
Introduction
After 6 months lobbying and planning, you finally have the “green light” to develop a new
web site. Your procurement team and IT team are keen to get started and the external
communications, sales and marketing guys are equally excited.

Now you need to find someone to work with – a partner that fits within you budget range and
who can really help – at least that’s what the references have said.

But how to find, evaluate, select and induct that company? Do you really know what you
need? Can you take informed decisions about where to cut corners to save on time and on
cost? Do you know what work your own internal team will be doing and how they should
interact with these new business partners?

The “Online” RFP Maturity Assessment tool has been created with exactly that in mind – to
deliver a quick and effective assessment of how ready you are to prepare and release a
tender or RFP document and to identify any need gaps that should be filled before trying to
find the right partner for your new Online presence.

What is “Online” RFP maturity?
Wikipedia defines online, RFP and maturity as follows:

• Online: Available over the Internet.
• RFP (request for Proposal): an invitation for suppliers, often through a bidding
process, to submit a proposal on a specific commodity or service.
• Maturity: The state of being mature, ready or ripe

Taken together, the term refers to an organisation or team’s readiness to issue a proposal
for services concerning internet capabilities.

The key issue here is “readiness”. Within the “online” context, readiness must include and
integrate the following:

• An understanding of the visitors to the web and to any existing internet pages that are
within your scope of concern. Who are they? What do they want to achieve? Where do
they come from?
• An understanding of the organisational stakeholders, what they hope to achieve with
the internet and how this integrates with internal processes and other channels
• An understanding of the essence of your brand – design elements; thought leadership
opportunities and requirements; brand advocacy opportunities; tone of voice.
• An understanding of your enterprise architecture – processes and how they will need
to adapt; organisational structure, roles and capabilities and how they will be
impacted; security constraints and opportunities, especially where web 2.0 or mobile
capabilities are involved; application and technical architectural integration,
especially where intranet or extranet capabilities are involved
• What does success look like? What KPIs and targets will be applied to the end result
and how will these contribute towards your corporate scorecard?

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In each of the above areas there are specific issue that can only be known by your own team
or teams, and which will have profound impact on any RFP response and subsequent selection
activities.

Why is it needed?
The RFP process provides a powerful tool to enable effective collaboration between
companies – however this effectiveness is fully dependent on correctly defining what is
required and then accurately evaluating the responses received. If the specification is
incomplete then the responses will be vague – making it difficult or impossible to evaluate
effectively. This “Online” RFP Maturity Assessment tool will allow you to be confident that
you have a complete set of requirements and will assist you in applying weightings to
evaluation scores when evaluating RFP responses.

How do I assess my organisation’s maturity?
Following are a series of open questions that can be used to consider your maturity across
each of the 5 topic areas mentioned above. These questions are the result of extensive
experience in major multi-national commercial companies. As a result they may need minor
re-interpretation when considered in a NFP/government or charity context, however the
principles remain constant.

To the left are the questions you should consider – to the right is the reasoning (why the
question is important). The last two columns are for you – does it apply in your case? Is it
addressed in the RFP?

1. Web visitors
Question Reasoning Applies? Addressed?
1.1 Do you have descriptions Forms the basis for the set of
of the types of people who requirements for the RFP.
visit or should visit you web These are the people who will
site? be using the new capability so
1.2 Do you have descriptions unless their needs are
of the scenarios or stories for integrated into the process the
each visitor type – ideally online presence will probably
resulting in some sort of “call fail. This grouping of people
to action” or activity that then allows for stories, or
they would do as the result of scenarios, to be built to reflect
a successful visit? expected behaviour. These
stories then drive the site
navigation or IA, as well as
related issues such as onsite
search. The “calls to action”
are critical as without these it
becomes quite difficult to
define and measure “success”.
1.3 Do you have statistics to Important to understand your
see where they have come current level of “organic
from – what offsite behaviour search” success and the

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has brought them to the site? effectiveness of ad-words. Also
important to assess the
usefulness of banner
placements and social media
activity that could promote
traffic to the site. If the RFP is
to extend also to operating the
Digital Channel then these are
key issues to include now.
1.4 Do you have a Important to integrate this if
visitor/customer there is such research as this
segmentation model that needs to inform persona
identifies different behaviours development and can allow for
and calls to action for targeted online campaign
different types of visitor? activity (behavioural targeting)
1.5 Do you have stories or Critical question, not just
scenarios to separate out because it forces consideration
anonymous visitors, registered of target customer groups that
visitors, key customer might be otherwise forgotten,
individuals, distributors and but also because it helps
retailers and internal identify scope of the online
employees? channel. For example, what is
the relationship between a
corporate internet, the intranet
and extranets?
1.6 Do you have demographic Important to help identify
profile information and localisation issues and also key
stories concerning translation needs. Translation,
geographical location, if required, can place an
language preference? enormous burden on a web
site’s operating costs so needs
to be considered carefully

2. Internal Stakeholders
2.1 Is there a clear Critical to ensure there will be
understanding of the business engagement and content flow
stakeholders and their from the parts of the business
expectations for the new web needed to develop the
presence? extended content network. A
2.2 Is there commitment from detailed content strategy needs
the content providers for web to be included as one of the
content? Especially Corporate development activities – and at
Communications, Marketing this stage it is important to get
communications, engagement from the sources
environmental and social of this material in order to
responsibility teams? ensure this activity is correctly
2.3 If there is an internal handled in the RFP.
Knowledge Management
initiative in place, is it
engaged with this activity and
with Thought Leadership

