Contented Management

Want to improve your project? Change its name

Street sign - Casa di Giulietta - covered in stickers and graffiti

Let me start by saying this is a purely anecdotal post. But what is lacks in statistical evidence it makes up for in my own eyewitness accounts of projects doomed to fail. I’m sure you’ll have seen this too.

Time and time again I’ve seen institutions running projects that will significanly affect their day-to-day business, but they clearly haven’t thought about what to call them. They’ve invested in governance processes, supporting tools, getting the right people involved, but not the name of the project.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet knew nothing about project management. If she’d been better at planning she wouldn’t have been so star-crossed.

The name of the project is the thing that’s most readily communicated to the project team and stakeholders. It’s the daily reminder of the work that they’re doing and the benefits that they’re expecting. And yet the name we give a project typically detracts from its core values, with these examples as the most typical culprits:

The new technology

Why oh why have you called this project the “Social Media Marketing project”? Or the “CMS upgrade”? Or the “Intranet replacement”? What useful information could that possibly convey?

Does everyone involved in the project – from the people who’ll use the system to those who have to approve its budget – actually understand what that technology’s supposed to do? Does it really give all the stakeholders a good idea of project scope?
Why are you upgrading? Surely it’s not just so that you can say you’ve the latest version running… or is your organisation full of Apple fanbois? You upgrade because you’re missing key functionality, or because the existing system is underperforming, so at the very least call it a content strategy project which has an upgrade component to it.
And if you’re replacing a system, you’re actually compounding those two issues: do people understand what you’re getting rid of and why, and aren’t you replacing it with something that does a lot more? So it’s not a replacement, it’s a new strategic platform which enables the business to function more effectively. You’re not just throwing a wad of cash at a technology supplier in order to end up with exactly what you had before.

Naming a project after the technology is missing the whole point about what technology is. It’s an enabler, not an end solution. If your organisation thinks that by updating its technology it will solve its problems, you know that you’ll never meet your business goals.

The website redesign

I’m at a loss as to know where to begin with website redesign projects. As with new technology projects, the redesign isn’t an end in itself unless it’s some pure vanity project. The redesign is about improving how your audience achieves its tasks and that usually necessitates people who create content finding new ways to manage it, as well as identification of business objectives, target markets, persona, user experience testing, information architecture and so forth.

But calling a project a website redesign masks an endemic issue. It sets the expectation that once the project is complete, they’ll be no more work to do. Website redesign isn’t a project. It doesn’t have a start and an end. It’s a process of continuous improvement where your web team analyses audience interactions, responds to them and adjusts the website to improve how your organisation communicates with its customers online. If you turn it into a project, you’re effectively saying that you’re not going to fix what you know to be wrong until the project goes live, and that when it goes live you just need to sit back and measure the benefits. That approach is anathema to everything the web stands for: innovation, engagement, simplicity.

Clearly there will always be website projects that need to be run as projects, not least because corporate governance requires it. But they’re not redesigns. They’re projects to improve user experience, or to update a corporate brand, or to plan out a content strategy. Redesigns are fails before you even pass Go.

The acronym or buzzword

Some project management offices think they’re cool. That’s the only explanation that I can find for organisations that give their projects codenames or buzzwords or acronyms.

And guess what: project management offices aren’t cool.

I’ve worked with at least three organisations that called a project Prism. What for? None of them were about optics. It’s just someone thought it was a good idea to call them something cryptic. I’m pretty sure one was an intranet, another was a finance system but I really can’t remember what the third was… document management, perhaps?

The only thing that I can commend about those projects is that they didn’t fally into one of the first two traps. But they didn’t address the issues either. What on earth is project Prism, or project Orange or project Stan all about? Is it something that’s deliberately meant to exclude the majority of employees? Because that’s what it looks like, and it’s hardly going to get stakeholder buy-in if that’s the case.

Buzzword projects are doomed because they isolate the people working on them from the rest of the organisation and – worse still – they give the impression that actually the people working on them don’t really know what the project is about. I’ve seen many a buzzword project (though not the prism ones) being strategic projects where the organisation felt it had to do something, but it wasn’t exactly clear what that something was, and didn’t want other people to know about it until they’d figured that out so they could deliver the right message.

But they’d already delivered the wrong message. That no matter how competent the project team, they simply didn’t have a clue.

Choosing the right name

So if you can’t name the project after its core technology and you can’t call it a redesign and you can’t call it something you thought was cool, what can you call it?

Call it something relevant.

I realise that’s a boring answer, but you know what, every project you ever work should have a business objective. Call it the project content strategy improvement or expenses streamlining or improving our brand reach.

The name of your project should make transparent to all the stakeholders why you’re doing the project in the first place and keep the team focussed on what it is that they’re meant to achieve. Just because developers have done their bit doesn’t mean that the project will be a success.

So if your project is failing and you’re looking for a quick turnaround that might improve it, try renaming it according to where the team needs to focus. You might just avoid tragedy and a plague o’ both your houses.

Philippe Parker on Adoption, psychology | 17 February 2012 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Keeping people buying content

This is the fifth of five posts about saleable content management.

A hand holding an apple

In our previous post, we looked at how content is being produced for sale in multiple formats, but in this post we’re going to look at how people then buy it.

It’s worth noting that many new business models aren’t based on people buying content in the traditional sense of taking it away and owning it. Rather than always having the content, you’re effectively buying access to it for a set period of time. This is true of music over Spotify and its various competitors, the vast majority of newspaper paywalls, satellite and cable TV subscriptions and Kindle lending through Amazon in the US. Effectively we’re leasing content rather than buying it, as we don’t think it really retains its value.

One effect of this leasing is to create something of a distribution oligopoly as a few key providers try to corner the market for selling or leasing content produced by others. This creates a serious problem for content producers: the smaller ones can’t afford to fight back by establishing credible director to consumer channels, while the larger ones often don’t have a strong enough brand to compete. That last point is serious: do you know whether the book you’re reading is part of Hachette, or whether the music you’re listening to or the movie you’ll watch this evening were produced by Time Warner? For music, books and film the brand is based on the product, the author or the star, not the publisher.

I believe that a second effect of this oligopoly is to encourage piracy. If distribution appears limited and pricing controlled – whether by the publisher or distributor – people are going to look elsewhere to get hold of content. And that is compounded by the lack of brand loyalty. Now, I’m not going to comment at all on the SOPA / PIPA issue, as many more knowledgeable people have written about this already and I’m based in the UK anyway. But people who create content for sale really do need to consider a few key issues if they want people to buy it rather than steal it.

One person’s piracy is another person’s viral. Susan Boyle sold over 700,000 copies of her first album in the US largely due to a clip of her on YouTube. It was in breach of copyright but of massive benefit to SYCO music. Content producers need to “stop treating the customers as users, and start treating them as fans”, as Rovio CEO Mikael Hed puts it.

Fundamentally, however, “Companies don’t rise and fall due to piracy, but they do based on the quality of the products they release.”. If you want to sell your content, you need to create good quality content in the first place. This means finding the best creatives, acquiring rights based on all the formats you’re going to deliver to and developing brand loyalty that extends beyond a single title or artist.

Content producers need to convince us that they frequently find music, TV or books that interest and adhere to that fundamental tenet of sales: it’s easier to farm repeat business than hunt for new business. But they also need to keep their content separate from its presentation so we return to buy it in whatever format happens to suit us. That is how to manage saleable content.

Philippe Parker on saleable-content | 15 February 2012 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Producing multi-presentational content

This is the fourth of five posts about saleable content management.

Guillotine

Our previous post looked at how content can depreciate in value.

If content is king, the guillotine is being sharpened. Those publishers and producers who have failed to embrace the multi-channel model are already in the tumbrils.

One key to this model (and I’m grateful to Edward Smith for the term) is asset liquidity. If you can create your format so that it’s suitable for consumption on multiple devices, you can keep on selling your content even if one delivery stream’s market dries up. That’s where content management comes in. Publishers who are stuck with antiquated production processes are going to struggle to produce multi-format content efficiently and yet this is something that the content management industry has been used to doing for many years. Whether this is providing templates for print, web and mobile, or encoding video, or producing multiple image formats, the technology is established and proven. And yet a number of challenges to the multi-channel approach still remain.

Firstly, there are presentational challenges. While text on a web page and typically on eBook readers is “flowable” – unconstrained by the area it’s displayed in – it’s fixed in print and in some other devices, particularly when you have text presented with images. So a news article could appear on a single long web page or be in a short column on the front page of a newspaper and then continued on a separate page. This creates issues during the production process because editors need to understand where those breaks will appear. Moreover, on reading devices where text size can be changed by each individual user, it’s practically impossible to define where breaks might appear for that device. This is far from limited to text: if you can zoom images, or you want to produce media content for devices with different screen sizes and resolutions, you’ll encounter similar problems of trying to deliver an optimal experience for your entire target audience.

Secondly, publishing to multi-function devices increases this problem of the optimal experience, with the most obvious example being the iPad. Neglecting iPad delivery is tantamount to commercial suicide these days, as lean-back media experiences a resurgence. Unlike a Kindle, the iPad screen is backlit, making extended text reading tiring. While the screen on an iPad is good, it’s not going to be better than watching programmes or movies on a good television screen. And if you don’t want to listen to music through the iPad’s speaker – and why would you? – it’s a lot less portable than most other music players. I realise that there are ways around most of these issues that are available on the market, if not widespread. But for people who want to get through to the iPad market, this also means accepting a degree of compromise in how their content is consumed.

Which brings me to the third challenge: difference in consumption habits and the uncertainty that these cause. People who produce content for sale don’t actually have that much say in the determining which format is the most popular. Book publishers want to be a lot less dependent on the Kindle than they currently are, while newspapers – notably in Italy – are at significant risk of shutting down as people move away from printed paper. We’ve already seen in our previous posts how people simply don’t buy CDs any more and it’s only a matter of time before DVD sales are similarly affected.

If you invest a lot into producing content for multiple formats, you also have to accept that not all those formats will exist forever and you’ll have to take a financial hit if you spread too thin or gamble on the wrong one.

Producers and publishers are going to need to find tools which enable them to automate multi-format production and that are flexible enough to accommodate new formats as they emerge. And it’s not just new formats; it’s new content consumption channels too. The way we choose to buy our content is changing along with the devices that we use, as we’ll consider in the next post.

Philippe Parker on saleable-content | 14 February 2012 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

The depreciation of saleable content

This is the third in a series of five posts about saleable content management.

Weathered metal shed

Our previous post paints an uncertain picture for traditional media. New delivery channels imply new sales channels and new commercial models.

One of the biggest questions that commercial providers need to consider is whether their content is an asset. And by asset, I absolutely do not mean this in the sense of how the content should be managed. I mean this in the sense of whether that content retains its value or depreciates over time.

Consider reference materials: an encyclopaedia for example. One of the reasons why Wikipedia does so well is because it’s always up to date. You can pretty much guarantee that when a news story breaks, someone will update a relevant Wikipedia page about it that day. I’m not sure when I’m going to publish this post, let alone when you’re actually going to read it, so just try it now. Go to a major news site, find the top personality or place involved in that news and look them up on Wikipedia. Does the entry refer the news story? How can your encyclopaedia at home possibly keep up?

Of course, the massive speed advantage of multi-contributor online reference material has to be weighed against the academic rigour that you get through content that takes longer to publish and which needs to charge for that expertise. That’s the approach the Guardian newspaper is looking to adopt in its fight against more rapid news media. In a recent email the editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger tells subscribers:

But we’re well aware that, increasingly, you tell us that what you want from the printed newspaper changes as you seek out, or absorb, breaking news from the web, mobile, TV and radio. Half of you now read the paper in the evening, by which time you want more pieces that explain events and contextualise them.

News is – as we’ve seen from the figures provided in the previous post – hugely important to people. But currently people don’t need to see it as an asset because the supply seemingly outstrips the demand. (I’m slightly cautious about that supply because we all live in countries where some of the news sources – whether free or paid for – can be less than reliable.) So for saleable content to be an asset and retain its value, it both needs to be hard to get hold of and offer some degree of added value.

Ross Dawson wrote a post that touches on different ways of creating that added value and there are a few examples I wanted to touch on:

If you turn the focus away from real-time consumption (as the Guardian intends to), you can extend content’s “use by” date and therefore increase how long it holds its value, as Louis Gray explains.
The New York Times is trying to improve engagement with its content, by adding trusted commenting.
Faber’s chief executive has a manifesto for change for the book industry.
The movie industry (what we in the UK used to call “film” but is clearly a redundant term given this discussion) has developed the UltraViolet licensing system so that customers can “buy once, play anywhere”.
Amazon have a similar approach with their Kindle so that digital books can be read on a variety of platforms from a single purchase.

