Old-ish Content Warning!
Simon and Carolyn’s excellent presentation on digital transformation has me thinking about where (and how) digital activities would ideally be integrated into a museum, and I keep thinking about how much easier it would be to do this if I knew what our product was. Like, as an art museum, what is the main thing that we make? It’s not the collections; it’s not probably even the objects. Is it the scholarship? The interpretation? I don’t know.
If I did know, however, I would quickly figure out how the museum should be structured to deliver services in support of that product (or those products, I guess). I almost envy the relative simplicity of a retail organization in this sense. In retail, anything that doesn’t support increased sales (or better customer service, or whatever) is cut. I think the digital services (and non-digital services, for that matter) that we provide would be easier to define if we had that kind of clarity around our central product.