Going online is a change management project | No messing about

I used to work with companies that felt they needed to get online, but didn?t really know what to do or how to do it.

I don?t just mean technically, that?s really the easy bit. There are plenty of great providers who can ensure you get the technical platform and performance you need, the hard bit is how can an organisation that has succeeded offline for years, adapt itself to the new environment.

This might be a reaction to a threat: business is slipping away as customers increasingly turn to online alternatives. Bookstores are a great example of this, most failed to adapt to the new terrain, held out as long as they could, then withered away.

It might also be a proactive move to take advantage of an opportunity. The offline business might be doing fine, but the company wants to explore opportunities and doesn?t want to miss out on getting out ahead of the pack.

Often this means transformational change ?

? but not always ?

An innovative construction company, for example, might come up with some clever ways to engage online (a ?Grand Designs? type blog, augmented reality mobile apps to show how things would look etc.), but essentially the main business is still ? quite literally ? the bricks and mortar of construction.

In most other businesses, the transformation required is not just adding an online team, it?s challenging every corner of the business and building a whole new value chain.

Sometimes ? like with e-commerce ? this is obvious, but in many other sectors it is far less easy to see ?

A small neighbourhood restaurant might stick its menu, opening times and contact details online and think that that?s it. Maybe, if they?re seriously good, they?ll allow online reservations ? but the real innovators in their sector will be doing more than an online advert, they?ll be engaging with their customers and building loyalty and using this as a platform for social influence.

How to do this is not easy. There are as many answers as there as businesses, but this is why the process of going online must be treated as a full-blown change management project, and not just a quick fix website managed by the marketing team.

Anyway, I wrote this post as an introduction to a post I wrote for ColbensonLive website about this very topic ? so please click the link if this is of interest.

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Change manager, interested in management, leadership, strategy, organisational psychology, learning, change, creativity - that sort of thing. Also writer, blogger, bookish type ...

Source: http://johnrtomlinson.com/2013/05/09/going-online-is-a-change-management-project/

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