Perry Hewitt shares advice and examples from implementing a digital strategy at Harvard University in her Delight 2014 presentation.
Originally presented at Delight 2014, Oct. 6-7, 2014. http://delight.us/conference
11. 2009
Transitioned from
hand-coded HTML to
“blogging software”
WordPress
• Quick win
• MVP approach
12. 3 months from
conception
to launch
• Managed small internal
team + vendors
• Trained editors on CMS
• Ported 500 stories and
iFramed the rest;
redirect strategy
• Moved hosting from in-house
to MediaTemple to
Rackspace
13.
14. 2013
Continued to iterate
based on audience
needs, analytics data,
news trends
• Platform for
storytelling
• Responsive
• Award-winning
28. Checklist for change agents
Find a quick win that solves a problem
Embrace and celebrate the MVP versus
detour down consensus highway
Allow risk, but know what’s acceptable
failure
Share your mistakes and lessons learned
In the enterprise, keep one eye on the
29. “pragmatic fields from
science to politics to
business are looking to
design for ‘inspiration,
alternative processes,
metaphor and a bit
of uplift’”
How does an institution approaching its fifth century embrace a digital strategy for communications and engagement? With a lot of shared best practices — and a culture that can support change management.
This talk will address challenges and ideas for bringing digital change to enterprise institutions, and offer concrete case studies where outward-facing experience design and measurement informed new digital approaches.
This is Massachusetts Hall, the oldest surviving building on Harvard’s campus. While Harvard was founded in 1636, this was built as recently as 1718. This creates a double-edged sword when it comes to change. On the one hand, when you have been around 378 years, it can be hard to change. Harvard is a school most people have heard of, and it has a brand with a heft that gives people pause for thought. On the other hand, it’s a place where a lot of change has happened, and a lot of firsts have occurred.
And we’ve lived through a lot of communications firsts. Communications inventions since 1636 include the telex, radio, photography, telephone, television, and the internet. This is the news office in the 1930s.
And as you saw in the video, none of this history has precluded a foothold in innovation. Here’s an early Twitter prototype from 1910. Students don’t yet know to call these status messages, but that’s what they are.
3:00 Where the deuce are you anyway. I thought that you were going skating with me this afternoon. Am furious. McKinney – that’s 119 characters, including spaces
And I know how hard change can be. I have lived through a lot of change. This is my first computer.
For Christmas in 1977,I received this computer. The TRS 80 was one of the first PCs marketed for home use. The TRS-80 had no hard drive and four kilobytes of memory—for comparison’s sake, Apple’s iPhone 4 has 512 megabytes of memory, and the iPhone 6 has 1 gigabyte of memory.
But today I am going to focus on two big changes that our team, along with others, made at Harvard. I’m going to focus on what the change we made was, and why it stuck in a big org where change is hard..
The first issue came out weekly and an annual subscription was one dollar. Primarily event listings.
Thinking about is lass as a destination than a syndicated news service.
2009: Harvard Gazette was
200,000 page views
Print first, selectively and manually published to web
Optmized for IE
Predominantly text
Thought of solely as destination, not feed
Built as single celled organism
Faster and easier publishing workflow
More visual design
More visualreading, searching and browsing experience
Measurable to inform both development path and media outreach. Measurement is a path finder and a sales tool for change agents.
When I arrived – no social presence institutionally. Harvard had not entered – not realizing ticket to play, not ticket to win.
Coordination is essential
Coordination is essential
Why we capture what we capture
Visual – and true to you. Authenticity drives change
People want to be part of a winning effort, and an aggregated audience.
The first kind is what you do – the second kind is being willing to be out in front and own what you do. I am the truckdriver in this scenario..
But you sure as well cant get there without teamwork – esp in distributed enterprise.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/design-golden-age/
parting thought
We’re living in a time of “acknowledged urgency,” Antonelli says, and pragmatic fields from science to politics to business are looking to design for “inspiration, alternative processes, metaphor and a bit of uplift.” (“Delight” has become a buzzword in Silicon Valley.) As a result, design has become incredibly multifaceted in recent years, encompassing subfields such as interaction design, critical design, environmental design, social design, biodesign and service design, to name just a few. It’s become a medium for expressing ideas, raising provocative questions and addressing social and individual anxieties.