The architecture of the 21st Century organisation

Recently, I have been working with to a number of companies via our Engagement Marketing Workshops

We have worked with large media companies, a large newspaper group and a mobile operator. Not all the in the UK.

I was asked the question,

If, I buy into your concept Alan of Engagement Marketing, which I do. What does that mean to me in terms of how my organisation is structured and operates?

For me, this is a question that demonstrates that someone has deeply understood the potential for Engagement Marketing but also understands the dilemmas and challenges involved.

In a recent workshops these were the topics raised...

1). What is advertising in the 21st Century?
2). Should brands and business be more service orientated?
3). There has to be room now for new creative business propositions has the technology allows us to do so
4). How might this enhance revenue streams?
5). How can we build proper revenue profiles around these new initiatives?
6). Targeted commercial communications will become the norm
7). Metadata and 3D customer profiling will become key and vital to all organisations in their marketing efforts
8). Segmentation will be created via networks not demographics
9). How do you migrate legacy businesses through the digital journey
10). How do you create value in the digital age for advertisers and customers?

This is where everyone goes a bit misty-eyed as its a mother of a problem.

The reality is its incremental revolution, you have to educate and take people with you, you need new metrics and job descriptions and dare I say a more flatter organisation.

Its a new logic, a new culture a new way of framing who you are and what role you play in fabric of peoples lives.

In the Digital Challenge Roy Greenslade wrote

The future of newspapers is online - but how are they responding to the demands of different platforms and round-the-clock reporting?

Actually I would say the future of newspapers is on digital platforms that is different to online.

But Greenslade also writes

It is really about the creation of a new journalistic culture, a method of working that reflects both the technological possibilities and the demands of a wised up, increasingly media-savvy public.

Indeed, it is also about the response to a new public because newspapers are no longer serving a geographically distinct area. Worldwide access to news sites means that the audience served by London-based national newspapers is no longer merely British.

So of course I missed point 11). That is the world is hyper local and also super global.

Time and geography and distribution have collapsed.

And also back to the thorny problem of where do we start? Start with a laugh and work backwards... Don't solve your problems by chucking technology at the problem.

Its how one frames and understands ones world: economically, culturally and socially that insights will offer themselves to those in desperate need of answers.

Comments

[Graham Hill]

Alan

It has been a while since the MobSocNet course in Oxford. Still seems like yesterday.

You ask a difficult question that has dogged major changes in business since the introduction of TQM in the 1980s. And no doubt from before then too.

But the question is not answered by simply redrawing boxes on the organisation chart. It is answered by thinking through how the organisation's work will change. And what that means for coordinating work, organisatuional collaboration and job design. Organisational form follows function as the OD saying goes.

I researched networks and their impact on organisations almost 10 years ago when leading the organisational redesign for a credit card company. Their challenge was to reorganise around a much more rapid sense & respond capability to support micro-marketing to tiny groups of customers, where the marketing wondow of opportunity was open for only a few weeks.

A hybrid-organisation consisting of networks for the sense & respond parts and hierarchy for the machine-like parts was the answer in their case. Some of the same thinking may apply in today's case too. The really big difference being the extensive involvement of customers themselves. But even this change is not likely to mean that we need to throw away all that we know about designing effective organisations.

Check out what the Rand Corporation and the US Military have been doing in their swarm warfare programme. It may suprise you to know that their thinking about organising to face up to an enemy organised as loosely-coupled networks, is much further advanced than any of the business organisation thinking around customer networks to-date.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager

[Alan Moore]

Dear Graham,

Thank you for your comments, my sincere apologies if you thought I was just redrawing boxes - my belief is more about work flows geared to effectiveness vs. efficiency.

I will follow up your suggestions on Rand and the Military. Did yu know that the concept of strategic planing came from the military in the Second World War and was adopted in peace time by Royal Dutch Shell.

If you have any links please send

Thanks for posting

Alan