Dreaming the future for digital agencies and transformation
Creating an environment where products are nurtured and rewarded based on their value
I give you money you give me your employee’s time
We are stuck in an old model, an advertising agency model that goes back to the period of Mad Men. A client pays an agency for some of their employees time. The cost of estimating and demonstrating this time as value is huge. Not only the cost to estimate but the cost of getting the estimation wrong and we get it wrong all the time. Not because we are bad at our jobs, but because no one can predict the future, especially not a digital future that evolves and changes every day.
That is only part of the story, this model encourages quantity of deliverables not quality. Even if we did get the estimations right, is time really what makes a good product? We don’t think so, at Hello Great Works we believe in delivering value no matter how long or short time it takes.
Imagine an agency where:
- No need to invoice through cumbersome internal processes
- Reduced complex charges from “actual”, “predicted”, “logged” time
- Constant real time status of income against predictions
- Charging based on skill sets and delivered value not time
- Flexible teams and resourcing
- Teams motivated to deliver value and high quality work
- Each piece of work leads directly to a vote of confidence from clients, experts, users and peers
- A trusted CV and portfolio without the need to put work into it
- A language to talk about progression, feedback directly from the people involved in the project
- Performance tied directly to money and quality at the same time
The future is closer than you think
My aim of this post is not to just complain or even to give the perfect solution to any of these challenges, this isn’t “top 5 ways to improve your agency” or “10 simple steps to make your digital transformation profitable”.
What I have started to see over recent months is a vision where all of the challenges don’t exist in their current form, a paradigm shift if you like such buzzwords. I want to take this time to dream, hypothesise and theorise about how this may look and how feasible this is. Although I work in a company that helps other companies to transform their digital capabilities, it’s not often we get to reflect on ourselves and how an agency itself may digitally transform.
My role working agencies is often to say what’s realistic and actually possible, take a designer’s dreams and turn them into a realistic digital roadmap, it’s somewhere between digital strategy and technology implementation. This means being a creative realist. I have to get creative with reality in order to ensure the ideal solution is possible and that the value is tangible.
Therefore, I will not be outlining specific technologies to use and how to use them. I am not defining an algorithm, AI implementation or data model. I’m just applying my knowledge from these fields to ensure a level of feasibility.
This is not a vision for advertising and marketing agencies, although much of what I describe could be transferable and it is impossible to talk about strategic design and digital product companies without there being some level of marketing involved.
I am aware that I am taking the easy route, avoiding most of the complicated technical parts. But in my defence I believe there are many more talented people out there that can do the algorithms, but before we can implement them we need to ensure that we are going in the right direction. There is a need for strategic direction and vision and that seems to be what everyone is unclear about.
The modularization of everything, from modular code, to design, to data
The initial rationale for thinking about this new paradigm is that, from modular code, to web services, to micro services programming - particularly on the web - has been getting more modular, gradually broken down into smaller and smaller pieces. We are now seeing the same thing happening to design with the proliferation of design systems. In the utopian theoretical world that I am living in for this blog post, the delivery of a digital product or service should be completely modular from a design and development point of view and the two should work in harmony, this allows for improvements and additions to occur organically as required without having to redesign the system from scratch.
My question as a data consultant is where does data fit into all this? Surely data should be modular too. What I mean by data here is; data for measurement, informing decisions on product design and indicators of performance and success.
Again existing in my utopian theoretical blog post world, if each module/section/asset can be measured then each UX’er/designer/developer/strategist can be completely informed on how it is performing and prioritise the product roadmap accordingly.
Yes that is a lot to ask, but it’s possible — honestly — don’t look at me like that. Not only is it possible but it has much wider ramifications to the agency model. Big claims I know, but I am living in theoretical utopian world, it’s great over here.
What I would note is that it is not the technology that limits our ability to do what I am going to propose, it’s people, it takes a huge change in mindset and way of working, which I don’t think I need to say takes a long time to change when lots of people are involved.
What is value anyway?
