“Online” RFP Maturity Assessment
Graham Honeywill Amberbuzz Consulting Oy 12th January 2010 Version 1.0
Contents Introduction
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What is “Online” RFP maturity?
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Why is it needed?
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How do I assess my organisation’s maturity?
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What can I do about it?
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About Amberbuzz Consulting Oy
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©Amberbuzz Consulting
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“Online” RFP Maturity Assessment
Introduction After 6 months lobbying and planning, you finally have the “green light” to develop a new web site. Your procurement team and IT team are keen to get started and the external communications, sales and marketing guys are equally excited. Now you need to find someone to work with – a partner that fits within you budget range and who can really help – at least that’s what the references have said. But how to find, evaluate, select and induct that company? Do you really know what you need? Can you take informed decisions about where to cut corners to save on time and on cost? Do you know what work your own internal team will be doing and how they should interact with these new business partners? The “Online” RFP Maturity Assessment tool has been created with exactly that in mind – to deliver a quick and effective assessment of how ready you are to prepare and release a tender or RFP document and to identify any need gaps that should be filled before trying to find the right partner for your new Online presence.
What is “Online” RFP maturity? Wikipedia defines online, RFP and maturity as follows: • • •
Online: Available over the Internet. RFP (request for Proposal): an invitation for suppliers, often through a bidding process, to submit a proposal on a specific commodity or service. Maturity: The state of being mature, ready or ripe
Taken together, the term refers to an organisation or team’s readiness to issue a proposal for services concerning internet capabilities. The key issue here is “readiness”. Within the “online” context, readiness must include and integrate the following: •
• • •
•
An understanding of the visitors to the web and to any existing internet pages that are within your scope of concern. Who are they? What do they want to achieve? Where do they come from? An understanding of the organisational stakeholders, what they hope to achieve with the internet and how this integrates with internal processes and other channels An understanding of the essence of your brand – design elements; thought leadership opportunities and requirements; brand advocacy opportunities; tone of voice. An understanding of your enterprise architecture – processes and how they will need to adapt; organisational structure, roles and capabilities and how they will be impacted; security constraints and opportunities, especially where web 2.0 or mobile capabilities are involved; application and technical architectural integration, especially where intranet or extranet capabilities are involved What does success look like? What KPIs and targets will be applied to the end result and how will these contribute towards your corporate scorecard?
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“Online” RFP Maturity Assessment In each of the above areas there are specific issue that can only be known by your own team or teams, and which will have profound impact on any RFP response and subsequent selection activities.
Why is it needed? The RFP process provides a powerful tool to enable effective collaboration between companies – however this effectiveness is fully dependent on correctly defining what is required and then accurately evaluating the responses received. If the specification is incomplete then the responses will be vague – making it difficult or impossible to evaluate effectively. This “Online” RFP Maturity Assessment tool will allow you to be confident that you have a complete set of requirements and will assist you in applying weightings to evaluation scores when evaluating RFP responses.
How do I assess my organisation’s maturity? Following are a series of open questions that can be used to consider your maturity across each of the 5 topic areas mentioned above. These questions are the result of extensive experience in major multi-national commercial companies. As a result they may need minor re-interpretation when considered in a NFP/government or charity context, however the principles remain constant. To the left are the questions you should consider – to the right is the reasoning (why the question is important). The last two columns are for you – does it apply in your case? Is it addressed in the RFP? 1. Web visitors Question 1.1 Do you have descriptions of the types of people who visit or should visit you web site? 1.2 Do you have descriptions of the scenarios or stories for each visitor type – ideally resulting in some sort of “call to action” or activity that they would do as the result of a successful visit?
1.3 Do you have statistics to see where they have come from – what offsite behaviour ©Amberbuzz Consulting
Reasoning Forms the basis for the set of requirements for the RFP. These are the people who will be using the new capability so unless their needs are integrated into the process the online presence will probably fail. This grouping of people then allows for stories, or scenarios, to be built to reflect expected behaviour. These stories then drive the site navigation or IA, as well as related issues such as onsite search. The “calls to action” are critical as without these it becomes quite difficult to define and measure “success”. Important to understand your current level of “organic search” success and the
Applies?
Addressed?
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“Online” RFP Maturity Assessment has brought them to the site?
1.4 Do you have a visitor/customer segmentation model that identifies different behaviours and calls to action for different types of visitor? 1.5 Do you have stories or scenarios to separate out anonymous visitors, registered visitors, key customer individuals, distributors and retailers and internal employees?
1.6 Do you have demographic profile information and stories concerning geographical location, language preference?
2. Internal Stakeholders Question 2.1 Is there a clear understanding of the business stakeholders and their expectations for the new web presence? 2.2 Is there commitment from the content providers for web content? Especially Corporate Communications, Marketing communications, environmental and social responsibility teams? 2.3 If there is an internal Knowledge Management initiative in place, is it engaged with this activity and with Thought Leadership ©Amberbuzz Consulting
effectiveness of ad-words. Also important to assess the usefulness of banner placements and social media activity that could promote traffic to the site. If the RFP is to extend also to operating the Digital Channel then these are key issues to include now. Important to integrate this if there is such research as this needs to inform persona development and can allow for targeted online campaign activity (behavioural targeting) Critical question, not just because it forces consideration of target customer groups that might be otherwise forgotten, but also because it helps identify scope of the online channel. For example, what is the relationship between a corporate internet, the intranet and extranets? Important to help identify localisation issues and also key translation needs. Translation, if required, can place an enormous burden on a web site’s operating costs so needs to be considered carefully Reasoning Critical to ensure there will be engagement and content flow from the parts of the business needed to develop the extended content network. A detailed content strategy needs to be included as one of the development activities – and at this stage it is important to get engagement from the sources of this material in order to ensure this activity is correctly handled in the RFP.
