Presented at the August 2014 Auckland NDF BarCamp by Michael Lascarides, Manager, National Library Online (NZ).

1. digital strategy for
cultural heritage
workshop
Michael Lascarides
Manager, National Library NZ Online
@mlascarides
!
!
Auckland NDF BarCamp
August 15, 2014

2. “digital” “strategy”
INTRO - What the hell is a Digital Strategy?
- About that word "digital" (== "horseless")
- Why plan?
- Avoiding the Digital Death Spiral

3. “digital”
INTRO - What the hell is a Digital Strategy?
- About that word "digital" (== "horseless")
- Why plan?
- Avoiding the Digital Death Spiral

4. “strategy”
Strategy includes WHAT NOT TO DO.
Strategies are UNCERTAIN.
Strategy is UNIFIED and CONNECTED.

5. plans == guesses
“Business Plan” == “Business Guess”
“Strategic Plan” == “Strategic Guess”
Do not mistake the strategy for infallible truth… revisit it often.

6. tools for conversation,
not marching orders
Example: e-books, the Web, iPhone/iPad, etc

7. Simon Tanner, Balanced Value
Impact Model
Simon Tanner’s wine glass metaphor

8. NLNZ Online Roadmap model

9. Phase 1: DO YOUR HOMEWORK
Phase 2: HAVE CONVERSATIONS, AND REALLY LISTEN
Phase 3: WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT, HUH?
Phase 4: OWN YOUR CREATION

10. Phase 1: DO YOUR
HOMEWORK

11. Phase 1: Do Your Homework
What is your quest? VISION/MISSION, TERMS OF
REFERENCE
What’s been done already? LITERATURE REVIEW, STRATEGY
ALIGNMENT
Whom do you serve? AUDIENCES
What the hell is all this stuff? SERVICE INVENTORY
Are you about to be hit by a train? EMERGING TRENDS

12. Vision & Mission
Does your organisation have a vision and a mission?
- Is it up to date?
- Are you expected to align to it, or help to craft it?
- Important: Make sure your frame of reference is big enough to spare some room for growth.
- WHO ARE THE DECISION MAKERS?
- And what are they expecting to sign off on?
- Who will be responsible for implementing action plan?
- OUTPUT: Vision and mission statements
- OUTPUT: Terms of reference

13. Roadmap “mission”
What is the purpose and scope of your strategy?
Does your organisation have a vision and a mission?
- Is it up to date?
- Are you expected to align to it, or help to craft it?
- Important: Make sure your frame of reference is big enough to spare some room for growth.
- WHO ARE THE DECISION MAKERS?
- And what are they expecting to sign off on?
- Who will be responsible for implementing action plan?
- OUTPUT: Vision and mission statements
- OUTPUT: Terms of reference

14. Literature Review
&
Strategy Alignment
- [Show the big binder!]
- GATHER EVERYTHING RELEVANT
- What's been done before?
- What documents should you align to?
- Strategies?
- What interesting research is out there?
- Has anyone in your peer institutions done something similar?
- Read all of it.
- (3 ring binder)
- You will learn a lot
- You will also learn what works in a strategy document
- The people who wrote that stuff wanted it to be read, and considered.
- OUTPUT: Make a bibliography and put it somewhere accessible to the team. You should be referring to it often.

15. Question:
What sources of knowledge
can you draw from?

16. Peer Institution Review

18. Audiences
3. Whom do you serve? AUDIENCES
- What do you know about your audience?
- Find sources of info
- Web analytics
- Surveys
- Customer support logs/front line staff (SUPER IMPORTANT)
- What are the concerns they're hearing?
- Customer accounts (WARNING DANGER)
- Interviews/focus groups
- User testing
- Broad, public surveys
- World Internet Project
- Pew Internet project
- Stats.govt.nz
- What do they have in common?
- Demographics
- Behavior
- Location
- Language/culture

19. Discussion:
Who are your audiences?

20. Discussion:
What do you want to
know about them?
- What do they have in common?
- Demographics
- Behavior
- Location
- Language/culture
- Gender
- Education
- Income
- Access to internet (speed/reliability)
- Devices
- Special training
- INSTITUTION CENTRIC: What is their engagement curve?
- Frequency and recency

21. Discussion:
And how can you learn
it?
- Find sources of info
- Web analytics
- Surveys
- Customer support logs/front line staff (SUPER IMPORTANT)
- What are the concerns they're hearing?
- Customer accounts (WARNING DANGER)
- Interviews/focus groups (WARNING DANGER)
- User testing
- Broad, public surveys
- World Internet Project
- Pew Internet project
- stats.govt.nz

23. 3. Whom do you serve? AUDIENCES
- What do you know about your audience?
- Find sources of info
- Web analytics
- Surveys
- Customer support logs/front line staff (SUPER IMPORTANT)
- What are the concerns they're hearing?
- Customer accounts (WARNING DANGER)
- Interviews/focus groups
- User testing
- Broad, public surveys
- World Internet Project
- Pew Internet project
- Stats.govt.nz
- What do they have in common?
- Demographics
- Behavior
- Location
- Language/culture

24. Discussion:
Who COULD be your
audience, but isn’t?
- Whom do you think you are reaching?
- Whom are you really reaching?
- WHO IS NOT PRESENT?
- The digital divide
- Marginalised/at-risk groups
- Low-income
- Disabled/differently-abled
- Incarcerated
- First languages other than English or Te Reo
- People who just haven't known about you

25. Service Inventory
5. Man, We've Got A Lot Of Stuff: SERVICE INVENTORY
- List everything you are doing now.
- Document it. Keep good records. You'll need it.
!
- OUTPUT: Service Inventory