The world is a complex place and measuring value is complicated. Don’t listen to anyone that tells you otherwise, you can’t demonstrate value solely through money or percentages or one magic number. You certainly can’t compare to one benchmark number and see if you’re doing better than the average to see if it’s valuable, maybe everyone else working within the average is doing a bad job too.
So let’s think about this modularly/hierarchically. You can measure the success of a product as a whole, just task completion, a single page, a flow, a button or any other asset. But, getting a full picture of the success of all of these things is hard. You need to consider not only the customer and user, but also the business success. I don’t think even the best analytics tracking and measurement plan could do this. It is possible to modularise the measurement of each of these items individually and you need a holistic view to be able to take informed decisions.
Let us not forget the softer unquantifiable value. We are not in a place where we understand and measure enough of the world to be able to measure every bit of value. Even if we put sensors, eye tracking and brain transmitters on every person. That is a bit far, even for my utopian world. I am not saying that it won’t happen in the end it (it’s already happening in our office and just look at what Elon Musk is proposing), but I am looking for something a little sooner than that.
If we remove ourselves from the analytics technology for a second, how does that value get measured currently in real life? Typically through the continuation of projects, recommendations of people or skills, past projects and experience. LinkedIn represents this through endorsements and recommendations from your professional network already, a CV is just a paper version of the same thing. It’s not too far fetched to think of taking it a step further.
It’s all just interconnected networks
Say we make recommendations and endorsements as part of the measurement? What if users, businesses and industry experts could all vote on the quality and value of a solution at all levels of the measurement hierarchy. Votes, trust, certification across a network, this all of a sudden starts to sound very familiar… blockchain anyone? The architecture and protocols are already there, all the analytics is already in place.
As soon as I think blockchain then I begin to expand into other areas. If you are measuring quality and value accurately with blockchain, why not have a business model where you charge that way too.
I have seen a number of solutions, for example. Each of the examples has experimented with this model slightly, particularly when looking at freelancers. But many focus on time and efficiency and this is the wrong way to go in my humble opinion. The best solutions change the human experience and the society around it in ways beyond time and money, that’s what the best designers and developers do. Only the people affected by the product and solution can see and feel this.
So, as with all the best research, you need to compare what people say with what they do to best understand the experience. If we combine a voting system — in a similar way to LinkedIn endorsements — with the existing ways of measuring behaviour we have the closest mapping of real value across all hierarchical levels.
What we are looking at here is an extremely complicated layered network. A network where each user is a node, each designer and developer is a node and the value of that node is dependent on the knowledge and skills they have acquired during their work and educational life. Each node has connections to the other nodes through pieces of work and digital products, allowing each vote and interaction to have a weight or a score. All of a sudden you have a networked value system in which people can trust.
What’s the point in an agency at all
Now say this system is in place, where does this leave an agency’s business model? Work and value can be exchanged in the network automatically, money can be charged based on actual value that is derived from the finished work. If this is the case then clients are much more willing to pay and people working on the product are incentivised to provide the real value.
What then is the point in the agency at all, you may rightly ask. I believe there is still the need for an agency, I believe that agencies and whole businesses act as nodes of collections of nodes. Agencies are able to attract talent based on the people they have within them, the standard of agency can be judged with the skills inside. There is still the need to find new talent that is not yet part of the network, not only that but assigning the right skills and personalities to the right projects. In this new model, agencies would need to rethink why they exist and charge based on connecting new nodes and improving the quality of the network.
Driving the network effect
We have seen with crypto currencies, social media networks, this model does not work unless you have enough people on the network so how do we even start to move in a direction that gets us towards this way of working, how can we guide both agencies, workers and clients, what are the first important steps? Many people are working on exactly this with crypto currencies at the moment, the learnings from the finance industry will be invaluable if this is to work in an agency setting.
Maybe I’ll follow up with a blog post on that.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to James Kelway, Stefan K. Hansen and everyone else at Hello Great Works that helped me finally click the publish button.
Although not an academic article with references as such, I do feel the need to acknowledge a few pieces of content that helped formulate my thinking and inspired this piece. I recommend you take a look if you want to read further…
