Thursday, July 03, 2008 Toral: Taking Web operations seriously By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
WHENEVER I hear stories about website disasters on online booking sites and electronic banking, among others, it brings to mind how companies take their website operations seriously. But even for small website owners, like you and me, these matters should also be important and must be handled properly.
Here are some suggestions how:
Get the right people. They must be experienced with the kind of site that you are handling. Executives in the organization must appreciate the website’s workings as well and avoid the situation where they only get concerned when disaster strikes.
Web operation as a business advantage. The website must be seen as a channel to achieve the targets of the organization.
Its value and culture should be embraced and recognized in other areas.
Along with it, targets must be set, tracked and measured accordingly.
Whenever new things are introduced, there will always be resistance to change. This is where a principle suggested by Pip Coburn in “The Change Function” applies. The pain of adapting to change must be less compared to the existing pain felt now. If there’s no significant benefit that can be achieved with change versus the agony felt now, chances of success will be slim.
Clarify improvement priorities. Once a web site or project is rolled out, there will be a lot of requests for improvement along the way. Make sure that these ideas are ranked and prioritized based on their impact to the user and whether these will build better interaction with the site. I have to emphasize this as some improvements tend to serve more the needs of internal users and indirectly cause havoc to other users.
Get reliable vendors and service providers. Make them responsive and accountable through a well-defined service level agreement. As example, let me cite the chaos that ensued with one airline’s website, which caused a lot of difficulties for its loyal customers. Numerous refund requests due to booking failures piled up and release of payment took more than a month.
Yet, no one took any responsibility for those failures. This betrayal of trust will not be forgotten by customers and it will take a long time to re-build that trust.
Despite the failure of some vendors and service providers, companies must be prepared for incidents and should implement a risk contingency plan when disaster strikes.
The main points I stated here are inspired from the latest O’Reilly Radar Report, “Transforming Web Operations from Cost Center to Competitive Advantage.” The report highlighted best practices based on several interviews and findings from experts and prominent sites today. It is prepared by Allan Alter and the O’Reilly Radar Team.