26. Question:
What are all the points where
your institution comes in contact
with your audiences?
- Define "service" in a way that works for you:
- web sites
- social media presences
- on-site terminals
- customer interactions
- remote services
- data feeds
- any place you deliver some kind of value to your customers

27. Question:
What do you need to know
about each of those services?
- For each item, things to track:
- Name
- Where to find it (domain names)
- IP addresses
- Business, technical, support contacts
- Year started/finished
- Usage metrics
- Short description
- Who uses it
- Current disposition

28. Trends
- This part is fun and terrifying
- Start by focusing beyond your institution.
- Read blogs.
- Trawl the Internet
- Inforgraphics, visualisations
- Read the news
- Talk to experts
- Watch TED Talks
- Go to conferences
- ASK YOUR STAFF
- What are your patrons saying?
- Have workshops, BS sessions, brainstorm over drinks
- Look backwards to get a sense of the rate of change
- Talk to EVERYBODY
- "What terrifies you about the next five years?"
- "What excites and energises you about the next five years?"
- "What technology are you scared of?"
- See if your trends can be grouped
- By technology

29. Question:
What scares you about
the future?

30. Phase 2: HAVE
CONVERSATIONS, AND
REALLY LISTEN.

31. Phase 2: Have Conversations
Are We On The Right Track? LISTENING TOUR
My Strategy Has A Hole In It, Can I Have Another?
FINDING THE GAPS

32. Listening
1. Are We On The Right Track?: LISTENING TOUR
- Circulate these materials as an artifact for review with core customers, staff, etc.
- OUTPUT: Feedback, incorporated

33. Find the Gaps
2. My Strategy Has A Hole In It, Can I Have Another?: FINDING THE GAPS
- Look at the spaces between your Services, Trends, and Audiences
- Between Services and Trends: Technological change
- Between Services and Audiences: Over/Underserved audiences
- Between Audiences and Trends: Changing demographics
- Don't forget to ask Who's Not Accounted For
- Identify Gaps
- This is a great exercise for post-it notes and a workshop
- OUTPUT: List of Gaps

34. Question:
What are the gaps you can see
between your CURRENT services
and your IDEAL audiences?

35. Phase 3: WHAT ARE YOU
GOING TO DO ABOUT IT,
HUH?

36. Phase 3: What are you going
to do about it?
Where Do We Start?: BLUE SKY ACTION LIST
Enter the ThunderDome: FACETED FEATURE ANALYSIS
Forests out of Trees: OPPORTUNITY SPACES
Preparing for battle: DETAILED ACTION PLAN

37. Actions
1. Where Do We Start?: BLUE SKY ACTION LIST
- Take the list of Gaps and have a post-it fest with actions
- No idea is stupid.
- No idea is too big.
- No idea is too small.
- CAPTURE EVERYTHING
- OUTPUT: List of potential Actions
!
LEAD WITH VERBS.

38. LEAD WITH VERBS.

39. Faceted Feature Analysis
http://boxesandarrows.com/faceted-feature-analysis/
!
Enter the ThunderDome: FACETED FEATURE ANALYSIS
- The problem: Different people have different priorites for different reasons
- The solution:
- Score for particular criteria separately
- Weight criteria consistently
- Everyone has a different focus
- Simon Tanner : drinking wine metaphor
- Avoids personality scoring
- Understanding the spreadsheet
- OUTPUT: Faceted Feature Analysis, scored

40. Exercise:
FFA

41. Spaces of Opportunity
3. Forests out of Trees: OPPORTUNITY SPACES
- Group the actions into areas of affinity/focus
- Card sort exercises (fixed/free)
- Revisit what you're getting at.
- OUTPUT: Actions in Opportunity Spaces

43. Detailed Action Plan
1. Preparing for battle: DETAILED ACTION PLAN
- Details for each action
- How do actions align to Trends, Audience, Services?
- How do actions align to Strategies?
- When does this need to be done?
- Who will do it?
- Resourcing happens here.
- Lots of ways to handle this step... use what works for your org
- OUTPUT: Actions with priority, timeline, dependencies and resourcing

45. Phase 4: OWN YOUR
CREATION

46. Phase 4: Own Your Creation
Volkswagen on ice: IMPLEMENTATION AND GOVERNANCE
Start all over again: ITERATION
2. Volkswagen on ice: IMPLEMENTATION AND GOVERNANCE
- Hand off to the business
- Remember the vision/mission/ownership at the start? They become extremely important here again.
- Communicate with your org
- Communicate beyond your borders
- Remember who your audiences are
- Action plans for teams
- Do your stakeholders have what they need to support the implementation?
- Governance: do the people who made the strategy have a role to play?
- OUTPUT: Comms plan
- OUTPUT: Governance Plan

47. much thanks!
Michael Lascarides
Manager, National Library NZ Online
@mlascarides
!
Auckland NDF BarCamp
August 15, 2014

48. Further Reading
Simon Tanner, The Balanced Value Impact Model: http://
www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html (2013 NDF Keynote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDyBCmPomFQ )
World Internet Project http://www.aut.ac.nz/research/research-
institutes/icdc/projects/world-internet-project
Pew Research Internet Project http://www.pewinternet.org/
Adam Polansky, Faceted Feature Analysis http://boxesandarrows.com/
faceted-feature-analysis/
Michael Lascarides, Next-Gen Library Redesign, ALA Press, 2011

49. Further Reading
Crowdsourcing for Cultural Heritage, Mia Ridge (Ed.), Ashgate
Press, 2014 (forthcoming; Michael wrote a chapter in this).
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, William Whyte, 1980.
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, Paco Underhill, 1999.
Lucinda Blaser, National Maritime Museum, NDF presentation
2011. http://www.r2.co.nz/20111129/lucinda-b.htm
Karen McGrane, Content Strategy for Mobile, A Book Apart Press,
2012