How content producers exploit the multi-channel model is going to be key to their success. That’s what we’re going to look at next.

Philippe Parker on saleable-content | 13 February 2012 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Selling content on different media

This is the second of five posts about saleable content management.

A kindle and an iPad

Following on from the previous post about the need to separate commercial content from its delivery medium, let’s consider how various industries have been addressing this issue.

The most obvious place to start is with music, where traditional physical media has all but disappeared. Not only are people not buying physical media, they’re not buying what was previously the most saleable format (albums) and sometimes not buying music at all. Putting piracy to one side for the moment, music is effectively leased rather than bought through services like Spotify. This is a feature I’ll return to at a later stage.

Newspapers and magazines are undergoing a similar transformation, but struggling to find appropriate business models. Out of people in the UK who get their news online, fewer than 1 in 25 pay for that service, despite the millions who visit newspaper websites like the Mail (17.2 million unique visitors from Europe in June 2011) and the Guardian (13.5 million) (Ofcom report [pdf, 2.05MB] page 213, section 5.3.7).

Television is changing radically and rapidly. Over a quarter of the UK web population used the internet to watch TV programmes on a weekly basis even though only 7% have a TV that’s actually connected to the internet (Ofcom report, page 7). This has prompted Sky to go beyond its investment in TV programmes to any device (through Sky Go) to TV over the web as well as via satellite, which has until now been its core business. Both Google and Apple meanwhile are preparing their imminent and doubtless disruptive incursions into the television market.

Which brings us to the similarly turbulent world of book publishing. While Amazon posted extraordinary figures (the 1.3 million eReaders bought in the UK over Christmas represents 1 person in 40 receiving one), the printed book industry is suffering: there are now no major bookstore chains in Australia, while major retailers in the UK and US are struggling. Meanwhile Apple is trying to corner the production (and to some extent vet the publication) of iBooks and where Amazon can’t encourage authors to bypass traditional publishers through its self-publishing model it simply acquires the publisher instead.

Every form of saleable media is in a state of flux. If publishers are going to move forward, they’re going to need to address some fundamentals which we’ll consider in our next post.

Philippe Parker on saleable-content | 10 February 2012 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

How content management failed saleable content

This will be the first in a series of five posts about saleable content management.

A statue of a man clasping his face

This industry has spent years thinking about how to govern content, rather than about how to really make the most of it. We know the function of the content but we don’t know its value. Fundamentally, content – whether text, images, audio or video – would fall into these categories:

records, which either need to be retained or deleted;
processable content, which typically needs to be scanned or validated automatically;
collaborative content, such as co-authored or peer-reviewed internal documents;
public information, typically made available on websites but also in print brochures;
user-generated content, created by people outside the organisation, whether through facilities made available to them by the organisation (website comments) or through external services (social media, e.g. Facebook, Twitter).

These functions carry some implicit value which a business analyst might define on a project-by-project basis. But content often has an explicit value: it’s created for sale.

Now I – and I think much of the content management industry – didn’t think too hard about this saleable content for quite some time. But then again, nor did the industries that own it.

While those of us who work in content management focussed on classification, permissions and workflow, publishers and producers thought instead about TV programmes and albums, hardbacks and newspaper supplements. The fundamental separation of presentation from content was not well understood; as Paul Graham already related in 2009:

Consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either… Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant.

Perhaps the distinction was too theoretical to be worthwhile. Now, however, it’s essential for anyone who hopes to make money from the content they create: you have to be able to exploit multiple delivery channels, both to reach a broader market and to survive the turbulent changes in how people buy and consume their content today.

We’ll consider these changes in the next post.

Philippe Parker on saleable-content | 9 February 2012 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Project hell is others – not other people

Devilish ducks

L’enfer, Jean-Paul Sartre tells us, c’est les autres. This is so commonly and simplistically mistranslated as “hell is other people” that it’s become something of a fallacy. Hell for Sartre is not other people; it’s others. It’s about our faulty relationship with others and most particularly our psychological other, our id: the basic, instinctual drives that motivate us to seek out pleasure or avoid pain.

Those instinctual drives are very much at the heart of every project. A desire to move the organisation forward, to mitigate against business risks and seize profitable opportunities. And this desire underpins the project team, gives it a sense of togetherness, a common purpose. FTW! WOOT!

But this also means the team can just pile into a project without thinking it through, particularly if it’s being driven by someone with seniority in the organisation. The JFDI mentality prevails in these projects. Let’s just do it, get it over with and watch the cash roll in. Then, as complexity increases and mistakes are made, other emotional responses take over: blame-storming (particularly for teams who aren’t there: third-party suppliers or off-shore), hindsight, and the eventual withdrawal of project budgets. Suddenly you’ve gone from projected heaven to project hell.

Project management can of course help to control these urges. It provides the rational ego to counteract the emotional id. By introducing formal methodologies, you can moderate the project team’s urges and lead them to a more successful outcome. Theoretically, you could take any project and use ego-based techniques to deliver it. But that doesn’t mean you’d actually be delivering the right thing…

For that, you need a superego, a conscientious faculty to ensure you do the right thing. For projects, this means a governance process that ensures you have a reliable business case and that you continue to measure the business value of features that you implement, so you’re asking whether they’re valuable, rather than just whether they work or not.

Super-ego-driven, conscientious projects will ask “is this worth doing?”
Ego-driven projects will ask “is this working?”
Id-driven projects will ask “why don’t I have this stuff?”

That’s an instinctive question, but the wrong question. It’s a question that’s asked by others and the question that will lead you to project hell.

Also worth reading:

Failure is not a positive by Piewords

Philippe Parker on psychology | 10 January 2012 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

A 2011 retrospective

When you reach the end of a sprint, you look back and consider what went well, what went badly and what can be improved. There’s a similar process for waterfall projects when you produce a lessons learned report to share with the rest of the PMO. While I’m sure you floccinaucinihilipilificate about this company’s 12-month performance, allow me to highlight three things I’ve noticed come to the fore in the last 12 months.

You need to demonstrate the tangible benefits your project will deliver as quickly as possible.

Of course, this has always been true. But the pressure to be lean and value-driven is greater than ever, driven I think not just by wider economics but also because the technologies we work with are more mature and with that, so are customer expectations.

Many people are in the third or fourth significant implementation of a content management system, whether for web or across the enterprise. Marketers have already made their initial forays into social media. Not seeing returns on information systems or web engagement simply isn’t good enough. So before putting their hands in their pockets, they’re quite rightly asking what they’re going to get back. As an industry, we need to answer that question quickly and credibly.

Events are being stretched.

People are increasingly participating in events from a distance and after they’ve finished. Television has stretched beyond the screen by broadcasting with hashtags which allow an audience – not all of whom are actually watching – to discuss programme content beyond the control of the programme’s producers. Whether this is music or politics, it’s a long way from the controlled comments policies of newspaper discussion forums. Huge numbers of people are using tablets and smart phones to communicate as they watch TV.

This applies to football matches too, whether from the armchair or the stadium; and very much to music, be it at a festival or on Spotify. The discussion extends way beyond the geography and the duration of the event; supported by the fact that the media doesn’t need to be watched there and then either. There’s gold in those hills, I just haven’t figured out how to extract it yet…

We could understand our market a lot better if we just took the time.

Sales people and analysts have been harping on about big data as the next big thing without too much detail around what it is or why it’s useful. But consider this. People now reveal huge amounts of personal information under highly obfuscated terms and conditions. If you could join up Facebook profiles, Flickr, Amazon, loyalty cards, credit ratings, browser history, and online social interactions, you’d have an incredibly complex and potentially frighteningly accurate picture of your market and how to sell to them.

If you’re a D2C organsiation or want to become one, getting that kind of data and being able to process it in a meaningful way is going to make your current online engagement look… well, pretty poor. Start thinking now about how you can get more data legally and how you might exploit it to reveal business information that will give you a competitive advantage. You can be sure that if you don’t, your competitors will.

Philippe Parker on big-data, ROI, Twitter | 21 December 2011 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

The marriage of content strategy and online engagement

Wedding cake

Some people seemed a bit miffed by my last post. All that silence and then I say their product’s not as beautiful as some others. But as Arsène Wenger said, “Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.”
Well I’m not in the business of software-bashing. I deal with clients who have complex systems that they’re trying to get the most of in order to boost their business. So I do want to highlight a point in the last post that some readers seemed to have missed: Tridion is a really useful tool for supporting a content strategy.

What do I mean by that? Well, as Brain Traffic tells us:

Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.

And isn’t that what you want WCM software to do? I’ve recommended Tridion on the basis that it gives web managers good visibility over who owns content on the site and where it should belong, as well as providing powerful ways to devolve ownership. There are few products that do this as well as Tridion in my opinion; although I seem to be in a minority when I say that I like the way TeamSite does it too.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like everything about the product. User interface may be a matter of personal taste (and one of the posts that I still haven’t written questions how important editorial UI is anyway). But I’m yet to see a really good demonstration of a product that supports both content strategy and customer engagement in an integrated way. I’ve seen bits and pieces in different products, but:

where are the security and content-type models that we see for standard content being applied to UGC?
where’s the personalisation of content based on a visitor’s publicly-shared profile, e.g. Twitter and Facebook?
how are you tailoring your website content to relevant trends on the rest of web?
how are the performance ratings of your page content then reflected in the way other users navigate content? Does your WCM even let you track those KPIs?
can you promote content to a visitor based on what other people – and most specifically people that they trust – found useful or enjoyed?

Those are just examples, but fundamentally I think vendors have found this kind of integrated content engagement strategy a challenge because WCM and UGC approached content from polar opposites. I don’t think they’re wholly incompatible, but I think we’re still in an earlier stage of evolution than most vendors would want to acknowledge.

So let’s just say that true web engagement on content-driven sites is still somewhat immature, as I would suggest that there are others who might prefer to express that more robustly.

Philippe Parker on Interwoven, SDL-Tridion | 16 December 2011 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

SDL’s takeover of Alterian

SDL – who supply Tridion web content management – first announced it wanted to take over Alterian – purveyors of the CMS formerly known as Morello (Mediasurface) and Immediacy – in October. This week the Financial Times confirmed that an offer had been accepted. You can get the financial background to the takeover from the FT article, but while the companies are close to a formal merger, the software they supply remain poles apart.

As SDL continues to release modules and connectors to enhance the breadth of its web engagement offering, many of its customers find themselves operating dated user interfaces and struggling with the obscurities of Visual Basic scripting. If you put Tridion side by side with newer .Net CMS like Sitecore or EPiServer, you’d see the difference straight away.
Alterian’s WCM has a much slicker editorial user interface and delivers dynamic rather than static content. How you scale your website, integrate with other systems and personalise content therefore requires a completely different technical approach.

This personalisation aspect is particularly relevant as both vendors have been positioning themselves in the web engagement / customer experience market. Even though SDL is at the crest of Forrester’s online customer experience wave (and remains firmly ensconced in Gartner’s magic quadrant for web content management), I would argue that neither tool is that well-suited to handling the kind of user-generated content that some lighter weight open source tools like Drupal can offer. SDL seems to me to be particularly well geared to organisations that have a thought-through web content strategy, while what sets Alterian apart in online engagement is its social media marketing tool, SM2. Indeed, this is what SDL seems to covet most:

“We think that there are synergies with the marketing analytics and content delivery,” Mark Lancaster, SDL executive chairman, told the Financial Times.

Allow me to express some degree of scepticism here. Alterian have owned both WCM and SMM technology for over three years and made little (if any) headway in their integration. SDL may have greater resources to achieve this, but we’re looking at completely different products here. Any quick fixes would simply be a rebranding exercise with no under-the-bonnet coordination. Of course, SDL may have a clever plan and I stand to be corrected on that point.

Overall, I’m quite positive about the takeover. I think SDL will benefit from the niche benefits that Alterian brings, particularly in terms of focus on improving editorial interfaces. I think there’s a great opportunity for Alterian partners who previously worked with Immediacy to get to grips with a Tridion CMS that’s similar but more powerful than what they were previously used to. And I think that customers, particularly in Europe, will get a broader set of implementation partners to work with who have great web experience.
Yes, it’s yet another merger and apparently less choice in the market, but actually for the two software development teams, I hope it’s an opportunity for them to learn from each other and for synergy to mean establishing a really good, forward-thinking product rather than just an excuse to downsize.

Contented Management

How are you managing your reputation?

The recent superinjunctions cases in England have highlighted one particular issue: you may have content that you want people to come to you for, but they can get it in lots of different places on the web.

In this case a number of celebrities have sought to protect their privacy in the face of allegations made about them and have won orders preventing anyone repeating them. But some of these cases have “gone viral” with those allegations being repeated on Twitter and elsewhere, potentially outside the jurisdiction of English courts. This calls into question whether the injunctions can be sustained: given that most people now know the identity of the people involved and the allegations, why prevent the mainstream media from repeating them?

