a future path and will ask managers to overcome the obstacles in the way. The type of vision CEO’s need to provide and not delegate to IT managers.

The challenge and opportunity is that not many chief executives have realized yet that embracing Enterprise 2.0 is a strategic imperative and are focusing the discussion around short term ROI.

Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNET provides a comprehensive review of the evidence and opinions regarding ROI and adoption challenges, and adds his own interesting model of collaboration cause and effect chains that while clearly provide benefits, make them harder to pinpoint and measure.

He also concludes that

“… an accumulating body of knowledge is pointing to potentially dramatic business returns with Enterprise 2.0. If these continue to be borne out, it will affect the competitive and financial positions of the companies that are proactive and therefore their long-term marketplace success“

And wonders what it will take to break the current status quo?

His colleague Dennis Howlett on the other end thinks the ROI is still years off and concludes

“As always, the secret to long term success depends on management’s ability to maintain a sustained commitment and all that goes with it. The difficulty today is that same management is wondering where the next sale comes from or how cash will be generated.”

The good news is that Enterprise 2.0 does not require large capital expenditures but mostly thorough organizational commitment. There has rarely been an opportunity for businesses to gain so much competitive edge by investing so little.

As in many cultural revolutions, by the time Enterprise 2.0 related changes start translating into business differentiators, organizations that have not made the transition will look as outdated as an organization resisting getting these useless PC boxes or adopting email.

Cloud Computing Trends: Thinking Ahead (Part 2)

In the first part of this series we discussed the definition of cloud computing and its various flavors. The second part of the three part series focuses on the offerings from three major players: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

Amazon (AWS)

AWS is a collection of services offered by Amazon to implement Amazon’s vision of IaaS and to some extent PaaS. Some of the main services of AWS include: EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), S3 (Simple Storage Service), & SQS (Simple Queue Service). Amazon differentiates itself from the other two players by providing PaaS and IaaS in an integrated package. You can simply start an instance of a Windows machine or a Linux machine and select either a big machine with lots of memory and CPU or a small one.

Once you have an instance you can interact with it via remote services and install any software you want and configure it. If you had a Java application that used Tomcat and MySQL running on an old server under someone’s desk, you could simply start a desired size machine instance, install Tomcat/MySQL, and start running your application from EC2 without changing any code. However, this flexibility comes at a price. If the needs of your application went past the single largest instance EC2 can provide then you would need to re-architect your application to distribute processing across multiple large instances.

Of course the benefit of this approach is that it allows you to move your application into the cloud without rewriting code as long as your needs don’t outstrip a single instance. There are also no limitations in terms of programming language or software that you use. Your application can be based on J2EE, .Net, Python, Ruby, or anything else that runs on Windows or Linux OS.

Microsoft (Azure)

Microsoft calls Azure  a cloud operating system (PaaS) and as such it abstracts away the regular OS that we are familiar with. You write your application to specifically work with Azure using its storage, queuing, and other services and then simply publish it to run on the Azure’s compute fabric. The good thing is that you use all the tools that you are already familiar with to write an application (e.g. Visual Studio 2008).

After the application is written it can be tested locally and only published to the Azure cloud when satisfied. Once the application is running in Azure you cannot attach a debugger to it and must rely on good old log messages for debugging and gathering state information. Azure supports .Net as the de facto framework and supports assemblies compiled from any CLR-compliant language as long as they comply with Azure’s framework. The obvious drawback of this approach is that an existing application cannot be simply moved to cloud without rewriting its key components and perhaps without a complete redesign. However, the advantages are also obvious and significant; once you have written your application to run on Azure it gives you instant ability to scale by simply reconfiguring the number of instances your application runs on. This can be very powerful if your application’s usage is unpredictable or has a seasonal variation. Another issue with this approach is that it ties your application to the platform and you cannot simply take your application and run it in another cloud.

Google (App Engine)

Google App Engine is a PaaS platform and is a combination of an instance service, a data service, and a queue service. It also hides the OS and hardware from the user/application like Azure. But it limits the application to be written in Python in order to be hosted on Google’s cloud. You have to write the application using the SDK provided by Google and once again you can configure it to run multiple instances and automatically benefit from seamless scalability and redundancy. However, you not only have to rewrite your existing applications you also have to commit to a specific language and platform which may not match the requirements or the skill set of your organization.