Times they are a changin'...
Those of us steeped in the traditional waterfall methodologies of the past for deploying web-sites are in for quite a shock. The ways that we've been thinking about strategy and development of web-enabled initiatives, where sites can cost anywhere from several hundred thousand to multiple million dollars, need to embrace a whole new world of perpetual beta. First of all, there aren't that many full, from scratch virgin e-com site builds out there today. Second, the technologies and platforms we have available to us are so much more lightweight, scalable and functional that we don't need to consider the custom build in the same ways that we used to. The attempt to perfectly lay out a multi-million dollar, two year deployment plan is just not realistic or responsible way to spend our shareholders' or clients' money, because by the time you get that behemoth off the ground the digital space will have changed and you'll already be behind. Seriously, if you can't frame it up so that it launches something in a 3-6 months window, it's probably too big. Break it up into chunks.
Having just managed the deployment of two Community Portals for Best Buy (forums.bestbuy.com, forums-es.bestbuy.com, accomplished in 8 weeks on the Lithium (www.lithium.com) platform, I can tell you that this whole business has been turned on its ear.
The deployment of something like this is a beginning, a beginning where we want and encourage our customers to create and co-create this space with and for us. So the way these sites will look 12 months from now will be much different than they look today. That is a considerable shift from the website development strategies of even 2 years ago.
I find it highly energizing.
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