Let’s put to one side the moral and legal questions this raises and instead focus on the commercial issue for publishers: News International researched and developed one of the stories and is now unable to report on it. Not only does the celebrity have no control over the content, but the publisher has lost it too.

This situation can happen to any publisher in less extreme circumstances: you’re trying to lead a discussion on your website, probably about your products and services, but the real discussions are happening outside it, in other areas of the web. Access to content is competitive; and we’re talking way beyond SEO. The competitions is based on three factors:

driving people to your site and maintaining their interaction there;
recognising the debate that happens outside yoru site and interacting with it;
having a content strategy that enables you to do both (1) and (2) in the tone and manner that you want to engage your audience in.

Number 1 is pretty traditional and many organisations have recognised it for a long time, although the methods for attracting visitors to your site are continually evolving. Search engines are probably of diminishing value, with marketing via social media increasing. But affiliate and offline campaigns can also help to attract visitors.

Number 2 is where a lot of organisations fall down. There’s a fairly blinkered view that if content isn’t on your own website, people aren’t talking about it. Out of site, out of mind. Yet most organisations’ products and services are evaluated beyond their own content management processes. Web managers can no longer be managers just for their own site but for the online presence of the organisaiton they represent.

Number 3 then takes on an increasing importance. Do you want to engage in the debate beyond your site? There’s a danger of being sucked into constant rebuttals or distracting side-issues. And how do you want to have those conversations? Do you need a different tone on Facebook or in discussion forums from your main corporate site?

Web content management is changing radically. Where WCMS were supposed to give organisations degrees of control over their online presence, how people use the web to access information is changing. If you don’t recognise that fact, people will get your content from elsewhere and from someone else’s perspective. You can’t expect people to base your reputation on what you tell them.

Philippe Parker on psychology | 23 May 2011 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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My threepence for 2011

I can’t help myself. It’s New Year and that means some kind of retrospective, and indeed preview. I’ve been working a lot less with off-the-shelf CMS and doing a lot more work involving custom-built web applications. I’ve no idea if this is reflective of a wider market trend but I thought I’d share three things that I’ve seen in the past year which I think will become even more important over the next 12 months.

1953 Thrupenny bit

1. Content management applies to off-site content too

It’s all very well thinking about content as the “stuff” people in your organisation create in repositories that you control. But there’s a really big issue. There’s a whole load of content that’s not in your repositories that you need to deal with. From an internal operations perspective, this is the tacit knowledge and the documents that people take outside your office when they leave each day and doesn’t come back until they return. From an external marketing perspective, this is the content that people outside your organisation are creating on platforms you don’t control: Facebook, Twitter, blog posts. Just getting a handle on what’s going on strikes fear into many. But exploiting this off-site content will bring huge benefits to your organisation.

2. The web is a competition

Look at all the online reputation tools out there like Klout and We Follow. Isn’t online participation just a competition where the brands with the biggest reach have the largest social market capitalisation? It used to be about whether you appeared on the first page of Google’s search results, but now we can measure influence and advocacy in other ways too. The web encourages you to ensure that your online presence exceeds those of your competitors. The services that you offer need to tap into that mindset if they’re going to be successful. But you also need to consider what tangible returns you make on raising your web profile. It’s a competition, there are trophies, but is there a cash prize?

3. Designers need to think a lot harder about multi-platform

While people who’re engaged in heavy content entry will continue to use devices with comfortable physical keyboards, we’re obviously going to see even more use of mobile phones and tablets. This means smaller screens, touch screen controls and often, slower performance. Designers who are constantly trying to cram ever richer user experiences onto a page are going to fail their audiences if they don’t consider how people on slow connections can download media, or interact with fiddly HTML buttons. It’s no good expecting the device browsers to be clever enough to handle your designs well. Test-driven interface design is going to be essential.

Philippe Parker on gamification | 5 January 2011 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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The truth about content management

Daft Punk encore

I am going to make a point about content management and better websites, but bear with me.

The web can be a really annoying place. But I found this tweet from Alain de Botton particularly ill-conceived:

A chief effect of the internet is to boost the already unhelpfully strong sense that the answers are ‘out there’ rather than within.

Why did it annoy me so much?

Firstly, because it confuses the medium with the content. There are lots of answers “out there” and not just on the internet. Does a TCP / IP protocol make ideas less robust than if they appear on a printed page? It’s a completely ridiculous notion. It’s one that those of us who work with the web still need to counter in many organisations where people still see the web as a frivolous fad; a notion that runs absolutely contrary to some of the web’s most successful sites, particularly those providing health information.

Secondly, because there’s a hypocrisy in attempting to broadcast aphorisms over the very medium that you’re criticising. This made me wonder if the tweet was a joke, or some kind of ironic experiment to see if people would retweet something non-sensical. And over a hundred did. Were they doing it in jest too?

Thirdly, because de Botton writes and sells books about philosophy and now he seems to be telling us that other people (like him) don’t have the answer, and that we should focus on introspection. This is probably a reference to the Socratic principle “know thyself” but this shouldn’t be at the expense of trying to discover objective truths. You can know yourself but be ignorant about the world around you: Socrates’ pupil, Plato, was a key figure in European philosophy but still defended slavery.

So what does this mean for content management?

There are many objective truths and certainties, but there are many more that are still to be proven. Establishing those truths is a competitive business. Scientists, explorers, researchers, all compete to establish a truth in a particular domain.

Similarly, your organisation holds truths that are more or less well articulated: terms of business, HR policy, progress reports, invoices.

Getting to these truths is a fundmental issue for content management. As users, we know that your website, or intranet, or digital asset management system should hold the piece of information that will answer my question. If we can’t find the right information, we’ll just invent it. But deep down, we know it’s there somewhere.

So problem 1 is: how do we make sure that our audiences can find the right information? Through better classification, more effective tools and encouraging people to tell their peers that this content is the right content.

Problem 2 is: how do I make sure that people get the right message from the information when they find it? By providing clear content that is constructed in a way that is appropriate to your audience: well written, well-produced, accessible.

The truth should be in your systems. If it isn’t, your audience will go somewhere else, “out there”, to find it.

Philippe Parker on truth | 10 November 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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The curse of WCM

Salvin's Albatross Diomedea cauta salvini

There are so many large websites which bear the curse of being CMS-driven rather than people-driven. It hangs like an albatross around the neck of visitors.

We know that navigation structures and labels should reflect your audience rather than your organisation. But there’s more to it than that. If you design your website based on content management practices, you’ll condemn your visitors to wander aimlessly through oceans of content rather than make a swift voyage home.

Typically, when you deploy a CMS you do some kind of card sort. You audit your content, group what’s relevant, label the groups and those labels become your putative navigation. If you’ve enough money and sense you’ll test that navigation on some users. This is a pretty straightforward way of coming up with a structure that people understand. But that’s not the same as the navigation that people need. You’ve just prioritised your taxonomy over your visitor’s user journey.

Instead of looking at what you have, ask yourself two questions.

Which tasks do the audience most want to achieve on your website?
Which tasks do you most want them to achieve (for example, because it saves you money compared to offline channels)?

Those should be two primary drivers for defining navigation. Don’t get caught up in what you have. Focus on what’s needed.

Philippe Parker on Taxonomy | 20 September 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Culling web projects in the age of austerity

Statue of an emaciated Buddha

Austerity is on the agenda. Across Europe, business and governments are making cuts in spending. In the UK, this means a further “clampdown” on the number of central government websites, while many private sector organisations are looking to reduce the total cost of their web presence.
Shareholders and taxpayers will applaud budgetary asceticism, but there has to be a middle way. Cut budgets from the wrong projects and you won’t achieve your online goals. Cut too far and you’ll undermine your ability to respond to new market challenges. Short-term gain will lead to long-term pain.
So what’s the best way to decide which budgets should be protected and which should be culled? I’ve found executive boards typically consider three propositions.

1. Blanket cull

The easiest way for a board to implement austerity is just to withdraw funding for all new projects. This approach may be the simplest in the short term, but it’s also the most destructive. Any board that proposes this kind of cull is tacitly admitting its own incompetence. How can you engage effectively with an online market that requires you to respond to emerging trends without investing? Be under no illusions: cutting projects doesn’t mean a loss of new revenue streams; it means conceding market share.

2. Stick to your guns

Marginally better than stopping all new projects is permitting just those that conform to your corporate strategy. This is the typical approach of an executive that is totally convinced its strategy is correct. They’ll probably have the market research to support this conviction too. But this kind of tunnel vision is fraught with risks. Who wants to place all their eggs in one basket? You’ve got to have some room to hedge your bets. It’s not just that you need to respond to market trends, it’s also that people in your organisation innovate, and by applying a rigid strategy you effectively block out those innovators. They’ll be demotivated and, if their ideas are any good, guess what: they’ll take them to your competitors and you’ll be in no position to respond.

3. Additional governance

If the board is a touch more enlightened but still clinging to its purse strings, it will introduce extra governance procedures. This is a classic ploy in most large organisations: create some new hoops to jump through and hope that this puts off anyone who hasn’t completely thought their proposition through. But this recreates the same problems: you’re satisfying your existing bean-counting processes rather than trying to discover what potential benefits might emerge as a result of a project.
When an executive introduces more stringent procedures for budget approval, it’s often because it wants to appear strong but is actually completely disengaged. It’s handing over responsibility for key decisions to a set of formulae. When the project goes wrong it will blame a poorly-constructed business case rather than the more obvious cause of project failure: lack of executive involvement.

Budgetary control is not the same as leadership

All projects rely on the executive to be actively engaged: making decisions when they’re required, providing leadership and assuring that the project continues to be aligned with organisational objectives. Fundamentally, if your executive is adopting one of the approaches outlined above, it’s only thinking about the money, not about the project. And that’s likely to mean the project’s going to fail anyway.
So if it’s a bad idea to stop new projects, stick vigorously to your existing strategy or introduce extra governance, what can you do to save money?

You’re in a hole, stop digging

Organisations are littered with zombie projects: those that have been running seemingly forever but that have never delivered benefit. These are the projects that sap the morale of the teams working on them and engender snide remarks from other teams struggling with lesser budgets yet more likely to deliver.
If your project has already been running for more than a year, has missed major milestones (or, worse still, has no major milestones), has had more than one change of project manager or systems integrator, or is just setting a strategy for other projects to follow, you can be pretty sure that it’s not going to deliver against its original brief.
Why force everyone else to tighten their belts when you’re continuing to squander money on a project that has had an opportunity to deliver but failed? It seems so obvious when you’re stood on the outside, but I think most organisations can be honest and say they’ve let some projects go on too long when they should have pursued others.
Good programme management isn’t about relentlessly pursuing the same objectives with an ever-diminishing budget. It’s about the ability to shift focus and point your organisation towards new benefits. Imposing arbitrary rules just gets in the way. So be rigorous in your budget management, but be dynamic in going after new opportunities. Be less fearful of abandoning something that hasn’t worked than missing out on something that might.

See also Alan Pelz-Sharpe’s article on UK budget cuts and public sector IT and re-assessing the value of Enterprise Licence Agreements.

Philippe Parker on Government | 16 September 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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WCM season preview

Leon playing football

The new Premier League season is upon us in England and it was with some surprise that I noted Tottenham were being sponsored by Autonomy, purveyors of Bayesian probability and content management systems.
Professional integrity dictates that I shouldn’t exclude Autonomy from shortlists just because of who they sponsor, but this deal may cause those of you with taste to reconsider whether Autonomy are meeting their corporate and social responsibility targets. Yes, I am an Arsenal fan.
I was going to write an article that mapped each Premier League team to a WCM product, but realised I’d be sued by anyone I associated with Blackburn Rovers or Stoke City. Nevertheless, I think their are a number of useful analogies to be drawn

Beautiful doesn’t always mean effective

Some WCM products have editorial interfaces that entice you to play around with them: thoughtfully designed with user-friendly tools like drag and drop, red-lining, or DAM integration. Others practically repulse: ugly web forms with incomprehensible labelling and non-sensical reference data.

But don’t assume that a beautiful GUI makes for more effective content management processes. Just as Bolton Wanderers are restyling their footballing approach under Owen Coyle to be more appealing, this won’t mean they’ll finish higher than they used to under the ugly pragmatism of Sam Allardyce. Give free reign to your editors’ creative spark and you may find your content strategy going down the pan.

A solid financial basis

Virtually no Premier League football club is without debt. WCM vendors are in a less financially perilous situation but hardly paragons of financial stability. This should make you wary in your contractual dealings with them. Always hold proprietary source code in Escrow. It’s not much of a security but it’s better than none at all. Check the financial stability of services partners and weigh this against their ability to deliver: a team that’s doing badly is likely to have disincentivised staff and the best of them may be looking to leave.