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activities?
2.4 Especially for intranet-
related RFPs, but also
partially with internet RFPs,
are the corporate values
integrated?
2.5 Is there commitment In addition to content flow the
from the process owners for other major stakeholder group
processes of related offline are those people with process
activities such as order responsibility for those process
fulfilment, query responses that will be impacted by the
etc? Especially, e-commerce web presence. This includes
and e-care also budget owners, P&L-
2.6 Is there a cross-channel responsibles for those parts of
strategy or at least the business impacted
understanding of the interplay
between online and other
channels, for example stores,
events, distributors?
2.7 In a global or multi- Local businesses have a
business unit organisation, is tendency to expect their own
there support and visitors to have unique needs
engagement across all that can only be served locally
business entities? and in a local language. This
needs to be explored and
aligned with corporate vision in
terms of communications flow
and global accountabilities.
Localisation and translation can
become extremely costly if not
managed carefully.
2.8 Is there legal support Internal legal teams may need
available to develop site external support for Online
terms, opt-in terms, and Channel legal issues
avoid any legal pitfalls?

3. Brand
3.1 Is there a digital style- The digital channel places
guide to guide and support use some unique opportunities for
of brand assets in digital the brand to come to life but
environments including use of this needs to be done in close
brand logo online, digital alignment with the brand
design elements, use of photos, team or can create a “show
movement etc.? stopper” later on. It may
3.2 Is there a brand guideline become apparent that some
to steer the tone of voice for brand development or brand
the brand online? This is also identity development needs to
important when allowing be done in parallel with the
visitors to engage with the web site, in order to optimise
brand, addressing guidelines the opportunities that can

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such as moderation, blogging emerge.
and thought-leadership.
3.3 Is there a programme or
policy concerning or supporting
brand advocacy, both internal
and external, that can or will
influence the development of
the web channel?

4. Enterprise architecture, IT
4.1 Is there a clear policy for IT security and the IT
Corporate Security that has implementation of corporate
been implemented into IT security policies need to be
security? How do those policies carefully considered.
support internal and external Development of a new digital
digital identity requirements? environment requires careful
How do those policies support review of corporate policy
information confidentiality especially concerning digital
issues that will emerge as the identity (single sign-on) and
web opens up and social media information classification. The
is taken into use? IT implementation of
Corporate Security
requirements can create
major problems if not handled
at an early stage in the
process
4.2 Are there existing Proprietary, global platforms
architectural decisions in place versus open source platforms
concerning content for web activity. This is a key
management and document issue that needs to be handled
management platforms as part of the RFP. The issue
here is structure and re-use
versus flexibility and
innovation.
4.3 Extranet capabilities and Especially if e-care and e-
back end application sales are in scope, or in cases
integration where there is likely to be
tight process integration – it is
important to understand the
architectural constraints and
opportunities from back-end
systems and to include these
within the scope of the RFP.
4.4 Metadata policies and This is a critical area for both
capabilities internal and external search
that is often overlooked at the
RFP phase but which requires
considerable effort if not
established early on – to
ensure people can find what

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they are after using search
4.5 Desktop/laptop image The browser and desktop
constraints office image can become
4.6 Mobile device support and major constraints or
use opportunities for intranet
development. If this RFP
extends to internal visitors
then this needs to be carefully
considered too. If the RFP
scope is primarily external this
is still needed, but mainly
concerning browser support,
screen specification supported
and use of related
technologies such as Adobe
flash or Adobe Air.

5. Corporate scorecard
5.1 Is there clear positioning of Development of an effective
the objectives for this RFP online channel can take many
within the Corporate strategy months to complete. It is
and top level KPIs? important to get top
5.2 Are there targets set for management focus and
the Online channel within the support for this by
overall business financial demonstrating the role of the
targets? digital world as an element of
5.3 Are there targets set for the business world and then
the Online channel within the reflect this into the RFP in
overall customer satisfaction terms of linked targets that
targets? can be used to develop
5.4 Has an overall business partnerships with vendors
case been established to
support this activity?

What can I do about it?
Once you have completed this assessment it will become immediately apparent whether the
RFP document is ready for submission or not. If there are open issues identified here it could
indicate the need for some sort of Digital Strategy development work or it could just indicate
a need for some fine-tuning of the RFP document itself.

Typically, issues involving stakeholder buy-in or visitor understanding indicate the need for
some strategy work – as these issues impact on the basic scope of the RFP, which could
compromise the entire process if not managed.

This list is a brief description of some of the strategic development activities available from
Amberbuzz Consulting Oy that you could consider in order to address any issues you identify
from this RFP maturity assessment.
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• Review of the current online Operating model including a process review, SWOT
analysis, stakeholder survey analysis
• Review of your current web visitors, profiling, expectations, experience
• Review of your Competitor web sites as a basis to assess your own web presence
Development of a Digital Channel Vision and target state
• Development of the business case for new Digital Channel capability
• Brand development online>site design and template creation
• Development of personae and scenarios to form the basis for the web site structure,
content and capability
• Development of a new Digital Channel operating model (core/context analysis)
• Enterprise architecture high level requirements
• Development of Online process (call to action processes, content development and
launch process, content translation process, requirements handling process
• Content strategy development including search strategy
• Information architecture
• KPI development

About Amberbuzz Consulting Oy
I am a small, independent consultant, based in Helsinki, Finland. I specialise in Digital
Channel Strategy development and execution activities including the activities described
above.

I have two primary modes of operations:

1. I will work directly with you and your company to provide independent and objective
strategic services, tailored to your specific needs
2. I will work through Digital Media Agencies, either our own or as selected by our
clients, to augment the agency skills with the necessary consulting (strategic and
facilitation capabilities).

For more information please contact me, Graham Honeywill at graham@amberbuzz.fi.

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