Tan Kin Lian's Blog: Develop a second website

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Develop a second website

Comment posted in my blog
Dear Mr. Tan
Do you really expect the government agency or large company to abandon its current website, where they spend many millions of dollars and thousand of hours of development and training staff, and go for your prototype website?
Are you sure that your website prototye is robust and free of bugs? Can the organisation take the risk?

REPLY
I suggest the government agency or business organisation create a second website, which is linked to their current website by a label such as "Click here to view an alternative, simple website". This will provide an alternative for the public to test. The organisation can measure the number of transactions on the current and new website for 6 to 12 months.

The cost of developing a second website based on my proposed prottype is small, just a few thousand dollars, instead of a few hundred thousand dollars.
If the second website is popular and more than 50% of the transactions have moved over to the second website, the organisation can decide on the time needed to remove the current webiste (which is developed on the spider web concept). If the second website is not popular, it can be also removed in 6 to 12 months time, just by removing the link.

Tan Kin Lian

9 comments:

Anonymous said...: We can take "risk" with YOG by increasing the original budget by 300% to make it a success.
+ Because we want to impress foreigners
+ foreigners have a choice of international venues

But TKL's new and improved website is NOT a risk worth taking because;
+ Only Singaporeans will benefit from a better website
+ So why should anybody care?

In business, we call this a "captive customer market" situation.
- the business strategy in such situations is to reduce the cost-to-serve
- NOT to increase risk and cost (time, money, people) by improving the customer experience

Other examples include;
- Orchard Road floods
- SMRT over-crowding
- Teach Less, Learn More
- filial piety
- welfare for needy families
- large classroom sizes for average students; July 11, 2010 10:48 AM
Tan Kin Lian said...: Reply to 10:48 am
Let us take a positive attitude and encourage our government and business organisations to develop the second website.

If you find the prototype to be easier to search for information and application forms, you can pass the feedback to the organisation. If more people make this request, they may be willing to give it a try.

It will improve their productivity, reduce cost and provide a better quality of service to the public and their customrs.

It will be win-win-win.; July 11, 2010 10:57 AM
hongjun said...: Unless someone fork out own money to develop a second website, otherwise, it is going to be unachievable. We cannot expect the government to launch tenders to revamp their website since many are quite new actually.; July 11, 2010 11:40 AM
Tan Kin Lian said...: Hi Hon Chun

The technology cost of the second website is quite low, based on the prototpye. Just a few thousand dollars and not hundred of thousands.

A larger cost comes from creating the PDF of the various information, but it should also be quite modest (as most organisations probably have them in documents that can be easily converted to PDF.

The potential savings in productivity should be tremendous for the organisation and the public.; July 11, 2010 12:18 PM
Anonymous said...: Dear Mr Tan
I admire your equanimity and will give your advice on "win-win-win" a try.

You remind me of the classic Singaporean leaders of the past. People who are sound in both strategies and tactical execution.

I'd sleep a lot better with you at the Education Ministry.

For your consideration, may I refer you to "The Battle of Wu Zhang Plains" from the novel Romance of the 3 Kingdoms.
- The final battle between Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi.

SOURCE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sima_Yi

Sima Yi was a brilliant general and strategist in his own right. But he was never as good as Zhuge Liang.

But in the Battle of Wu Zhang Plains, Sima Yi brilliantly employed the strategy "In order to win, first you put yourself into a position where you cannot lose".
+ it was also consistent with Sun Tze's Art of War advice.
+ the acme of skill is to win the war without fighting a battle; July 11, 2010 12:33 PM
Anonymous said...: Nowadays, Mr Tan's proposal of prototyping or parallel-running an alternative website is both technically easy and relatively cheap. The only problem is the red tape, the bureaucracy, the stuck-in-stone mentality, the kiasu kiasee mindset of large organisations especially govt and GLCs.

Mr Tan's model can even be done as a Software-As-A-Service model, or as cloud-computing --- The target company can just pay a monthly service fee to Mr Tan. No need to increase your servers, storage space, or increase maintenance, or man-hours, or testing etc. Like what is said, maybe a 6-mth contract to try it out.; July 11, 2010 4:00 PM
Anonymous said...: The person who wrote the note to Mr Tan shows the type of attitude we Singaporeans have developed, "cannot be done attitude",

Mr Tan is from the Mr Goh Keng Swee era, the "can do spirit".

Shame on you to the person who wrote the note to Mr Tan, such negative spirit!; July 12, 2010 12:27 AM
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