*supercollider

The Italian government has spent five years and allocated €45 million on a tourism web portal, without actually producing anything yet.

The WSJ article is loaded with insights into the fiasco, which boils down to an object lesson in why design and innovation by committee is a recipe for suck:

1. Start with the wrong objective.
   “Spain created a brand. Italy tried creating — without much success — a Web site.”

   I’m all for websites. I better be, considering they are a large part of what I base my livelihood on. But as with anything, you need to start with the end — your business objectives — in mind. Once we have those established, we have a frame of reference for all the decisions that follow in determining how best to achieve those.

   It sounds like the team on this project skipped the part about defining objectives and went right to features envy, briefing their myriad of agencies to give them a Titanic-sized web portal with which they could dwarf their Mediterranean rivals. At least the Titanic made it out of dry dock.

2. Design by committee
   Hands up to everyone who visibly flinches at the words “bureaucracy” or “committee”. Now check this out:

   “Several government ministries — in two administrations — and each of Italy’s 20 regions were involved in creating the portal. Associations of travel agencies and hotel owners had their say as well, while the design and creation of the site was assigned to a consortium of three different companies.”

   It’s one of those massive errors in strategy and execution that are the specialty of bureaucracies: trying to please everyone.

   The sad thing is we’re not even talking about the people who would use the service, who in this case are the prospective tourists. Trying to please every potential tourist would’ve still been a mistake, but at least we could’ve forgiven them for having their heart in the right place.

   No, unfortunately the people they are actually trying to please are all the internal stakeholders. And there are thousands of them, by the sounds of it.

   What a recipe for disaster.

3. No leadership
   There was “no single guide telling us where to go with this,” says Luca Palamara, former managing editor of www.italia.it.

   The thing about committees is they are actually not a bad thing if they are just used as a source of input. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with soliciting the input of smart people who may have different viewpoints.

   The problem is when committees take over, and start making decisions.

   Committee decision making is generally about lowest common denominator. No one gets offended, but no one is particularly happy either. The result is bland. If committee decisions were a meal they’d be porridge.

   Every successful, groundbreaking initiative needs a project champion. Someone who has the ultimate authority to make the calls, and make things happen. Or if they don’t have the authority, they make the calls anyway.

   If no one either seeks or is allowed to take accountability, then the natural result is:

4. Decision paralysis
   Simple disputes over whether to handle hotel bookings through the Web site went unresolved after a year and a half of discussion.

   Think about Steve Jobs for a moment. Now can you imagine him spending even a week thinking about this? A month? A year and a half? You’ve got to be joking. But in a bureaucracy, it’s entirely possible.

   Decision paralysis initially seems harmless, but left unchecked it eventually leads to stagnation.

5. Stagnation
   “The project was born already obsolete in technological, organizational and conceptual terms”

   Bureaucracy is the enemy of innovation for many reasons. Here’s one example: it introduces “drag” to everything.

   When things drag out (like say spending 18 months making a single decision which probably could’ve been made in a week) there are major, programme threatening impacts.

   This can include actual cost, from wasted time. Or it could be opportunity cost, like the marketplace changing in the meantime.

   But often the biggest loss is simply momentum. People get bored. Next steps become fuzzy, and lose urgenc. People forget what they were trying to achieve. Stakeholders change. Next thing you know, the project has cobwebs and everybody is on to a meeting about the next shiny thing.

   Ask any sports team or battlefield general — the most important weapon in your arsenal is momentum. The easiest way for a bureaucrat to kill something they don’t like is to simply to slow it down. Committees without leadership do it naturally.

€45 million for a tourism web portal.

For my digital agency brethren out there, let’s first have a moment of silence for all the incredible things we could’ve created for a fraction of that funding. Sigh.

Member-get-member marketing is potentially very powerful, but generally woefully under-exploited by brands. Providing an “email a friend” link is the lowest common denominator, but what about providing a reason for people to spend their time promoting you?

Amazon’s hugely successful Associates program gives it’s 900,000 participants worldwide a cut of the action worth up to 10% of every purchase made their your referral. Rival hosting companies Dreamhost and Bluehost’s affiliate programs have netted them thousands of advocates, posting on forums and hosting reviews across the web to spread the gospel of the service and earn some payola. And the age-old contest technique of giving extra entries for any friends you sign up has been given a twist for the digital age by the Orange Balloon Race.

However the best MGM initiative I’ve seen lately is World of Warcraft’s Recruit a Friend program.

Blizzard has sidestepped the slightly dirty business of paying cash to it’s members for spreading the word by providing relevant in-game bonuses instead. Besides the obvious free game time, more exciting is innovative ideas like the ability to level-up your friend and obtaining a unique zebra mount for your character. Anyone familiar with the game knows how prized the various mounts are, so it’s a really nice incentive.

I also really like that they further incentivize you to introduce your friend to the social aspect of the game and help them get started by offering triple experience bonus just for teaming up with them and slaying animated baddies together.

Blizzard has done an amazing job of designing the WoW game experience and is very in touch with it’s passionate user base, and so it’s no surprise it’s put the extra effort into designing an affiliate program that is both provides real unique value to members and is actually likely to work.

However, there’s no reason many brands on the web couldn’t do the same!

Have you seen any innovative branded MGM schemes recently? If so I’d love to hear from you in the comments or by email.