Be wary too of cutting deals that actually disincentivise your suppliers: if you cut their profit margin too much they’ll focus on more profitable accounts when the going gets tough. And the last thing you want to do is see your team go into administration like Portsmouth last season.

Living off past glories?

Just as some Premier League clubs look down on new entrants and see themselves as the established top tier, some WCM vendors subscribe to a similarly blinkered view. Don’t choose a team just because they’re an established player and appear in an analyst’s magic quadrant. Take a look at the wider field and figure out what it is you’re really after from your supplier. Having a vendor with a good reputation in the industry won’t improve your website any more than winning the league 49 years ago makes you a better club today.

The long-term view

So if you’re ignoring the past, what abou the future? No need for Paul the octopus: take a look at company history. Has there been a recent big-money acquisition? If so, you can be certain that the vendor is going to be focussing more immediate efforts on proper integration of that product rather than on new features. Assimilating new players takes time, as Manchester City discovered last season.

Or was the last release community-driven? If you don’t have the means to engage actively with that community, how are you planning on getting the enhancement (and fixes) you need the product to deliver? You’re unlikely to hold any sway over the selection despite your investment.

Where’s the support?

A crucial consideration must be who’s going to support your team once you kick off. Is there a loyal and knowledgable fan base? Are they likely to up sticks for another trendier team the minute the going gets tough? And where are they? If all your support is in a different timezone, you’re going to have problems.

In my experience, transatlantic services particularly suffer from this Manchester United syndrome of long-distance support. Many European vendors have struggled to provide north American clients with the same levels of support as clients in Europe and the reverse is certainly true. The problem is is seldom resolved by takeovers, when a larger company may bring a much larger support team, but product experts remain few and far between.

It’s not about loyalty

In the end, remember the crucial difference between implementing a WCM and following a football team: you’re a client, not a fan. I’ll support Arsenal even when the players all inevitably collapse with cruciate ligament injuries before Christmas; I’m a lifelong fan. But if you’re not getting what you need from your team, relegate them and seek your glory elsewhere.

Philippe Parker on Interwoven | 20 August 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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CMS fail: how not to implement a content management system

Envelope stamped with a fail

The attempts of Johnston Press, a publisher of local news in the UK, to implement a new content management system have spectacularly backfired. How can the selection of a CMS lead to a vote of no confidence in the managing director and a ballot on strike action by employees? That’s a pretty colossal project failure by any measure.

Johnston Press selected the Atex content management system. Atex, whose product is based on the acquisition of the Swedish CMS Polopoly, has carved itself a niche in the newspapers vertical and Johnston Press would no doubt have been reassured by their client list. However, the company imposed the choice of CMS on employees at a number of its titles and more importantly, inextricably linked the CMS to changes in working practice. The Guardian provides more background to the dispute.

So where did it all go wrong?

No stakeholder involvement

It’s truly crass management to push through a project without consulting those people who have to live with its consequences. Johnston Press wanted to cut costs with an integrated cross-channel publishing environment and employees were right to fear that this would put their jobs at risk. So the CMS became an enemy, rather than a product that would help staff to work better and secure the company’s future. There may have been no way to get around job losses, but if there had been consultation about the reasons for the CMS, how it was going to work and the benefits that it would have, there could have been a more constructive dialogue and a greater chance of a decent outcome.

No content strategy

One reason why Johnston Press thought the CMS would bring cost savings was because they thought they could replace the role of sub-editors, getting the journalists who’d researched the stories to also place the stories and create the headlines. This may well have been possible, but it doesn’t look to have been that well thought through. The journalists were interested in gathering stories and information gathering. The sub-editors were interested in promoting the right messages and maintaining editorial standards. These objectives can conflict.

Again, had the management approached the project by identifying a content strategy issue – positioning the kind of tasks they wanted from their readers and establishing relevant journalistic and copy-writing processes to support these tasks – they would have stood a better chance of selling the benefits to their employees and having a successful project.

Lessons learned?

I would hope that your content management project failures haven’t been as extreme as this one, but I wanted to take two highlights from this project.

Firstly, it demonstrates the importance of an inclusive and transparent selection process. You need to involve the people who’ll receive business benefits from the system, the people who’ll support the system and the people who’ll use the system. And you need to communicate the business case to them transparently so that they understand the purpose of the CMS and don’t feel threatened by it once it’s been implemented.

Secondly, you still need people to assure content quality. The CMS can certainly help you build in those processes that assure quality, but you need real writers to write good content and achieve your business goals.

There’s a lesson for the supplier too. This publicity hasn’t been great for Atex. When a project goes so spectacularly wrong, it’s easy to assume that the software is the root cause. But there’s an onus on the supplier to deliver against a clear brief and ensure that the client isn’t being stupid. You may have got your commission, but at what cost?

If you have a more spectacular case of CMS failure than this, I’d love to hear it.

Philippe Parker on Adoption, Atex | 9 April 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Is my project management useful?

Delivery has been uppermost in my mind recently. My wife is expecting a second child but this one decided he doesn’t want to head in the right direction. Next week he’ll be “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”. Consequently I’ve been thinking heavily both about caesarean delivery and about a number of projects which now share a common delivery date. If I were project managing this birth, I’d just be cajoling the baby to get into position but quite frankly wouldn’t be offering much value. Is this the same for web projects? Do project managers actually help and how can you get more out of them?

According to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the population of planet Earth was formed by a spaceship full of middle managers, hairdressers, marketeers and account executives. It’s easy to lump project managers into this mix. When Ford Prefect complains about this group’s inability to get stuff done — “This is futile! 573 committee meetings, and you haven’t even discovered fire yet!” — you can be sure that a project manager was there, maintaining the rolling action item log.

This is often exacerbated by project methodologies that foster a generic culture of project management, where all project management problems are essentially the same and if you can fix the issues around business case, stakeholders, executive sponsorship and resources you’re well on the way to project failure prevention. I’ve no doubt that these rules do apply for all projects, but I wonder that if you have a culture of just focussing on these issues you simply encourage project management by numbers where you get unthinking, standardised responses. As usual, Scot Adams got there first:

Case 1: Dogbert the generic manager: Ted - We need more people on the project. Case 2: Dogbert - Figure it out. Work smarter not harder. Make a plan. Move some things around. Adjust priorities. Just get it done. Give me a status report. Case 3: Ted - That did nothing but make me hate you. Dogbert - I can replace you with someone who will pretend to be inspired.

Even where you have a good project manger trying to help, it’s usually soft skills. Plant any management consultant in there and there’ll come up with the same answers without really having to get to grips with the fundamental issues. Why is the project struggling? Let’s not call lack of sponsorship a root cause when it’s just a symptom.

Sponsors are reluctant when they don’t understand project goals. You can see this for nearly any social media project. The business case is difficult to prove, the executive don’t buy into social media as reducing costs or increasing revenue, and the rigid formulae of business case definition help no one. This isn’t a sponsorship failure where the project manager can go in and mitigate against lack of funding. It’s fundamentally about whether an organisation is culturally ready to adopt social media and understand how they might use it. The project manager can facilitate this debate, but really you need a subject matter expert rather than a journalist who has read a couple of reports from the big analyst firms.

Jerry Manas recently wrote an article in which he suggests that project managers who run agile projects bring a completely different style to the table that’s much more concrete than traditional approaches. While I don’t agree with the entirety of his article, I think the main hypothesis is right. If you can get project managers who are close to the stakeholders, intimate with the issues and prove that they’re not just some glorified secretary, they can bring real value. Specialist projects require specialist experience and expertise and the world (of IT in particular) is littered with projects that have been delivered to industry best practice, but to abject failure.

The better generic project managers will continue to mitigate against failure and they’ll deliver their projects. But it the end, you’ll be judged on what you’ve delivered, not how you delivered it, and that’s where domain knowledge is essential.

My son will be just as precious to me whether he comes via forceps or scalpel. But it’s the people with the hard skills, not the soft skills, whom I’ll to put my faith in to ensure that he gets delivered safely.

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What makes different WCM different?

I’ve recently been working on a number of web content management system selections. My preference is to carry these out in a two-stage process (see the one-sheet guide to selecting a WCM). The first stage pre-qualifies suppliers according to client attitudes to cost, risk and technological preferences. The second stage then gets into the real tasks that you want to perform, discovering how the WCM enforces and informs processes.

Like most other people in this business, I approach this from the point of view that there is no best WCM, just different products that may be viable for different kinds of tasks. It’s about finding a product that will allow you to get started as quickly as possible without precluding later ambitions. I try to show clients what a WCM could do for them, and in turn client aspirations suggest product features. These usually centre around a number of core areas:

Editorial interface

How is content updated? Is it through a browser, a document template, or some other application? If it is through a browser, which browsers does it work in? Does it require a plug-in? How viable are those constraints within the organisation? If the organisation is planning to devolve editing, how appropriate are WYSIWYG and in situ editors? If content entry needs to be more controlled via forms, how will users preview their work? Can the WCM offer different editorial interfaces for different types of users? And hand in hand with the interfaces, if you have lots of devolved editors, how does the WCM assure concurrent contribution and secure access for different kinds of users?

Pages vs. elements

Some WCM only really have the concept of pages and associated assets, making it hard to re-use fragments of content across the site. This simple model is generally appropriate for two scenarios: where there are many devolved, occasional contributors who would be confused by having to perform multiple tasks to get a piece of content to update on one part of the site and wouldn’t immediately understand the implications of a more complex editorial change; and for sites which have quite user journeys with little information appearing in more than one place.
For sites which need to re-use content a lot, where there’s a central editorial team assuring that changes are propagated correctly, more advanced systems that use “fragments” of content in multiple locations across the site in an “edit once, publish many” model can bring significant business benefit. These content management models usually bring more flexible templates but they can also make it more difficult to audit content: what did a given page look like on a specific day and who made the content changes? They are also reliant on robust link cohesion, so that if you move a piece of content, the WCM continues to link to its new location.

Content structures

Absolutely central to most WCM is the concept of a content type. This is the model that allows you to define which fields editors need to complete to publish a page and the constraints on those: e.g. title (no more than 200 characters), summary (plain text), main body text (rich text), location (postal code), category (list of valid values), etc. These structures are important for a number of reasons. They allow you to create business rules for linking content, such as get me the three latest news items about Germany. They allow you to create different presentations for different types of content, so am event looks completely different from an FAQ. And they allow you to contol which information must be completed before content can go live and how it will be presented on different platforms once it’s been published.
There are other metaphors that WCM use to relate complex content: hierarchical metadata structures such as folders, categories or channels enable you to group content together in more complex ways. Flatter metadata structures also allow you to “traverse” across website structures and relate content in differnt part of the information architecture that don’t sit into this hierarchy. It’s often useful to have multiple kinds of metadata, particularly faceted taxonomy, if your content is particularly complicated and needs a lot of content relationships in order to achieved desired user journeys.

Technology

Where the WCM isn’t a standalone application but needs to integrate with other systems in a web platform – user directories, CRM, eCommerce, transactional tools – you need to validate how it will communicate with other systems. Is it through the Application Programming Interface (API), web services, or some other method?
The maintenance and extensibility of the system can also be important requirements. If I need to change a content type, what does that involve? If I need to get data from another application, can I do this in a de-coupled way?

Some other factors may come into play, such as workflow, internationaisation and personalisation. If one product is particularly strong in one of these areas and it’s a key requirement, then it may get into a shortlist even if it’s weaker in some of the other areas identified above.

This all brings me to the recent debate about whether WordPress is a CMS, with numerous contributions on Twitter as well as from:

My experience of WordPress is that it’s really good at two key features where some established content management systems are relatively poor: search engine optimisation and comments. On SEO, it ties your blog post title to a friendly URL, enables good internal linking (as long as you don’t move any pages), allows tagging and categorisation and offers some great SEO tools. Comments meanwhile can be quite tricky for some WCM that operate separate content contribution and consumption environments, but WordPress does this easily, with useful anti-spamming tools and the ability to follow the comment conversation by RSS or email.

When it comes to the question of whether WordPress is or isn’t a WCM, the best analogy I could come up with was a camera phone. A camera phone does take pictures, it is convenient, some phones even have a flash and autofocus. But would you get a camera phone specifically to use as a camera? I think not if you’re serious about photography, It is a camera, but a very limited one.

WordPress is a blogging tool with some shared characteristics of a WCM. If you apply some of the many available modules to it you can come up with a really nice proposition, up to a point. But you’re effectively hacking the software to get it to behave as many WCM already do. You can get any software to do pretty much anything in the end, but that still doesn’t make it a WCM.

