Tim Hart from Museum Victoria in New Zealand, described the successes and challenges of bringing three separate museums together online. They worked together with management to develop an online strategy that encouraged broad ownership and cooperation. One of their biggest problems had been that their IT staff had been, seemingly paradoxically, much too focused on the actual technology. Finally they realized that it was so hard to create excitement for new projects because the rest of the staff had trouble understanding what they were even talking about. Instead, it was much more successful to find measurable objectives and focus on what the technology would do and how it would help everyone do their jobs better. By engaging their coworkers through an “online planning group” and making the process completely transparent with an online schedule of progress that was available to all staff, they were able to create a sense of ownership for their project and, therefore, it was much more successful from everyone’s perspective.
Stephanie Pau from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art talked about the interpretive goals process that has been implemented at SFMOMA with a large degree of success. Instead of curators, educators, and technologists segregating themselves in the exhibit development process and creating distinct areas for themselves (“Now you’re viewing the exhibition”, “now you’re using the technology kiosks”, “now you’re in the education department”), SFMOMA facilitated a collaborative process in which all interested parties came together to develop exhibitions. The most important lesson from SFMOMA: more technology is not always better. Instead of worrying about volume, we should be focusing on using what technology we have in the most effective way.
I come out of this session reminded that, when it comes to technology, the question should be “why?” instead of “why not?”