I’m revisiting an earnest and mercifully short talk I gave at UK Museums on the Web last year. It was sandwiched between two inspiring visions of digital strategy for museums and galleries, delivered by John Stack of Tate and Andrew Lewis of the V&A. Both of these gentlemen have had the dubious honour of being my line manager in the past 6 months.

This piece is concerned with being a functional digital professional whilst dealing with problematic technologies in complex organisations.

Technological Problems

Technology will always reflect a business’s internal dysfunction. More succinctly, you get the CMS you deserve.

Technologists are often somewhere down the chain of command and may be last to hear of the exciting digital component of a project that has been promised to a funding body. Such things can be skewered into the side of an in-house development team’s workflow, derailing the forward momentum of other projects. Projects start to slip.

Not to worry, we just make the team bigger. If we want to lay more bricks in the same period of time, we simply need more bricklayers. On software projects, this approach falls foul of the Mythical Man Month principle, which Joel Spolsky summarises here as “when you add more programmers to a late project, it gets even later”. This is because you increase the number of communication paths—or potential confusion paths (my words). The implication here is that rapid communication and understanding within a project team is a greater bellwether of success than the number of warm bodies you have typing code.

Human Responses

Avoiding scenarios like the one above is a concern for all digital practitioners. It also requires organisational governance and a wider understanding of the complexities of technological work. You wouldn’t suddenly ask a set of building contractors to refurbish a museum’s lavatories when the same team was 75% of the way through transforming your flagship gallery.

Unfortunately for us technologists (designers, programmers, producers), it may be futile to wait for a venerable institution to change around us and “get it”. If you’re not working at a trendy start-up, you probably won’t get a freezer full of Ben and Jerry’s. We need to make our case strongly whilst meeting non-technical colleagues on common ground as ambassadors for our profession.

A tweet from the Godfather of the Web caught my eye the other day. He was quoting Mike Monteiro at An Event Apart.

Jeffrey Zeldman ‏@zeldman 15h “Eye rolling is not a design skill. If you act like a disenfranchised creative, you’ll be treated like one.” @Mike_FTW #aeasea

Here, you can substitute “programming” for “design”, “techie” for “creative” and the logic stands. We may not be rewarded with ice cream but we work with the most amazing content on Earth. If we appear credible to our internal audiences, we stand a better chance of serving an audience of millions.

Shadow Digital

Traditionally, IT departments have become regarded as a bottleneck in big institutions leading to shadow IT springing up across teams and finally culminating in half-a-dozen isolated CRMs.

Now, institutions are also finding “web teams” undersized and overworked. This, in turn, results in shadow digital media. Formerly, one-off exhibition microsites and Flash apps were the prime examples of this umbrage.

Throw in the fact that—around the turn of the decade—many of us embarked upon colossal web redesigns/redevelopments. We put into practice what we’d belatedly learned from that Web 2.0 thing. For those of you too young to remember, “Web 2.0” means “tagging, AJAX and rounded corners”. Somewhere between 18 months and 3 years later, web teams emerged blinking into the light with an (excellent) 960px wide web site to discover that mobile had happened.

Now, the world of mobile/tablet native apps has captured the imagination of every department in your institution. Five-figure pots of money are secured from funders or project budgets and converted into these apps with great fanfare.

As a developer, I’m relatively relaxed about these apps. They work as a marketing tool—like a big glow-in-the-dark, touchy, swipey advertisement. So far, very few have landed on my desk as a maintenance task, which is a blessing. Up to now, apps have been largely “tactical” and fall outside the core digital strategy.

Core competencies

Avoiding distraction, in-house teams can focus on the core digital offering of the museum. There are some aspects of digital that require passionate long-term nurture and engagement. Consider online collections, search, information architecture and community management. External expertise is always welcome but I remember Seb Chan coming to the UK a few years ago and advising us, “don’t outsource ideas”. This echoes another piece of Spolsky wisdom:

If it’s a core business function – do it yourself, no matter what.

That’s how I’ll end this screed and begin this financial year.

Set in Markdown and 12pt Menlo Regular.