WordPress is widely used by many organisations as a web content management system and there are a lot of photos taken on camera phones. But you need to understand the product’s limitations and if these don’t affect you and you’re achieving what you want, then no one should criticise you for your choice. But let’s be sensible about it and say that even if there’s no such thing as the best WCM, you know that it wouldn’t be WordPress.

Philippe Parker on Metadata, Twitter, WordPress | 4 March 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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I know why the caged bird sings

Janus Boye recently provoked an indignant response from the Twitterati when he proclaimed that he unfollows anyone with more tweets than followers. You should read the comments to gauge the general feelings about that view. It provoked some reflection on my part — which I guess Janus will say was his aim — and I went back to look at how my use of Twitter has evolved over the last two years. And it went something like this: Bewilderment » Discovery » Catharsis » Promotion » Engagement

Bewilderment

Like most people first dipping their toes into a new service, I came to Twitter slightly perplexed. What do you tweet if you have no followers? The thing that first drew me was trying to find out how micro-blogging might be used in a business collaboration context. I’d already used SharePoint and Ning and I was intrigued by the broadcast nature of theses services. It was so Enterprise 2.0! It reminded me of how J.P. Rangaswami had made his emails public to all employees in the organisations he was working and I wondered what effect that had on an even more public scale.

Discovery

So I kept relatively schtum and decided to follow some people I know: @draml, @izahoor, @mcboof and see what they were saying. And they were talking about web content management and I thought, that’s cool: I can find out some new stuff. It’s quick to scan tweets and I’ll read up on a daily basis.

Then I followed the people they were following — which was easier then because Twitter used to show all replies. And I discovered CMS people well worth following, like @sggottlieb and @piewords, as well as people I knew about already like @irina_guseva and @TonyByrne.

So Twitter effectively became a recommendation engine for blogs, of which I amassed quite a few and continue to add to. That gave me plenty to read to keep me on the bleeding edge of the industry.

Catharsis

But then I realised I was saying nothing myself. Resolutely ignoring the adage that it’s better to stay silent and be thought the fool than to speak and remove all doubt, I started to tweet my frustrations at various projects. It was these tweets that put me in jeopardy of Janus’ Law. I was re-living Joachim du Bellay:

Je me plains à mes vers, si j’ay quelque regret,
Je me ris avec eulx, je leur dy mon secret,
Comme estans de mon coeur les plus seurs secretaires.

That was a mistake. Fortunately I never resorted to telling people I was on public transport or making toast.

Promotion

So I just started retweeting links to useful CMS resources and that got me some followers. And it dawned on me that there was a whole world of business leads out there, so I started searching for key CMS terms and following people who tweeted on the subject, trying to engage with them and see what they were after. It was a bit rough but drew some small successes. So then I just promoting my blogging instead.

Engagement

That was a turning point, because I could engage more with people on Twitter than through my website. And because I was following other people’s blogs, I could engage with them on Twitter more easily and involve other people through broadcast messaging, just like JP Rangaswami! Twitter has become a sounding board for my thoughts: I can test things out on the Twitterati and get feedback before I have to let my ideas loose on clients. I hope that it’s actually improved the quality of my work.

I had one big #unfollowfriday when it all got a bit too much, but I won’t generally unfollow unless you annoy me, and I’ve a pretty passive character. I also find some kind of moral obligation to follow people who’re following me and can’t bring myself to unfollow people I’ve known for a long time in the real world, no matter how much rubbish they spout. Those that I really like to follow are those who know stuff and are funny; although having now met @adriaanbloem I’m convinced he uses some kind of ghost tweeter.

But the best things are seeing people get involved in real conversations. Take a look at @jameshoskins‘ Paxman-esque interrogation of @iantruscott about the Alterian roadmap. Or the discussions around #cmshaiku. Twitter can be fun and informative.

So how do I use Twitter for work? I still haven’t figured out if Twitter has a place in the enterprise, but it does allow me to keep engaged with a continually-evolving industry whose ideas appear online in less than 140 characters.

Philippe Parker on Twitter | 15 February 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Early thoughts on Drupal Gardens

Geese in Stourhead gardens

Last week, Acquia launched Drupal Gardens in beta. Speculation might have been more feverish had this not been on the same day as some company in Cupertino launched a new gadget. Nevertheless, Acquia’s offering is worth a second look.

Gardens is effectively Drupal 7 as a service: WCM hosted on the Amazon content delivery network. It includes a number of modules and is aimed very squarely at microsites and perishable campaign sites. It promises rapid deployment without needing a Drupal superhero to set up your site. You don’t need SQL, you don’t need PHP. You pick your URL, your templates, tools and styles, enter your content and you’re live.

And that represents what many people really understand by WCM.

You can create repeatable information architecture and consistent design elements from a library of themes and templates. You can use the Theme Builder to create custome content types. And it’s way friendlier than WordPress.com. Slicker too. People with very limited web knowledge can create websites even more easily than they used to in the days of Frontpage or Dreamweaver and go live with them, since Acquia take care of the hosting.

But this is very much WCM for websites that have content only. There’s nothing transactional and no sign yet of secure hosting that establishes private networking to your other online applications. It’s a great template editing tool to give to your design team or for small businesses to play around with, but not necessarily the tool that allows you to devolve complex editorial tasks to distributed authors. While the cloud-based aspect should allow you to scale your website delivery, it’s not clear whether it scales on the authoring side for people wanting to contribute content from around the world (which probably isn’t a central use case). It’s also worth noting what’s on the road map, because these are things that Gardens can’t yet do; such as multi-site search, multi-site configuration, and analytics.

Where Garens is a great fit is for clients who want a rapid time to deploy with minimal fuss. Why should clients concern themselves with APIs and hosting SLAs? Why should they have to engage with geeks just to change a template? Gardens resolves those issues by giving you a website builder and at a great price: it’s free throughout 2010 and only $20 to $40 per month per site after that, with flexibility over multi-site licences. But if you’re hoping that your website should be more than just vanity-ware, that it will increase revenues or reduce pressure on other streams by bringing transactions online, you’ll have to look at a content-driven application that has better integration points with other systems, or wait for this to be developed by Acquia.

I think Acquia’s move has implications for the wider WCM industry. Firstly, that the SaaS model has a valid use case which will permeate higher-end WCM; for example, Alterian CME is sort of available as a service through Verizon. Secondly, because many clients still understand (and want) WCM to be a tool for managing look and feel as well as content. Drupal Gardens achieves both those things. Can other vendors say the same?

Philippe Parker on Alterian, Cloud, Drupal | 2 February 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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When WCM isn’t enough

Orange and blue liquid forms in a glass

How many websites these days are purely content-driven?

It’s hard to justify brochureware sites. How many people do business with you just because your website looks pretty? Organisations want websites that either generate an income or reduce pressure on more costly channels, like call centres. That means transactional web applications, not just web content management.

Yet content management is still required. Whether you’re updating marketing material to support your service offering or changing form labelling and layouts to ensure fewer drop-outs on transactions, the web team still needs to be able to make content changes without having to go through a lengthy development release process.

The simplest way to achieve this is to run two web applications separately, one driven by the content management system and the other by the transactional software, like eCommerce. You get your developers to style the two applications to look the same, run from similar URLs and hope that the web app gives you enough control to alter content that it’s responsible for, such as labels on form fields. This way you can keep system integration to a minimum. There are a couple of significant disadvantages, however. Firstly, if your site needs to change globally — a change to brand or navigation, for example — you have to update both systems. Secondly, you need to design your site in such a way that you keep content and transactions separate, which is very unlikely to lead to a successful user experience.

So what are your other options? You could take content managed through the CMS and embed it in the transactional application. This means that when you have a form field to complete which needs some guidance, that guidance can come from the CMS without the user having to abandon their transaction. But this creates problems of its own. You lose some of the key benefits of the CMS: relationships are harder to maintain between pieces of content and preview becomes nearly impossible.

This is why the transactional application is often embedded in the CMS. FatWire, for example, has just launched its Web Experience Management Framework, which should make this process easier, while Terminal Four also touts its integration with external systems. Yet irrespective of the CMS you use, you’re going to face some integration problems. There’s bound to be an element of custom code, issues with assuring decent performance from both the CMS and the transactional application, and above all design difficulties ensuring that the security of the user’s transaction is maintained by the delivery layer.

Another option is portal technology. In theory, portals enable you to deliver all your web applications in an integrated fashion and what’s more, do so incrementally, adding applications without having to change the core configuration. They’re also usually pretty good at managing sessions and user credentials. Portals bring their own problems however, not least cost of delivery, increased time to develop and un-friendly URLs.

So all four approaches have positives and negatives. There’s a niche in that market somewhere for a vendor. Until someone proves they’ve filled that niche however, you’re unlikely to be able to deliver a great business-driven website using just a web content management system.

Philippe Parker on FatWire, TerminalFour | 14 January 2010 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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The future of the web is JavaScript

O'Reilly JavaScript textbook

The future of the web is mobile. And by mobile I don’t mean mobile phones. I mean browsing through devices that people carry around with them. All these devices, irrespective of form factor, have a common problem: they are prone to lose connectivity to the internet.

If you’re on the move and keep losing your 3G signal, or just happen to live in an area with a poor reception, or in a house with brick walls which slow wifi, or suffer from terrible contention rates in your Starbucks or conference venue, you’ll know that cable-less connectivity is fallible. So you’re in the middle of a transaction, just trying to get to the next step when… enter tunnel / lose packet / connection error and you have to start over.

There is a solution to this problem however. As Michael Kowalski tells us, the future of the web is JavaScript. Or perhaps not JavaScript in its current form, but client-side scripting nonetheless. Why? Consider the options.

If you want interaction that will run reliably on a device with poor connectivity, you can’t keep expecting the browser to go back to a server. So you might make your functionality available as a downloadable app. But it had better be a killer app the user wants to rely on, because otherwise they won’t want it taking up real estate on their phone. And it’ll have to run across operating systems if you want to reach a broad market, not just Steve Jobs’ latest toy.

You could use a rich internet application such as Flash or Silverlight. But the client platform has to support these and the user has to install them, although they’re more likely to do so for a generic RIA than for a specific tool. The big issue with these applications however is that the content is embedded in the interface, which makes them both heavy to download and difficult to make accessible to other applications, such as screen readers and content aggregators. So you’d probably have to create two versions of the content: one embedded in the RIA, the other standalone. That’s not great.

JavaScript has the advantage that it can be used to enrich content, but not contain the content itself; for example, to provide better interactivity on maps. There are also libraries of JavaScript functions that can be re-used and downloaded to the client device with the user barely noticing. Take jquery: Google hosts a copy, so if you use these functions on your site, you don’t even need to host the file. Reference Google’s copy and you’ll save bandwidth and, if enough websites follow the same path, there’ll probably be a cached copy on the user’s machine even before they get to your site, which will significantly improve response times.

Google is of course moving beyond jquery to complex client-side scripting which its own browser / operating system will be capable of handling, but some other browsers may struggle with. Chrome is a replacement for off-line scripting using Gears. It should not only enable mini applications such as Wave to run faster in a browser, but will enable online transactions to continue to function better when connections are poor. Opera has been developing similar functionality for its browser too.

So if you want to provide audiences with a better experience irrespective of platform and location, a lightweight client-side tool that separates content and function and runs in a browser seems like a future-proof idea. And for the moment at least, that means JavaScript.

Philippe Parker on Google, JavaScript | 11 December 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Devolving complexity

Combined harvester

What sort of editorial model do you follow for your web content management? Do you try to get as many as possible hands-on, or do you run everything through a centralised editorial team?

It’s ironic that WCMS which enable you to perform more advanced content management provide tools that you probably won’t want to devolve to part-time editorial teams. Conversely, simpler WCMS are often chosen by by smaller, centralised teams who often feel constrained by the software they use.

Vignette, for example, enables you to assign content to various taxonomies through folders, projects and channels, so that content can be cross-referenced extensively across your site. Put these taxonomies in the hands of people who don’t understand them and you’ll create convoluted user journeys: the exact opposite of your content management objectives.

Alterian’s corporate offering meanwhile — once known as Immediacy — provides pretty basic content management. Most users should be able to get their head around its tools pretty easily. But if you want to create more complex content relationships or have content fragments re-used across your sites, you’re better off with Alterian’s enterprise product, known as Morello. Devolving editorial responsibilities to part-timers who don’t fully understand the consequences of updating content that’s used in lots of places in your websites is decidedly risky, however.

In larger organisations, lots of people will produce content for the web sporadically. These people will change, have variable knowledge of the software and writing style guides, and limited understanding of your website. The last thing they need is a piece of software that allows them to break stuff because they just don’t get it.

So, do you:

select a simple WCM for devolved teams to create pages in predefined templates; or
select a complex WCM that enables you to perform more advanced content management tasks, but centralise the editorial process.

