Background Noise

You're Doing It Wrong: The Corporate RFP

As I write this, I'm taking a break from working on a response to a "Request for Proposal", commonly referred to as an RFP or sometimes an RFI. 150 pages of light reading, with probing questions like:

"What quality control processes have you implemented in order to mitigate the frequency and severity of errors in future releases of your software?"

Look, I've been on the other side of the table and I totally get it. This is going to be a very big project for the company in question, with a lot of internal stakeholders, and is not a decision to be made lightly. Making the wrong decision here would seriously compromise their ability to grow their business online. The first reaction when faced with an undertaking like this, is the get out the old fine-tooth comb and start combing.

Unfortunately, most of our prospective customers anchor this process with the corporate albatross of decision making: the RFP. Which is fine...if it was 1982.

The RFP was a necessary evil back in the dark ages, when corporations would only open the kimono when forced to do so through a bidding process. In fact, most RFP's were done as away to force vendors to blindly bid against each other as a way to get the best price. Somehow, the RFP has evolved into a magic document that too many companies think will actually help them make these business critical decisions.

Let's get real about this process for a minute:

- On the corporate side, hundreds of man-hours are spent preparing the RFP.

- Vendors are almost always just going through a copy-and-paste exercise when responding. And they will never - I repeat - never give out their best pricing in an RFP.

- The result is hundreds of pages of information that has to be processed by multiple people in order to be remotely useful.

I've seen this process in action as an eCommerce executive, and many times over in my current role. Not once have I ever seen anyone make an educated decision to select a vendor based on how they responded to an RFP. Even when RFP's are involved, the decisions are ultimately made by smart people who take the time to talk to each of vendors in detail, research the company and it's products, and more than often they rely on their most valuable asset: their gut.

I wish I had the reach to convince every corporate IT and Project Management office to just stop perpetuating this dinosaur of a process, but obviously I don't. The irony of it all, is that almost every company that drags us through this forced march is telling us that they have two major objectives in mind: increasing their time-to-market and return-on-investment. In both cases, they're starting out behind in the count.

Hello, it's me...

In the immortal words of Jim Anchower:

Hola, amigos. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I got a lot on my plate these days!

If you're one of the 2 people that read my blog when I first started it, you remember that I made some vague references to some upcoming changes in my professional life. Well, that has seriously come to pass, and I've been drinking from the fire hose for the last month or so, and haven't had a moment to catch my breath and devote some time to my blog.

Shortly before the end of last year, I came to the realization that I would be leaving my position as Director of E-Commerce at Finish Line. I was in that role for 7-years, and very proud of what I accomplished over that period. Unfortunately, like any other relationship, perceptions and expectations can change over time, and it was time for me to move on to a new challenge.

After much deliberation, and some really great opportunities in front of me, I decided to take a position as a Solutions Strategist with ATG. I had been a client of theirs for quite some time, serving on their Customer Advisory Board for a couple of years, so I was very excited when the opportunity presented itself. In my new role, I'm going to working in a consultative role with prospects and existing customer, helping to align the technology with the real-world demands of their online business.

As some of the members of my new employer like to joke with me, I've crossed over the "Dark Side" now. As funny as that sounds, I'm jacked about sitting on a different side of the table than what I'm accustomed to, and it's just the challenge that I've looking for!

Do we still need professional critics?

I was stumbling my way around the Internet yesterday, and ran across a company called Critical Metrics. They are apparently still in "stealth mode", but not sure what that even means these days, as they have working site and their first application is open to the public. I think the trendy thing to do is call the company in "beta"!

At any rate, it's a fairly interesting idea: By now, everyone knows about the value of the voice of the consumer, and using consumer reviews and ratings as a selling tool. But the Critical Metrics value prop is based on making recommendations based on the collective wisdom...er, tastes of professional critics, and not the general public. Their first application of this algorithm is in music playlists, but their site alludes to future applications as well. I'm not entirely sure I'm sold on this yet, as the whole music recommendation market seems pretty crowded to me, and they have an uphill climb to make this a success.

The bigger question for me, is what value do professional critics have in the media today, especially the Internet? When is the last time you bought music on the advice of a review in Rolling Stone, SPIN, or Blender? Or went to see a movie because Roger Ebert gave it four-stars? Perhaps this is where my version of reality is somewhat skewed by what I do for a living. I spend all of my time on the Internet, so my exposure to consumer reviews is about 100x my exposure to professional critics. The only exception to that rule might be with food and wine, but I think you get the point.

