Leverage Momentum

The US Elections have been and are still quite topical. What was the result, sweeping change to the government from the Republicans to the Democrats. Barack Obama on his victory night speech invoked the picture of lines and lines of people, thereby creating an illusion that the voter turnout was massive towards the change mantra that had been preached over the campaign. To quote from his victory speech.

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in
numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four
hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this
time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.

Listening to the victory speech made we want to check the inside messaging of the statement.

Was it massive voter turnout? NO; Total voter turnout was 60% of total voters up 3% from the previous election in 2004, and the increase is in line with the general increasing trend of participating voters showing a steady increasing trend from '96 when it was 49% of total voters. So this is a trend of +4% per election over 12 years.

Yes, there were more registered voters this time, but that is also line with general population increase and the general trend of registrations.

Was it total dissatisfaction (excluding President Bush's personal ratings)? NOT NECESSARILY., as there was only 53% to 46% in the popular vote total, a gap of only 7% in the end result. The electoral votes are a winner takes all, but in some states the individual races were very close indeed.

What made a difference was the mood for change. The Democratic party identified this an galvanised people to action, leveraging the mood for change. They managed to gain the precious percentage over and above the registered party core to win through.

Along with the change message there was the defining figure of Barack Obama. Change became personalised, a history making event and therefore more real, more personal. Momentum began to build more and became defined in the person of Barack Obama.

Then on top of this was the availability of funds for ad spending and airtime. In reviewing the numbers I see that the Democrats had roughly a 2:1 ratio in funds to put into the overall campaign. In Florida alone the Democrat's spent somewhere around $24M to the Republicans $9M, go figure that, great marketing.

So to sum up, the thoughts here are that there was a momentum for change, a defining figure to attach to and that momentum was leveraged through solid marketing to ensure achievement of success.

There are some lessons that we can learn here for our ECM projects.

1. Find the mood for change (the compelling event)
2. Place the right leader in front to make the change personal
3. Leverage the Momentum through marketing and messaging for example "Yes we can" Change you can believe in"

And don't forget that a little extra funding does help to move things along. I am sure that now the campaign is over and the victory won that reality will hit home. All the best Mr President-elect.

Where do I start?

I was called on the other day to run a briefing session to talk about SharePoint licencing, Hmm! This type of request generally gets me thinking, do they know what they want? and what they are doing?

Well it was evident that there was from the outset of the meeting that there was a bit of confusion as to roles and responsibilities of the people in the room. Not a good sign if this is the way you feel about your own structure, or organisation.

Fortunately I had already prepared my deck as a game of two halves. The first half was talking about their licensing request, as expected, and the second half was all about getting them to focus on, why? and what? of the wider content issues that they would have to face up to.,

I started the second half by asking some questions:

* How does the organisation view information?
* How do senior executives view information?
* Is there an information strategy?
* What understand do we have of how information flows?
* Do you understand the relationship of information to business processes?
* Is there a view that there is a problem?

These are generic questions that if you fail to get a solid answer up front indicate that there is some serious thinking, planning and alignment that needs to go on before you buy software. Then from this opening I gave an outline of five steps to help get started. These steps are as follows:

1. Conduct an Information Assessment (where are you today?)
2. Align content (you need a definition of content first) to People and Process
3. Identifying problems (with the content alignment) and solutions (how can we make it better)
4. Sell the solution (to identified sponsor(s) ) and gaining executive Air Cover
5. Break the overall delivery into manageable steps (build a road map of projects)

And with these steps, always ensure alignment to business objectives and outcomes of the organisation.