The more you want to cross-reference and re-use content across your sites, the greater your need for an advanced tool and an expert team to manage it. But if you want to devolve authorship, you’ll need to keep content management tasks and software as simple as possible. Don’t try to industrialise content production by providing everyone with more machinery. For broader participation you need to provide hand tools. Leave the combined harvester in the hands of experts.

Philippe Parker on Immediacy, Morello, Taxonomy, Vignette | 8 December 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Something rotten in WCM

J. Boye’s 2009 Arhus conference was a learned and often humorous affair. The biggest lesson I brought back from Denmark was just how far away all of us who work in the industry — website managers, technologists, vendors, consultants — are from having good web content management.
Chimpanzee performing Hamlet by King Chimp

Alas, poor clients

How many people could say that they were happy with their implementation? Even those case studies I saw were tinged with regret at missing features or how long the process took. The conference was littered with people who’d wasted budget and wanted to share their hindsight. And these were the enlightened ones.

The industry protests too much, methinks

But while those of us in the industry can easily put errors down to naïvety, I think it’s time we took a long hard look at ourselves. How can we tell users that CMS is like complex machinery which should involve substantial training and even change management? That’s an appalling attitude to user requirements.

Don’t try to make people change… do something that can’t already be done. (Euan Semple)

When every survey shows usability as the top area of dissatisfaction with CMS, what’s preventing vendors from making a friendlier system? As Seth Gottlieb points out, they’re all as bad as each other.

Slings (and boxes) and arrows

Creating and maintaining content should be simple enough for devolved editorial teams to perform with little training. The tricky thing is creating high quality content to suit an audience’s needs. Yet few CMS will ease editors through this process or evaluate their content against style guides. We’re beginning to see a few technologies in this area, but these are just sold as add-ons to an already bloated feature set.

The play’s the thing

It seems the industry has been blind to the truth. Features are specified but never used. Vendors add functionality so that they can score highly in analyst reports and avoid being excluded from shortlists, but all they’re doing is making it more difficult for users to create a compelling web presence.
To be or not to be
WCM was once a breakthrough in enabling less technical users to publish web content relatively quickly. But has it really progressed in the last few years? I don’t think so. We just have more modules piled onto re-skinned interfaces. Can’t we have friendlier tools for delivering a content strategy? Otherwise WCM will see some other application usurp its role and seduces its client base, which would be a tragedy for the industry.

More on #jboye09

Philippe Parker on #fixwcm, #jboye09 | 10 November 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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‘Bove the contentious waves he kept

Google Wave is a browser-based collaboration tool that combines messaging, document writing and discussions in real time. I participated by proxy in an experiment with the tool last week that involved fellow content management professionals. These are my observations.

Saying is easier than listening.

In many ways the collaboration was too real time. In a spoken conversation, talking across each other isn’t really possible. In the Wave, it’s the norm. Even with half a dozen participants, it seemed everyone was piling in trying to get their thoughts down rather than considering what people were writing elsewhere. There were multiple threads to the document that you couldn’t follow at once It was like being in the middle seat at a party: it seemed like a good place to be but you couldn’t figure out which conversation to jump into. This might say more about the participants than the platform, but it is a serious issue for collaborative working where listening to a conversation, being able to respond to the speaker and draw out more information is crucial to constructive dialogue.

More is easier than less.

Anyone can add to the document, but there are no commenting features and a social reluctance to delete what someone else has written. The effect is that assertions are qualified rather than challenged or deleted, meaning that you end up saying in thirty words what you could have said in ten. The compound effect of this writing style is that you layer meaning on top of meaning to the point that — as Julia Kristeva might have pointed out — as a group you’ve said something different to the individual’s original point. That’s not collaboration.

You get more than you need.

I couldn’t quite figure out what we got from the Wave that we couldn’t get from just a Google document combined with chat or a similar tool. It was less the case of the glass being half full or half empty than the glass being twice as big as we needed. There were too many features. Nearly everyone experienced serious browser issues — except Ian, whose virtual shoulder I was peering over— whose Chrome held out where Firefox faltered. Wave might run in a thin client, but it’s a fat piece of technology.

So was Wave a total washout? No, but I think it will take a lot of adapting to. If only there were some browser-based tool out there that wasn’t reliant on Ajax, that was near real-time but forced you to refresh so that you listened before you spoke and which encouraged you to be as brief as possible when you did speak up.

Where could we find a tool that met those requirements? I’ll have to ask the good people of Twitter.

Things We Hate About Content Management
A Collaborative Google Wave Blog Post.
I Predict A (CMS) Riot: 1 hour, 6 People, 1 Wave, 1 Post
Wave experiment: Things We Hate About Content Management
The people who contributed to the post were: @irina_guseva, @justincormack, @iantruscott, @andrew_liles @adriaanbloem, @McBoof

Philippe Parker on Google Wave | 26 October 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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How to read Gartner

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is stirring up emotions again. This time ZL Technologies have launched a law suit against the analyst firm, essentially claiming that its methods are biased and obscure. We’re not industry analysts, or partners of any of the vendors, so we’re not too bothered about who’s in Gartner’s good books. It makes a big difference to the vendors, however, since Gartner is such a dominant influence in the industry and so many clients assume that if a product’s in the Magic Quadrant, it must be the best.

And yet, this precisely contradicts Gartner’s own advice:

Gartner advises organizations against simply selecting vendors that appear in the Leaders quadrant. All selections should be buyer-specific, and vendors from the Challengers, Niche Players or Visionaries quadrants could be better matches for your business goals and solution requirements.

But what clients and many consultants see is the graph, and this is what they decide on. We’ve worked with many of the WCM products assessed by Gartner and conducted many technology selections for clients. They want the best product, not a niche player.

But what do you want to do with your CMS? Don’t you want to achieve things that other people aren’t doing, within business structures that will be difficult to change, aimed at specific audiences? Isn’t that a niche? Then why wouldn’t you consider a niche product?

Just because a vendor has a more complete vision, doesn’t mean it offers all the features that niche products do. In fact, the completeness of vision is based on many other criteria, including market understanding and strategy, sales strategy, business model and geographic strategy. These are all important, but do they really have a bearing on your business requirements?

We’d rather come and ask you what you’re trying to achieve, point out the things that any CMS will do and some of your issues that only certain products are likely to solve well. We’ll suggest you look at those but warn you about some of their weak points. If you’re then concerned that the vendor’s marketing strategy isn’t up to scratch, go and take a look at their financial viability. But every vendor Gartner assessed had WCM revenues in excess of $8 million in 2008, so they aren’t small fry.

Nevertheless, you have to question the neutrality of a firm that takes a significant proportion of its revenue from advising the vendors on product development, but doesn’t disclose what that revenue is. As a buyer, you should question whether the criteria are relevant and whether the assessments are fair.

So what benefit can you get from the report?

Firstly, you get a list of products. That’s not a trite observation. In a market with several hundred vendors — and seemingly more each day popping out of the Scandinavian CMS womb — it’s useful to be able to limit the products you’re considering to those that have a considerable industry presence. Gartner will shortly be adding open source WCM to the proprietary software it currently evaluates.

Secondly, you get some ammunition with which to question vendors. If EPiServer is heavily focussed on expanding into the US market, you should be asking how much of their core team is still in Europe and able to deal with your concerns. (This is true of many of the European vendors.) Similarly, if you read between the lines on cautions about Vignette, you’ll need to ask how many of their clients are actually using the latest version of their product which they’re so keen to sell you.

So how should you read Gartner? With interest, and with caution.

Some further reading:

Philippe Parker on EPiServer, Gartner, Vignette | 22 October 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Does rationlalisation reduce cost?

It’s a fair assumption to make that some organisations haven’t procured their content management systems as effectively as they might have done. Poor procurement is particularly frustrating when it’s done with our money, i.e. by government. But government in the UK is steeling itself for a major cost-cutting exercise. The Transformational Government agenda is already well underway, seeking to reduce the number of government websites and streamline online services. Meanwhile the political parties have competing missions to rethink procurement, particularly of technology. You can’t argue with the idea, and as Ian Truscott points out, there are good reasons for reducing the number of websites from a user experience perspective as well as just costs. However, you can certainly question the approach.

Let’s say you try to consolidate to a single content management system. The smaller the user base for that CMS, the more likely you are to meet its requirements. As soon as you extend the CMS to multiple teams with different ways of working, different audiences and different kinds of content, you have a change management programme on your hands. The focus has shifted from where it should be, online engagement, to training existing users in new ways of working.

Over-rationalisation tends to lead to over-generalisation, and that in turn leads to a poor fit to requirements. If you generalise too much, you’ll necessarily have to introduce customisation to your system, which was precisely what you were trying to avoid in the first place.

This isn’t the only area where too much rationalisation fails to reduce costs. While preferred supplier lists brings down the cost of procurement, they’re unlikely to reduce the cost of implementation. Qualification to be a preferred supplier is strenuous, but once you’re on the list there’s very little incentive to control your prices. Preferred supplier lists can make procurement inflexible and frustrating for the business users too. New entrants to the market are seldom present, so it’s nearly impossible for government departments to be early adopters. This makes government look like it’s off-message, when in reality many civil servants are swimming against the tide to provide a good service.

What government and many other large procuring organisations end up with is a possibly cheaper but probably riskier solution: over-ambitious projects that take too long to implement and that can’t meet emerging requirements. The larger the project, the more changes to requirements will emerge and the less rational it will become. These kind of strategic rationalisations are doomed to failure. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, your project’s business case can stay irrational longer than your project can stay solvent.

Rationalising your web presence is a great aspiration to have, but your have to rein in your ambitions. Rationalise a feature, not the whole system, then you’re more likely to see some cost savings.

Philippe Parker on Government | 19 October 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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When should technology lead requirements?

How do you develop your content management requirements?

Typically, organisations will identify a business strategy, develop requirements based on that strategy to improve revenue or reduce costs, and then develop a software architecture based on those requirements. But when should the technology drive business change?

The simplest answer is “never”: don’t let the technology tail wag the business dog. But the simplest answer is rarely right. New technologies can lead to competitive advantage as well as stimulate innovation culture, so there should be room for a technology-led approach. You do need to establish some criteria for initiating these kinds of projects, however.

Emergent benefits but a defined problem
You may not know precisely what benefits the new technology will bring — this is particularly true of very new technologies that have little case history of ROI — but that shouldn’t in itself preclude assigning the project a budget. What should prevent you starting the project is not having a problem. This might be an operational issue such as ineffective project communications, or the opportunity to target a new market segment. But the problem needs to be there even if it’s not clear how the new technology will resolve it.

For example, online retailers have long had an issue with customer trust. People don’t buy products just because the website says it’s worth buying. But if you add the facility to comment on or rate a product, this gives some reassurance to the buyer. It improves sales markedly for some items, but risks reducing them for products that receive poor reviews. While it’s not 100% clear what effect customer ratings will have on your revenue stream, they do address the perceived trustworthiness of the product description.

If you want an example where this hasn’t worked, consider Second Life. Eighteen months ago, virtual worlds were the bandwagon to be on. It wasn’t clear what the benefits would be but it was technologically cool. The problem was that there was no problem. Second Life didn’t offer any real communication improvements while tapping a relatively small market that could be reached through other channels anyway. There may well be scope for virtual worlds in future, but they need to address a real business issue before they’ll take off.

Ability to deploy quickly
Since the rate of obsolescence outpaces the rate at which companies change [slideshare], you’d better be quick about your work. If it takes you a year to roll out a new technology, this should be business-driven, not led by a technology which will be old hat by the time it’s deployed. Software as a service gives companies a real advantage to deploy quickly, as do flexible server environments. You should certainly be looking at these kind of tools if yours is an organisation that likes to be at the leading edge.

Acceptable cost
How much money are you willing to risk if the technology doesn’t bring any benefit? This is a difficult assessment to make as you’re less likely to have a watertight figures than if you went down the more traditional business case route. Normally your assessment would be: my problem costs me £X, so if I spend £Y then I’ll get a return within Z months, so £Y can be my project budget. When you’re technology-led, you’re unlikely to know how long it will take to get a return. So you need to treat your budget as a sunk cost that you’re comfortable writing off.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that your budget must be small: the car industry spends a fortune on innovation because the risks of losing competitive advantage are so huge. Of course, you can limit your risk of failure by running a pilot, which will help you to satisfy the need to deploy quickly as well as constrain costs. Your project budget should be based on the scale of the problem you’re trying to solve, rather than on the scale of anticipated benefits.

Exit strategy
If the technology isn’t as successful as you’d hoped, or it’s viable but creates other problems you hadn’t forseen, you need a cost effective way to abandon it. This is particularly relevant for information management projects. If you put business critical information into a new wiki that has poor adoption, you absolutely need a way of getting that information back in a format that can be migrated to another system. Your project needs to include a decommissioning approach.

