THINKING WEB, NOT WEBSITE
by Gerry McGovern
The Web is the network. The Web is the organization. Your
website is not important. Reaching your customers is.
A website has substance. You can count the number of webpages
and the number of visitors. It is something you can show to your
manager. It is something you can talk about in a way that others
will understand.
Organizations came into being because for certain things people
organized in groups are more effective than individuals on their
own. A key feature of a traditional organization is that it has
the use of buildings and other tools of organization.
So, at a very basic level a company has the use of a boardroom
where the board can meet. It has the use of other meeting rooms
and it has offices where the employees can work. Within this
physical structure are tools of organization such as phone
systems.
Before phone systems, organizations used a variety of courier
systems to transfer information, because clear and consistent
communication is at the heart of what organizations do.
Organizations also have filing systems. These include filing
cabinets and computer storage that can often take up many rooms.
It is important that records of activity are kept and are easily
accessible.
Historically, it was not easy to be an organization. Because
organizations existed within a network of other organizations
quite a bit of money, training and connections was required. For
example, if you were a member of the upper class, you had a
better chance of establishing a successful organization than a
member of the lower class.
The Web makes the tools of organization cheap and widely
available. This is a major revolution. Power shifts. It was not
that long ago that the ability to have a conference call with a
group of people was only available if you worked with a large
organization. Now you can do it for free with Skype.
The general public now have the ability to create their own
organizations, and that's what they are doing with their
websites, on Facebook, on MySpace. Wikipedia is an example of a
new organization-type that simply could not have existed before
the Web.
Traditional organizations are not used to this and they don't
like it. They are used to organizing. Governments are used to
coming up with policies and procedures which citizens are then
supposed to adhere to. Citizens are supposed to learn government
language and how government works. There's very little in
government organizational training that encourages you to go out
and update a record in Wikipedia and then defend that update.
If your product or service is being discussed in the
blogosphere, you must be there, listening and contributing. Is
it more important to publish your content on your website or on
the websites most of your customers frequent? If your
organization has particular words for describing a service, and
those are not the words your customers search with, you must
change your words.
On the Web, we need to think beyond the organization. What is
success? Is it that having a website? Or is it getting people to
act in a certain way? It is the results of what you organize
that matters, not the organization you created or where you
created it.
Gerry McGovern
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