Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
—Putt’s Law
The above note might seem a little unnecessary, but you might be a surprised at the number of times digital projects get fast-tracked to this stage before any real hard thought. Before making any technical decisions — before even saying “I think we should start a blog” — make sure that you and your team:
Essentially, the steps already outlined in this primer. Some may go faster than others and experienced teams might be able to abbreviate one or more stages, but none can be skipped.
Also remember that during this process, all participants should strive to be agnostic when it comes to technology. The bits and bytes can be easily made to fit your strategy, whatever it might be. But if your strategy has to revolve around a given technical framework, your team will be forced to exclude otherwise promising options.
At this stage in the game, you will need to work with your team to bring in a technical lead for the project. As with your digital strategist, this is a crucial position and likely the one that you will understand the least. Follow the same general steps as those outlined above and you will get good results.
What’s hawt
If you are creating a digital extension to an entertainment property in 2010, you are probably going be considering one of the following:
- - Social networking frameworks
- - Crowdsourcing applications
- - Mobile content
- - Casual games
- - Third-party platforms like Facebook
- - Customized apps for the same
- - Social media extensions
- - Mechanisms for users to generate content
An interesting list, but by the time you are in a position to act on this primer and begin developing a digital extension, the world will have certainly moved on. Twitter might be so last week and cybernetic implants inserted into the cerebral cortex might be the next cool thing for the kids.
… you never know. It could happen.
The bottom line is that technology is going to change and keep changing under your feet. That is why it is crucial to evaluate and re-evaluate your goals and strategy from production to production and season to season. As long as these hold true, you will always be in a position to take advantage of the most appropriate technology.
Evaluating the tech
One thing to discuss with your technical lead is how he/she intends to orchestrate open source applications versus custom code versus managed services versus their own proprietary framework. There are pros and cons to each:
Open source code is readily available and is often supported by a community of developers who extend the code base for free. The disadvantage is that considerable custom work might be needed to make it suit your purpose. It is also not uncommon for systems built on open source code to be more vulnerable to hacking.
Custom code refers to an approach that calls for your tech team to build applications from the ground up. Danger, Will Robinson! Many tech leads are seduced by this approach but it’s risky and resource intensive. If you’re going to re-invent the wheel, make sure there is a damn good reason.
Managed services can often be a very useful part of your technical strategy. For a fee, care and feeding is provided by a third party technology company with the resources to build and sustain an enterprise level product. But these services will often not be able to satisfy all of the requirements of your digital strategy.
Proprietary code is a suite of applications already developed by your tech lead (or someone like him/her). It’s nice that they can bring such work to the table and it may give your project a running start… but make sure that the rights are clearly assigned to your production.
So, that’s some pretty heavy terminology and we are definitely skimming the treetops at 50 feet. This is why it is absolutely crucial that you hire the right people for these senior slots… a lot is riding on your trust in their decisions. But you’ve done this before with other aspects of your production. As always, when in doubt, trust your gut. It’s gotten you this far.
What you should expect from your tech team
As with your design team, the tech team working on your digital extension should be in a position to present a detailed technical design document to you and the other stakeholders. A word of warning: this document will probably not make a whole lot of sense to you, but it is important that you verify that they’ve done the work.
One thing to watch out for here are the costs associated with hardware, hosting and software licensing… especially those that might be recurring. These can add up and might weigh heavily on your budget. Be sure to review these with both your technical lead and digital strategist to ensure that you understand the implications.
Once again, this is almost certainly not your forte, so don’t be shy about calling in another trusted third party to review the finer details of the plan. Again, this audit shouldn’t take long and will go a long way to giving you peace of mind when the tech team encounters the inevitable landmines in developing the code that drives your digital extension.