Ride the wave
Technology should inform your business strategy, but being at the crest of the hype cycle isn’t enough. If you apply these criteria to technology-driven projects however, you should go some way to avoiding the trough of disillusionment, both emotionally and financially.

Philippe Parker on 29 September 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

The importance of good metadata

There’s been some debate on the role of metadata in content management: is metadata the future of content management, an integral part of the content, or are we making an artificial distinction?

Let’s start by setting aside the technological issues, because these are largely irrelevant. Metadata may be stored in a database separate from a file, or in a distinct table, or marked up differently, but this isn’t the determining thing that makes it different from other data or content held in a system. It can even be an inherent part of a document. What makes metadata different is how it’s used.

Metadata is used for classification. It’s used to relate one piece of content to another and to help people and systems find relevant information. If it’s not serving that purpose then it’s not metadata.

This may lead you to the conclusion that I’m saying everything is metadata. But it’s not. Some content that is marked up as metadata isn’t really metadata at all, or is at best poor metadata. Take a look at the UK’s National DNA Database, for example. This database records ethnicity and skin colour as a way to search for people, but one person’s view of their ethnicity may not be shared by another’s. This disparity has effectively rendered this metadata set useless. The records on ethnicity and skin colour are potentially useful as content, but unreliable as metadata.

So if you’re looking to define metadata types and corresponding taxonomies for your content, you have to consider how those doing the classification will apply the metadata and how other people are going to use that classification. If it’s not useful, it’s not metadata. If it is useful, you’ll be on your way to managing your content.

Philippe Parker on Metadata | 18 September 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Three things happening now in web content management

There are many views on the future of content management, but what of the present tense? I wanted to highlight a few trends that we’re seeing from WCM software vendors.

Social WCM
Of course the web is social, but WCM has traditionally made quite clear distinctions between authoritative content that’s created and approved by authenticated users, and content that’s produced by non-authoritative sources, i.e. external users. This distinction has been somewhat blurred by people recently and vendors have had to respond to blogging software like WordPress that makes it far easier to add comments and user profiles. Many WCM vendors who previously didn’t provide social features now tout their software as web 2.0 ready and this is a signficant area of product development. Moreover, if you look at the ECM sector, vendors are focussing heavily on use of these social features to improve internal business processes, aka Enterprise 2.0.

Web campaign management
Your website is a marketing channel: understanding your market and its responsiveness to campaigns is increasingly important. Many WCM vendors are heavily promoting the campaign management side of their products and developing improved campaign reporting features. The aquisition of Mediasurface by Alterian and the inclusion of content management as part of an “integrated marketing platform” is a good indication of where one branch of the industry is heading. FatWire is also developing marketing products as part of what it calls its Web Experience Management Suite.

Content quality
If you’re going to use the web to market heavily and you have a lot of content, you need to ensure that your website meets the standards you have set your organisation. There are a number of tools on the market that help editorial teams assure that quality (such as those from Vamosa and SiteImprove). We’re also seeing vendors like SDL Tridion adding these modules to their core product offering. Assuring the quality of your web content should be a key aspect of WCM and these features are particularly welcome for distributed authoring teams.

Clearly, these three trends represent a far from exhaustive list, but they do go some way to illustrate how suppliers are positioning themselves in the WCM market. Hopefully this will give clients some degree of differentiation and an awareness of possibilities that web content management can offer them now.

If you want to know more about trends in the industry, take a look at this list of feeds.

Philippe Parker on FatWire, Morello, SDL-Tridion | 10 September 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Theatrical ways to improve project performance

I wish I could remember who wrote that in tragic theatre events start quickly but slow down as they draw to their inevitable conclusion, while in comedy the action start slowly then build up pace. There are definitely parallels with projects.

It’s tragic when you have one of those projects which seemed like a great idea at the time, but the longer the it goes on, the less enthused people become and everyone despairs of achieving success. Managing these is not a cathartic experience: it’s a time to pity the stakeholders and fear for the project benefits.

On the other hand there are laughable projects where you took so long to define requirements that your implementation and testing are squeezed into an impossibly short period. These would be funnier if wasn’t for the fact that as a stakeholder, you’re the one being mocked.

So how do you avoid plunging into despair or feeling ridiculous? Here are three theatrical tips:

1. Get adequate direction

Your governance structures are there for a reason. Use them. If you think the project is going off track, then engage with the project board and escalate issues for them to make a decision on. Stick to the script and resist the temptation to ad lib.

2. Engage with the whole audience

If only some of your stakeholders know what’s going on, your project will be in big trouble. Project reporting needs to be broadcast, not sent to individuals. Set up a project repository where anyone can read reports and documentation, ideally with RSS feeds, and let any stakeholder subscribe. That way everyone can engage with the project and show appreciation, or displeasure.

3. Use actions, not just words

The performance of your project won’t be measured by how much you talked it up. Take on the role assigned to you, step up to the front of the stage and perform as best you can.

Finally, remember that acting and project management are both about empathising with people’s emotions without succumbing to them yourself. If your project’s going badly, you should be able to understand why your stakeholders are upset without getting upset yourself.

Philippe Parker on 27 August 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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What is enterprise web content management?

I find it hard to believe that there are still CMS vendors telling us that their software manages “enterprise web content”. Does “enterprise” mean just a more expensive way for large organisations to manage web content? Enterprise web content management is missing the point.

Firstly, if you think your organisation’s web presence is only the content generated in your organisation from your processes, you’ve completely misunderstood what the web is about. Your visitors aren’t just going to your site; they’re visiting sites all over the web. If you think they only want your “enterprise” content you’ve buried your head in the sand.

Secondly, if your website has a dedicated editorial team with a content strategy and proper style guides – and it should – they may well be resistant to the idea that anyone can be a web author as long as they use enterprise content management tools and processes.

The website is rarely just an end point or simple publishing channel for the documents your organisation creates. It’s market-driven. It’s meant to provide the information that your audience needs. Whether the website is designed to generate revenue (sell products) or to save money (stop people using more expensive channels like call centres), it needs to be managed so that your visitors can achieve their goals as simply as possible.

It’s because the creation of web content often sits outside enterprise processes that dedicated web content management software exists and stands alone from ECM. A good WCM will simply focus on making it as easy as possible to manage content created solely for publishing to the web, to be read on the web, by a specific audience.

There are of course many organisations who need to relate their website more closely to the rest of their activities. But what’s required isn’t just a piece of software that tacks “web” as a status on the end of a long workflow. You need a process that allows the website to request information from the rest of the organisation so you can deliver your web strategy.

If you view your website as a place where you can publish the “stuff” that your organisation produces, you’ll end up with enterprise web content management, and it will be bad for everyone involved. If you want a good website, make sure it’s a driver in your organisation and not a passenger.

Philippe Parker on 25 August 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Why do projects cost so much?

Why do Enterprise Content Management systems cost about five times as much as their top-tier web content management equivalents? Do they offer five times as much functionality? Are they five times less likely to fail? Are they significantly more usable? Generally, not.

But the operational savings that can be achieved with ECM are significantly greater than those typically made by rolling out WCM: there are time savings in information retrieval, cost savings in storage and reduced risk of compliance failure. You would expect these savings to be worth a great deal to most large organisations. Consequently, vendors can sell licences and services at a far higher cost than WCM.

Greater web content management costs can be justified in environments where devolved authorship, strong version control and compliance with web publishing standards are all required. This means that vendors can sell product licences at £200,000 knowing that what they offer can’t be achieved simply by installing WordPress. Commercial open source follows the same approach, but with pricing focussed on support and services.

It’s basic economics, but it’s worth recalling when you feel the costs of your implementation are running out of control. Products and services cost so much because clients tell suppliers that’s what they’re worth. It’s not up to your supplier to calculate your ROI; it’s up to the person paying the bill to do that.

The buyer sets a budget based on the benefits the project will bring, or the cost of not doing the project. Suppliers try to provide a solution that will bring about the benefits within the budget constraints. Together, they set up governance to ensure that the project doesn’t overrun or overspend, so that the business case remains viable.

The goal is not to deliver your project as cheaply as possible. It is to deliver the project in line with the specified business case. If you can save money then great, but if you’ve achieved your objectives, don’t worry that you might have been able to do it cheaper. Just bask in the contentment of having completed a successful project, an achievement that eludes so many.

See also Peter Sejersen’s article on whether you should reveal your budget when inviting tenders.

Philippe Parker on 20 August 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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The future of content management

Julian Wraith has started a discussion about the future of content management. There are a variety of responses to this linked to from the comments section, each with their own focus, but I recommend reading Laurence Hart for a longer-term view.

My own, brief take is that content management has to face a number of challenging questions over the next couple of years.

Will content need to be managed?

Content management currently focuses on providing tools for groups to create, review and retrieve content so that an approved version of that content can be made available to predefined audiences. User-generated content and the broadcast models of social networking challenge that focus.

Anyone can view content: most tweets go to everyone rather than direct to individuals.
Anyone can contribute content in a UGC world.
Distinguishing what’s your organisation’s content and what’s individual is becoming increasingly fraught; just take a look at any blogger’s site for disclaimers even though they’re blogging about their company’s services.

Will content need context?

Even in the least structured repositories (wikis, flickr, twitter) content is still tagged so that it can be retrieved. But the onus is on the user to find the right tag and on a search application to enable this. This is quite different from a CMS, where the software provides contextual models like folders and related documents to guide the user through an information architecture. As search interfaces and technology improves, there will be less need to provide those contextual models. I have my doubts that semantic mark-up will help people create more relevant content, but I do think that improvements to search will mean that content will be “find-able” and “relate-able” anywhere, even if it isn’t in the right taxonomical folder.

Will content need to be deleted?

As volumes of content continues to increase and contextualisation decreases, finding relevant content amid all the dross will become harder. I think that this will be an even bigger business driver than cost of storage for deleting content that’s irrelevant. But because distinguishing “approved” and strategic content will be harder, it will also be hard to identify which content is dross and what might be useful. Socially-driven records management is bound to take a stab at this problem, but whichever content management tool can help people to get rid of useless content is going to be a winner in the long term.

Philippe Parker on 6 August 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Thoughts on the CMS debate

Last week I attended the Future of Web Content Management Debate hosted by Squiz at Australia House. I met many interesting people and saw a range of presentations from analysts, customers and software vendors. I’m not sure that the future of the WCM was really debated that much, but perhaps the acquisition of enterprise search engine Funnelback by Squiz tells us that content management may well be rendered obsolete by improved information retrieval technologies… The debate instead seemed to focus on the advantages of open source content management software, as you might expect given that Squiz is an open source CMS vendor.

But why should open source even be a consideration when selecting a CMS? Increasingly we see drives by government and other organisations to promote open source, but as Adriaan Bloem points out, the only generalisation you can really make about open source software is legal: the licence. So unless being able to get into the nuts and bolts of the application and feeding back into its source are important to you, then open source shouldn’t really matter.

What should matter, and is often confused with the open source requirement, is:

cost: initial licences, project costs and on-going support;
who’ll carry out the development and support: an external supplier or an in-house team;
relationship with your suppliers and how easy it is to change them if something goes wrong without throwing away your technology;
upgrade path: ensuring you don’t over-customise your application so that you can’t move off it once it has outlived its usefulness.

Certainly, open source has a strong case to make with many of these issues, but fundamentally choosing the right CMS is about matching business requirements and budget to a technology and supplier, not about licence models. Hopefully the one-sheet guide we just published will help you in this respect.

Many thanks to Squiz for organising the debate and in particular to Kenton Ward, who was very open about his company and its development approach. Kenton also organises the Last Thursday group who meet in Shoreditch on the last Thursday of each month to discuss content management. Do join us!

Philippe Parker on 7 July 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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A one-sheet guide to picking a CMS

I’ve been trying to consolidate my thoughts on content management technology selection (a large number of which are collated on this site) into something more digestible.

So I’ve come up with this one-sheet guide to picking a CMS (rich text format, 41KB).

The guide is based on reading the many excellent posts on this subject from across the web (you can find a few of these on del.icio.us), discussions with colleagues and my own experiences in tweaking this process on client projects over the years.

Of course, reducing the process to a single page does mean that some of the finer points about how you achieve these tasks can’t be captured fully, but the key purpose is that people who haven’t been through a CMS selection before understand the main tasks involved and the order in which they should be undertaken. The document should also assist those of us who help clients select a CMS to focus on the most significant issues.

It’s not meant to be definitive, so please do let me know your comments: twitter’s the best place to do this. I’ll happily update this page and the document as required.