But maybe, just maybe, this is the genius of Critical Metrics: perhaps they recognize that the role itself of the professional critic is gradually shifting to that of a "highly trusted reviewer", and they are not simply aggregating the recommendations of a group of random people, but a group of people who are perceived to be experts at what they are reviewing. Take the collective wisdom of professional critics, and expose them to a customer that may have long-forgotten what value their opinions actually hold. An interesting evolution of the role of "critic", and time will tell as to how this will play outside the context of mainstream media.

On a side-note, the guy behind the idea is a familiar name to those of you that remember the early days of the Internet: Joey Anuff, co-founder of Suck.com. Now that I've dusted that memory off for you, try not to spend the rest of your day reading the archives!

Omniture's Integration Play

I haven't posted in a while, which I can blame on being in the middle of the holiday season as well as a nasty case of procrastination. I do have a few topics of interest that I want to get to, so hopefully I can get back into the rhythm of things.

I followed a press clipping yesterday to a demo of Ominture's new Genesis product, and I have to say that I'm impressed at first blush. While Omniture has always been one of the premier online analytics firms, I've held the opinion that their reporting interface seemed somewhat awkward when trying to measure traditional E-Commerce KPI's.

Granted, I've only seen the online demo and Data Sheet so far, but this looks like a step in the right direction for Omniture. It certainly addresses one of the biggest pain-points that we have to deal with on a regular basis, which is how to take analytical data from multiple sources and capture it in a way that enables you to make actionable decisions about your site. There's an adage in this business that suggests that if you have a $100K annual budget for site analytics, you should spend $10K on software and $90K on someone to manage it for you. A bit of an exaggeration obviously, but I think it illustrates the point that it's very difficult to properly manage the sea of qualitative and quantitative data  that exists for any E-Commerce business.

Here's the angle with Genesis that may enable them to stand out from their competition:

They acknowledge the fact that most of their customers use a handful of marketing applications from other vendors (email, affiliate programs, site search, SEO, etc..), and most of the common applications are already integrated into a simple drag-and-drop interface. They have basically created a common reporting platform to manage all of the disparate data that marketers have to sift through in order to make decisions on their marketing campaigns and site usability.

This is obviously Version 1.0, and everything looks great in a Flash demo, but I am certainly looking forward to getting a closer look at the Shop.org First Look event.

Style over Substance in E-Commerce

I was unable to attend the Shop.org Annual Summit last month, unfortunately, which is probably the best 3-days you can spend away from the office in this industry (while not on vacation). So, while I was in the process of cleaning out my ridiculously bloated inbox at work yesterday, I came across a few archived e-mails from colleagues, vendors and the press that contained notes and summaries of the presentations and workshops. One of the workshops was on the subject of what the presenter was calling E-Commerce 3.0, and how we are apparently at the dawn of a new era in E-Commerce right now. Damn it...here I am just starting to figure out this whole Web 2.0 thing, and now they've decided to upgrade the Internet!

In all seriousness, there seems to be a growing trend emerging in the E-Commerce industry that I believe to be fundamentally flawed; the practice of throwing what some would call "Web 2.0" applications at a site, in such a way that it completely breaks the existing online shopping metaphor that the consumer has been trained to use. In the past few months, I've seen sites totally redesigned in Flash, and Ajax being completely over-used, and in some cases it seems only for the sake of using it.

For the record, I am a huge proponent of the applications of tools and techniques such as Ajax and Flex in an E-Commerce site, but not at the expense of the basic fundamentals of usability. Their use is probably most common in applications such as single-screen checkout, which is an obvious place to try and improve upon the existing process, and recoup some the user abandonment that naturally occurs during checkout. Another great example is at Gap.com, where the consumer has the option of using their QuickLook feature to add something to their shopping cart without clicking through to a product detail page. It took me a while to warm up to this concept after it was launched last year, but it ultimately seems very intuitive and not overly intrusive to the customer's browsing behavior. It's probably something that frequent shoppers of the Gap will gravitate to, which should ultimately lead to an increase in conversion and AOV for repeat visitors.

I think there are also multiple examples of smaller, less-mainstream shopping sites that were built from the ground-up using Ruby on Rails, which simply blow me away. But ,that is a subject for a future post...

Obviously, the overall business of selling online has matured to the point where all of the low-hanging-fruit has been plucked, and we all have to work a little bit harder these days to not only win new customers, but keep the ones that we already have. Unfortunately, this seems to be causing a reaction in our business where we spend more time trying to chase the next hot thing, instead of listening to our customers and sticking to the fundamentals.

Like it or not, the basic framework for a successful E-Commerce site hasn't changed in several years, and for a good reason: It's simply not broke. I'm of the opinion that this notion of E-Commerce 3.0 seems like too much grasping at straws, and could ultimately create too much confusion in the marketplace.

I am horrible at attributing quotes to the right people, but there's one that comes to mind which bears repeating:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."