The Effective CIO

In my previous post, I complained about the effort needed to join a new social networking service.  It seems that every service wants to create an extensive profile and friend network to provide a foundation for their core feature.  The simple act of joining becomes an overwhelming exercise in typing.

The problem is that every social site wants to be all things to all people.  As a result, they wind up doing most of those things poorly.

Consider LinkedIn.  The grand-daddy of professional networking sites, LinkedIn is the gold standard for capturing your professional resume.  I have yet to find any site that does a better job of collecting, categorizing, and managing my career history.  If you aren’t on LinkedIn, you don’t exist in most professional circles.

You’d think that LinkedIn would be happy to be the very best in managing my professional profile.  Instead, LinkedIn has spent a lot of time to create second-rate messaging, status, collaboration, and search capabilities.  Why? Does anyone really prefer to manage their email in LinkedIn, as opposed to their primary email platform?  Why does LinkedIn send me an email to tell me I have a message in LinkedIn, instead of just delivering the message?  LinkedIn does one thing well; please stick to it!

Plaxo is the best site I’ve found for managing my contact list.  It seamlessly backs up my contacts, syncs them to various other systems, and manages role-based security among more than a thousand people in my address book.  Why, then, does it offer second-rate blogging and status updates?  Why does it try to stream content from other services into its Pulse service?  Plaxo does one thing extremely well; please stick to it!

I could go on and on.  Brightkite is the best site around for managing real-time location information, yet insists that you build a completely different set of friends within their service.  TripIt does a great job managing travel itineraries but also wants its own set of friends and contacts.  Facebook is the standard for context-rich real-time personal status, but also has goofy internal email and second-rate contact lists.  Flickr is one of the best places to manage your photos, but has yet another collection of friends and favorites to manage.

Twitter, to its credit, sticks to its core function of low-bandwidth real-time information; I hope they won’t be distracted by the need to add some second-rate services to “more fully engage their customers.”  We don’t want engagement, we want effective simplicity.

What service do you provide?  Is it your primary focus?  Are you distracted by trying to expand into areas that others already handle more effectively?  It is easy to fall into this trap as we work to serve our customers as best we can.  There is nothing wrong with trying to provide more service, but it can be a waste of resources to build things which distract us, annoy our customers, and ultimately reduce what we’re really trying to accomplish.

Focus on your core business. Consider additional services carefully before expanding. Sometimes, you deliver the best service by providing just one service, better than anyone else in the world.