Applies?
Addressed?
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“Online” RFP Maturity Assessment activities? 2.4 Especially for intranetrelated RFPs, but also partially with internet RFPs, are the corporate values integrated? 2.5 Is there commitment from the process owners for processes of related offline activities such as order fulfilment, query responses etc? Especially, e-commerce and e-care 2.6 Is there a cross-channel strategy or at least understanding of the interplay between online and other channels, for example stores, events, distributors? 2.7 In a global or multibusiness unit organisation, is there support and engagement across all business entities?
2.8 Is there legal support available to develop site terms, opt-in terms, and avoid any legal pitfalls? 3. Brand Question 3.1 Is there a digital styleguide to guide and support use of brand assets in digital environments including use of brand logo online, digital design elements, use of photos, movement etc.? 3.2 Is there a brand guideline to steer the tone of voice for the brand online? This is also important when allowing visitors to engage with the brand, addressing guidelines ©Amberbuzz Consulting
In addition to content flow the other major stakeholder group are those people with process responsibility for those process that will be impacted by the web presence. This includes also budget owners, P&Lresponsibles for those parts of the business impacted
Local businesses have a tendency to expect their own visitors to have unique needs that can only be served locally and in a local language. This needs to be explored and aligned with corporate vision in terms of communications flow and global accountabilities. Localisation and translation can become extremely costly if not managed carefully. Internal legal teams may need external support for Online Channel legal issues
Reasoning The digital channel places some unique opportunities for the brand to come to life but this needs to be done in close alignment with the brand team or can create a “show stopper” later on. It may become apparent that some brand development or brand identity development needs to be done in parallel with the web site, in order to optimise the opportunities that can
Applies?
Addressed?
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“Online” RFP Maturity Assessment such as moderation, blogging and thought-leadership. 3.3 Is there a programme or policy concerning or supporting brand advocacy, both internal and external, that can or will influence the development of the web channel? 4. Enterprise architecture, IT Question 4.1 Is there a clear policy for Corporate Security that has been implemented into IT security? How do those policies support internal and external digital identity requirements? How do those policies support information confidentiality issues that will emerge as the web opens up and social media is taken into use?
4.2 Are there existing architectural decisions in place concerning content management and document management platforms
4.3 Extranet capabilities and back end application integration
4.4 Metadata policies and capabilities
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emerge.
Reasoning IT security and the IT implementation of corporate security policies need to be carefully considered. Development of a new digital environment requires careful review of corporate policy especially concerning digital identity (single sign-on) and information classification. The IT implementation of Corporate Security requirements can create major problems if not handled at an early stage in the process Proprietary, global platforms versus open source platforms for web activity. This is a key issue that needs to be handled as part of the RFP. The issue here is structure and re-use versus flexibility and innovation. Especially if e-care and esales are in scope, or in cases where there is likely to be tight process integration – it is important to understand the architectural constraints and opportunities from back-end systems and to include these within the scope of the RFP. This is a critical area for both internal and external search that is often overlooked at the RFP phase but which requires considerable effort if not established early on – to ensure people can find what
Applies?
Addressed?
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“Online” RFP Maturity Assessment 4.5 Desktop/laptop image constraints 4.6 Mobile device support and use
5. Corporate scorecard Question 5.1 Is there clear positioning of the objectives for this RFP within the Corporate strategy and top level KPIs? 5.2 Are there targets set for the Online channel within the overall business financial targets? 5.3 Are there targets set for the Online channel within the overall customer satisfaction targets? 5.4 Has an overall business case been established to support this activity?
they are after using search The browser and desktop office image can become major constraints or opportunities for intranet development. If this RFP extends to internal visitors then this needs to be carefully considered too. If the RFP scope is primarily external this is still needed, but mainly concerning browser support, screen specification supported and use of related technologies such as Adobe flash or Adobe Air.
Reasoning Development of an effective online channel can take many months to complete. It is important to get top management focus and support for this by demonstrating the role of the digital world as an element of the business world and then reflect this into the RFP in terms of linked targets that can be used to develop partnerships with vendors
Applies?
Addressed?
What can I do about it? Once you have completed this assessment it will become immediately apparent whether the RFP document is ready for submission or not. If there are open issues identified here it could indicate the need for some sort of Digital Strategy development work or it could just indicate a need for some fine-tuning of the RFP document itself. Typically, issues involving stakeholder buy-in or visitor understanding indicate the need for some strategy work – as these issues impact on the basic scope of the RFP, which could compromise the entire process if not managed. This list is a brief description of some of the strategic development activities available from Amberbuzz Consulting Oy that you could consider in order to address any issues you identify from this RFP maturity assessment. ©Amberbuzz Consulting
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“Online” RFP Maturity Assessment • • • • • • • • • • • •
Review of the current online Operating model including a process review, SWOT analysis, stakeholder survey analysis Review of your current web visitors, profiling, expectations, experience Review of your Competitor web sites as a basis to assess your own web presence Development of a Digital Channel Vision and target state Development of the business case for new Digital Channel capability Brand development online>site design and template creation Development of personae and scenarios to form the basis for the web site structure, content and capability Development of a new Digital Channel operating model (core/context analysis) Enterprise architecture high level requirements Development of Online process (call to action processes, content development and launch process, content translation process, requirements handling process Content strategy development including search strategy Information architecture KPI development
About Amberbuzz Consulting Oy I am a small, independent consultant, based in Helsinki, Finland. I specialise in Project Management and Digital Channel Strategy development and execution activities including the activities described above. For more information please contact me, Graham Honeywill at graham@amberbuzz.fi.
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