 How accurately does your website communicate to the world what your organization is about? Your website is the place where people gain a first impression of your organization. It also provides a view of how you work within your industry value network. After all – your website is your company’s business card.
It is critical for organizations to accurately mirror their value network on their website in order to ensure a coherent and effective interface with the world. Website designers, however, are seldom tasked with designing a website to mirror the organizational value network or business ecosystem. Most often they are tasked with creating a compelling visual design – which may distort the actual message that needs to be projected.
A Value Network Analysis (VNA) can quickly reveal how accurately your Internet presence conveys the purpose of your company - from brand and identity through products and services, to Web 2.0 communities and support, and even to the level of semantic web elements.
When working with companies we frequently evaluate their website to see how well it communicates their role and business model in relation to the larger business ecosystem. Few websites present an accurate perspective or convey the kinds of offerings that entice visitors to interact. Indeed most websites end up communicating a star-shaped value network with the organization in the middle and a few standard roles (e.g., customers, suppliers, partners, etc.) around the edges. Interactions, if described at all, are vague or bland with undifferentiated exchanges that show little that is different from their competitors.
Using the ValueNetworks.com application, organizations can not only capture the way they really work (as a "strategy blueprint"), but can also compare that to the way their website is structured. Most importantly they can use this same approach to analyze competitors’ websites and compare messages and offerings from a network perspective. This provides a capability to benchmark against any number of well designed websites that communicate value networks. A website developer can see new opportunities to create a compelling, differentiated, inclusive, and authentic Internet presence.
Data required for using the ValueNetworks.com application to support website design is (a) the strategy map of the organization, (b) the value networks shown by the company website, including a webcrawl network map of linked URLS (c) the value networks of competing companies or organizations, and (d) sample value networks of websites – which are available within the application.
The value network perspective is especially valuable for website design agencies that need to either sell website design concepts to potential customers or wish to support existing customers in reinventing themselves.
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