Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Interactive or Web Strategy at the enterprise level is like braiding a giant squid. First you have to dive to incredible depths to find it. Once found, the challenge becomes keeping your hands on the tentacles long enough to wrangle them.

My team is working on braiding a giant squid right now. The principal challenge is braiding the corporate initiatives, priorities, goals, objectives, vision, current features, a history of enterprise successes and failures to consider along with everything their end-users want in an experience to make their lives easier and more rewarding. Tie all that together and you got yourself a plan, right?

How you tie all that together is what's remarkable to me. Our team's allegiance to the User-Centered Design (UCD ) approach makes this project so much more doable. I remember trying to accomplish enterprise Web transformation for a major financial exchange in Chicago the late 90's before I knew specific strategies about framing enterprise Web around users. I am a little ashamed to admit that I have little idea how our team pulled it off without stricter user-concentrated goals. Back then it was understood that your publish content based on organizational lines or strategic business units. And you were happy to have accomplished that. 

What I've learned is that with the right people and approach, even the most daunting of tasks can be much easier. This enterprise Web transformation project will be a giant and frankly is the third one our team has jumped on. We will follow a methodology whereby each strategy, tactic or left-field feature idea will consider user interactions through testing and will be measured not only by its ability to please end-users but also by its liklihood to serve its corporate goal.  

And while sometimes it feels like we are braiding a giant squid, its more apt to say, we are making sure that all tentacles are accounted for before we set it free.