The selection matrix

As a general rule of thumb, I have found that the following matrix graph demonstrates the sweet spot for open source, closed source, and the open territory.

Now I already hear a bunch of people thinking “yo whoa, hold up dude”.

So, I am not arrogant enough to be purporting that this matrix is true in each and every case – however, in my experience it is demonstrated to be true in 98% of cases. So let me explain the graph zones below and then in the following section, I will outline the basis for this representation.

Small business

The red zone is fairly representative of MOST small business:

• The complexity of requirements is low, many times they are looking to get a starter marketing website running to establish an online presence. They use social channel as their primary digital marketing tool, a template will do the job and the most complex requirement is a subscriber signup;
• IT resources are low, there is no internal tech staff – there’s a friend or a guy who someone knows that does websites;
• The website is not critical to their business, they don’t have high traffic levels, they are not an eCommerce business that is losing money when the site is down or they will not go out of business if their site is hacked & their subscriber list is compromised;
• Every part of the business is needed for budget – they are bootstrapped.

Now, what exactly is a small business? In my travels, I have seen this vary greatly; in Australia, we would say a business with less than 20 employees is small, however, in North America and Europe I would say the count is closer to 50 employees.

Medium-sized business

The yellow zone represents MOST medium-sized businesses:

• The complexity of requirements increases, the business needs to differentiate itself online from competitors and there are more business systems that require integration;
• While there may be IT resources, they are spread thin. They don’t have the time or skills to launch and maintain a website, its integrations, and its infrastructure – let alone constant enhancements;
• The website is now a critical part of the businesses marketing and positioning strategies. Downtime has significant impact on revenue and/or reputation and a leak of personal data would be newsworthy for all the wrong reasons;
• Budget for digital marketing has increased, however, not in line with its importance to the business and not to the extent to enable the employment of dedicated internal resources.

Again I would say that in Australia a medium-sized business is between 20 and 150 employees, however, overseas this is much larger, probably between 50 and 400 employees?

Large business

The green zone represents MOST large organizations:

• The complexity of requirements is large, there are generally several websites, perhaps several brands. The need for dynamic and personalized content is a key to success and there are a significant number of enterprise business systems that require real-time integration;
• Availability of IT resources can go two ways in large organizations. The advent of outsourcing and the ‘cloud’ has seen a considerable divestment of IT resources. However, in large organizations that truly understand the importance of digital – they often have a dedicated internal team of resources to develop and maintain their digital resources;
• Digital marketing has been critical for some time and downtime has a significant impact on revenue and reputation. A security scandal is front page news, results in inquiries and in people losing their jobs;
• The budget for well-justified, results-orientated digital marketing is unabated.

Large businesses in my calculation are those with more than 150 employees in Australia and more than 400 overseas. There is merit to an argument that there should be another category above ‘large’, perhaps Enterprise, however, most of the factors are very similar between those businesses with respect to content management. In my experience is it the procurement and risk mitigation policies that broaden in these businesses.