Module 4 Website Review

The website enTarga.com is a website offering consultancy services for the strategic planning for the business of the future. This website is owned by ROSS A. WIRTH who is acclaimed professional and academician. This website offers consultancy services for the change management within any organization of any size. It works “to support the development of internal expertise to develop a culture that is conducive to organizational learning and change processes. (enTarga.com)”
Website Review:
This website is excellent in its content and very simple to use and maintain. The home page has clearly defined sections under name Organisational Change, Strategic Planning, HR Planning, Marketing Planning and organisational complexity. The mission of the website as appeared on the home page is as follows:

“Helping organizations establish change processes that align with their unique culture and business needs – enabling the adaptive business of the future.  Harnessing the power of organizational learning and self-leadership for emergent organizational change with strategic visioning providing the collective purpose.  Turning theory into practice; working today to build the organization of the future.  This is our mission.”
It offers white papers and other source materials for the users. These materials are well organized and written. The website offers interactivity through Yahoo Groups. There are different Yahoo Groups made for different topics and people can interact, discuss and solve there issues.
These groups are active and involvement of Ross Writ makes it interesting and interactive. These groups have no national, academic or industrial boundaries. Anyone who is interested in the relevant topic can register himself and become member of the group. The process is simple and has better chances of attracting people of like minds.
As defined on the website enTarga has its unique meaning. It is as follows:
En- to make; cause to be made to resemble.
Targa- A type of shield carried on the forearm for protection, related to target
“Look and feel” and apparent target audience
The look and feel of the website is very simple, rather below average, but the content of website makes it much better than any other website with excellent look and no content. However if more efforts are done towards improving the look of website, it will attract more audience. Search Engine optimization and similar strategies will also help in increasing popularity of the website. So far it seems to be attracting people on the word of mouth basis.
This website provides me loads of information without any requirement of being member or paying anything. Apart from this the permission to use the material published on the website and acknowledging the author (Ross Writ) is another attractive feature. The site does not have any commercial feel in it; rather it looks as a pure academic website.
On the Organisational Change page ChangeAgent yahoo group is available for the viewers to participate in the relevant discussions. This webpage introduces the viewer to the organisational change process. It provides information on the change agents, resistance to change, points of leverage and organisation culture with respect to change. It also offers another link to the resources of organisational change. The resources available are of free of cost.
Strategic Planning webpage provides information on the Strategic planning process in any organisation. It gives information on benefits, pitfalls, implementation problems and key influencing factors as separate web links. It provides information on the Steps in the strategic planning process, business performance management and offers other planning resources on the website as different links. The yahoo group for this section is OrgComplexity.
The third web link is HR Planning. Here viewer gets information on Human resource issues, employee engagement, and strategic readiness of the organisation, Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and resources for human resource planning. This also has a yahoo group named ChangeAgent as its discussion list.
Marketing Planning provides information on customer analysis, marketing strategy questions, planning resources on the internet, associated marketing topics like Integrated marketing communications, relationship marketing, brand marketing topics on the internet, creating a brand strategy and development guidelines for internet marketing. The yahoo discussion group for the website is ChangeAgent.
Organisational Complexity provides information on organisational complexity and related issues. The yahoo discussion group for the same is OrgComplexity.
Apart from the above mentioned main categories of strategy information, it also has Knowledge Management & Organizational Learning as a separate webpage that provides information on knowledge management, barriers, Requirements for spreading a best practice across the organization, organisational learning and other resources.
The yahoo groups are active and have different members fro across the world. The groups initiate different topics for discussions. Anytime any member joins a new group receives a welcome.doc which contains welcome message and the current topic of discussion and requests the new member to introduce himself to the group. Once the member posts his message the message is moderated in the prohibition period. This is done in order to control spamming and spammers. Once the new member proves his authenticity, he participates in the group discussion and information sharing without any restrictions.
Conclusion
It will not be appropriate to criticise this website with such comprehensive and well written content for the looks and feel. But it will be an excellent website if some efforts are done to improve its look. Being a management professional I find it really useful for my continuous education and improvement and helpful in getting support in the form of suggestions in the yahoo groups. For me the attractiveness of this website is the active yahoo groups. Any new article published on the website will be notified in the yahoo groups.
This will keep the members informed. If interested, members can visit the website for reading the article free of cost. This makes the website interactive and keeps the users engage in the activities. There are various issues on the day to day problems of business world. Many a time individuals do not get any kind of platform or experienced people to guide them. The information available on the website deals with various issues that can help individuals to handle particular situations and take appropriate actions. This attractiveness is unique selling proposition for the website and this will attract me to go back to the website again and again.
Reference:
Lisa Hoecklin. (1995).Managing Cultural Differences: Strategies for Competitive Advantage. Wokingham:Addison-Wesley Publisher Ltd.
Levitt, T. (1983), The Marketing imagination, New York, The Free Press
Möller, K. and Wilson, D. (1995), Business Marketing: An Interaction and Network Perspective. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell.