There is an incredibly important point in this article for anyone running a consumer facing business. I’ve seen a good deal of schadenfreude online about the Army being duped into spending £113m on a website – but let’s focus on the fact that the article states it was “three times budget – meaning it was budgeted at £38m in the first place. 5 minutes on the website tells you that it is basically a big wordpress site, which should have cost a few hundred thousand at best and taken a month or 2. Consider how that procurement decision is made, and it is obvious that part of the problem is that no-one making it understood what they were buying or what it should cost. Sadly, I see the same thing happening in retail and hospitality businesses all the time – a whole chain of executives from IT project lead to CEO who simply don’t know what they are buying, and an aggressive vendor who therefore has the information edge. There is a big club of high street brands that have made the same mistake the Army has, and we need to reflect on how to get enough digital knowledge into our businesses to stop it from happening.
(Originally published on LinkedIn)