Philippe Parker on 6 July 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Feed your CMS knowlegde

I’ve gradually been collecting links to interesting blogs and feeds about content management and associated disciplines. Here are a number to share:

CMS news and analysis

CMS vendors

Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management

del.icio.us Bookmarks

Contented Management: del.icio.us bookmarks (feed)

You can also download the OPML export of all the feeds (7KB). Save it and import it into whichever feed reader you use.

The list of vendors in particular is far from exclusive, but if there are blogs missing that you think should be included, let me know.

Philippe Parker on 1 July 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Your website shall go the ball

Is yours a Cinderella website? Does it have an inner beauty that’s hidden away in some corner of the internet that potential Prince Charmings never visit? Does it suffer at the hands of a step-mother whose only interest is self-aggrandisement rather than nurturing their charge?

Get your website out of the scullery!

Promoting your web presence isn’t about just finding some kind of SEO godmother so you can trend on Twitter or make a splash on Google. You need to have content that’s stimulating, up-to-date and relevant to your target audience. If you simply tart up your presentation and wave it under people’s noses, your website will be about as popular as the ugly sisters.

So how do you get to the ball?

1. Make your content presentable.

Cleanse, freshen, and exfoliate! Remove anything that’s unsightly or redundant, accentuate your positive features by promoting them in your navigation and ensure that your design is focussed on your users’ needs.

2. Get out and network.

Once you have a website you think people will want to visit, you’ll need some kind of vehicle for getting your website in front of them. The channels that you use will depend on your target audience, but clearly SEO, social networking profiles and non-web media are all legitimate ways of getting yourself noticed. Unlike Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage, however, there needs to be honesty in the way you promote yourself. Habitat shot themselves in the foot recently by tagging their sales tweets with keywords about the Iranian election. Similarly if people are drawn to your website because it has popular but irrelevant keyword matches, they’re not going to hang around for long.

3. Keep that glass slipper.

Once you’ve got people to visit your site and experience your well-presented content, you need something to keep them coming back. RSS feeds are an obvious way of doing this, but you need to keep publishing good content if you want the party to carry on past midnight.

There’s not much point in having a website that’s an ugly sister – in your face but unattractive – or that’s beautiful but unknown. Every little website can grow up to be a princess if you can just show off its inner beauty.

Some further reading:

As a brief aside, did you know that Cinderella’s name comes from having her behind covered in cinders because she used to sit in the chimney to keep warm? And that her slippers were made from squirrel fur: vair in French, converted to verre (glass) by Charles Perrault to make the story more magical. Honest, guv’nor.

Philippe Parker on Fairy Tales, Interface Design | 26 June 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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We’re not just policing your content

Contented Management has joined forces with Linea to develop an online application and candidate management system for the Metropolitan Police. The system, which went live earlier this month, has already taken on appications for nearly 300 Special Constables and will shortly go live for Police Officers, Community Support Officers (PCSO) and police staff.

Candidates can check the progress of their applications online through integration with an enterprise offline system managed by the Met’s HR department.

The application was audited by a third party security consultancy and is built using the Java Struts 2.0 framework.

Visit metpolicecareers.co.uk and contact info@contentedmanagement.net to find out more.

Philippe Parker on 25 June 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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CMS trade-in deals

Fatwire is waiving licence fees for clients who migrate to its CMS from Vignette or Interwoven. Both these vendors have traditionally had quite expensive licensing models so there are potentially big savings to be made, although FatWire has a feature set that is probably closer to Vignette than to Interwoven.

The catch is that you need to procure migration services through FatWire, but they’ve partnered with content migration specialists who you’d probably use anyway. You just lose some flexibility on negotiating the price, but you’re going to be saving money anyway.

But does that make it a worthwhile exercise? As Irina Guseva points out, the project inevitably costs more than the licence, so the cost of migrating may well be more than your existing Vignette or Interwoven maintenance costs.

More importantly, the reasons for migrating are wrong. You shouldn’t abandon your CMS just because you can get a better deal elsewhere. It’s not like switching an electricity supplier to get a better rate. Just moving from one CMS platform to another is unlikely to resolve the content management issues you’ve been experiencing. You need to think about which problems you’re going to solve then pick the processes and technologies that will address these.

FatWire’s rescue package doesn’t make a business case to move away from Vignette or Interwoven, but it does put the product on the shortlist if you are migrating. For dynamic-driven Java websites, you have to consider FatWire, but it’s not a shorlist of one. Remember, open source products don’t have licence costs either.

So let’s commend FatWire for their marketing effort, and if you’re looking to migrate from a platform other that those mentioned, ask FatWire if they’ll cut you the same deal. But don’t trade in your existing CMS just to get a better price. Address your issues, conduct due diligence and pick a product that meets your requirements.

A couple of useful links:

Philippe Parker on FatWire, Interwoven, Vignette | 16 June 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Ditch useless content

Historically, web content management and records management have been at two different ends of the content management spectrum: web was all about time-to-market while records were about defining what you could get away with deleting. As web has increasingly become a channel for storing and sharing business-critical content (both within and beyond the firewall), you need to consider how long you can afford to hold onto your web content for.

Typically, retention policies are based on regulatory requirements, but it’s also a matter of reducing clutter. Most information we have at our disposal is useless: getting rid of it is going to help you get to useful content far more quickly.

So how do you sift wheat from chaff and decide what should stay and what should go? You have a number of options:

1. Stock-take

Spider your website every six months to get the last updated date for every page. Assign someone to go through every page that’s over six months old and decide if it’s valuable. If it is, update its last updated date; if not, remove it.

Pros: simple to implement.

Cons: a time-consuming and pretty blunt instrument.

2. Rolling assessments

Slightly more effective than a six-monthly stock take is a rolling approach, which you can do by setting a workflow status in your CMS to alert you to review each piece of content six months after its been published. The review cycle is therefore becomes business as usual rather than an arduous project.

Pros: spreads the workload, covers content that isn’t spider-able (such as reserved, non-public content).

Cons: still treats all content as equal, irrespective of its real value.

3. Pre-classification

Use either of the above methods in combination with metadata attached to the content. When you first publish your content, classify it as strategic or tactical. You can also add classifications for legal purposes (such as content covered under the data protection act). The different classifications then attract different review cycles: you review strategic content every year but tactical content after 6 weeks. You can add as many classifications as suit your needs and tie them to content types automatically within the CMS; for example, research publications are always strategic while press releases are always tactical. You can also automate the removal of these pieces of content using the CMS workflow.

Pros: flexible, extendable approach to retention; simple to implement with editorial guidance.

Cons: you’ll probably need to do an initial stock take of your existing content in order to perform the initial classification.

You still need to decide how you archive your web content: do you simply delete a page completely, or do you archive off a section of the site to a flat-file copy so that you can refer to it if necessary?

Whether you archive or delete, removal of useless content is an essential activity for all large website owners. Implementing a web content retention policy will bring real benefits to your organisation beyond the world of compliance. Less clutter brings easier content management, simpler information architecture and better access to relevant information for your user base. It’s an essential de-tox, so get deleting!

Key reading:

TK Train – Is Your Company Clueless? A 10-Point Checklist

Philippe Parker on Metadata | 2 June 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Promoting social media internally

Why do so many organisations struggle to implement social media effectively for internal use? Is it because they’re seen as too costly, a fad, or a distraction from real work? Why do so many of these platforms – often predominantly designed for business use – thrive on the web but struggle for a foothold within the corporate firewall?

It appears to me that organisations try to introduce too much web 2.0 culture into these projects while continuing to have rigid expections.

The objectives for social media on the web are emergent: they are the result of uncoordinated initiatives, with the benefits only becoming apparent as the site is used. Business change on the other hand is typically vision-led: there’s a clear idea of the business benefits before work starts and these are based on evidence derived from organisational learning. Moreover, on the web, adoption of new tools is viral. Within organisations, adoption is typically enforced.

Many organisational social media projects are sold to the business by middle management, early adopters who use similar tools outside the office. They believe that because a tool is widely used externally, it will be rapidly adopted internally too. This is rarely the case. The web provides a user base that far outstrips any organisation’s and staff have more pressing priorities than trying out a new technology. Moreover, executives need a concrete business case to approve a project. Saying “Twitter’s great” simply doesn’t cut it. The differences in approach are transparent:

	Objectives	Driving force
Web	Emergent	Bottom-up
Corporate	Clear	Top-down

Promoters of social media within organisations must meet pre-agreed objectives and promote the tool from the lower rungs of the management ladder. This guarantees frustration all round: project advocates believe executives are being obstructive, but executives wonder why the project isn’t achieving its business case.

You need to shift the axis. Don’t focus on the problems social technologies will solve. Compel your staff to use them as a communications channel and find out what benefit they bring. You can reduce the risk of failure by constraining your spending, so the tool is less painful to throw away, but you need top-down leadership to drive the programme or people will just focus on their day job.

A few practical steps:

Choose something that’s familiar and frequently used.
Staff need to grasp the tool’s basics quickly. If it’s overly complicated, your efforts will be invested in training rather than measuring benefits. It’s also got to be something that’s used on a daily basis. If you have a wiki on best practice, for example, it’ll get contributions for a week or two then just become forgotten about.
Make sure it’s throw-away.
To prove the concept, select something cheap or hosted, with low start-up costs. And make sure that you don’t put content or data in it that’s critical to your business strategy that you then can’t get out again.
Don’t customise it!
The world is littered with pilot projects that thought they knew better than the software before they’d used it, or tried to integrate it with other tools and turned into never-ending testing. Just run the technology as it is, in the simplest way possible. If it works, then consider how to improve it.
Engage key users.
Your trial should certainly get the executive to put their mouth where their money is. If they lead others will follow. Your sample group of users — you weren’t going to roll it out to everyone at once were you? — should include different departments so that it’s not seen as anyone else’s “baby” when you finally roll it out.
It’s a trial people must follow.
Using the new tool is not optional. Ideally, they’ll use it instead of something else, so a wiki instead of a file system, blog instead of broadcast email, micro-blog instead of instant messaging. If you think of how CRM software is typically rolled out in a business, you’ll see how important this kind of enforcement is to making adoption of the software a success.

For social media to be effective in your organisation, you can’t expect it just to be taken up by the user base. You have to drive it through. But you do need to be open-minded about what it will achieve. Hopefully, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Some further reading:

Philippe Parker on 26 May 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Support your web editorial team

It’s a pretty sure-fire bet that if your website has heavily devolved authorship, or a model where lots of authors make requests direct to a central team, that you’re going to have duplicate content, incorrect content and altogether more content than you actually need.

This is usually because few people know the content really well, while those who do are seldom in a position of sufficient authority to enforce processes and guidelines to make the website a streamlined communications tool. The communications team in charge of the site are put upon by subject experts and non-web marketing managers who insist that they need a new page, often linked to from the homepage, that promotes their unique piece of content.

Unless you have a really tough manager taking charge of the site, this spells trouble. Content is added without an over-riding communication strategy and very little content is taken away. It’s a symptom that you see most often in the public sector, where people’s fear of breaching misunderstood legislation like FOI mean that content purges are rare. Consequently website management becomes unwieldy as more and more superfluous information is piled into the CMS repository. This creates its own content management issues, but the most significant problem is lack of focus on the website.

If this is the case for your website, you need two things:

A clear objective for your site.
A clear process for dealing with duplicate content.

When you find duplicates, or a request is made to add content that resembles content which exists already, you need to ask the following questions:

Does the new content meet the website objective? If it does, process the request. If not, reject it.
Is there evidence that your audience requires the information supplied by the new content. If so, process it. If not, reject it.

If the content exists already and is fulfilling its remit but isn’t being read by your audience, you have an information architecture issue. This is the justification for promoting the content as a feature on the homepage or elsewhere on the site.

These are all basic editorial issues, but if you’re suffering from them it’s probably not because you have bad editors but because your editors have little support. You need to help them develop and communicate this very simple process and ensure that it is enforced. The clarity of your process will translate into clearer content on your website.

Philippe Parker on 21 May 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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People or software?

There’s a seemingly never-ending debate as to whether you choose your web content management software first or the team to deliver it. I’ve passed some comment on this myself in the past. It really comes down to Strategy 101. Are you looking to improve productivity or growth?

If you’re trying to improve your website’s revenue streams the software will offer you little. There are of course CMS out there that are sold by integrated marketing campaigners, and there are other CMS that offer strong personalisation capabilities. But fundamentally, it’s the concept and the design that will make your website better, not the underlying technology.

That’s not to say that you won’t make your life more difficult by picking the wrong tool; if you need to deliver personalised content with a CMS that only offers static delivery, for example. But if it takes you 20 minutes longer to produce the right content for your audience and deliver better advocacy and revenue, that’s a hindrance you may well choose to accept.

Nevertheless, CMS are fundamentally about improving editorial processes and governance. So if you’re trying to improve your content classification, link with other systems (like your LDAP directory) or make devolved authorship of your website easier, you must find the right tool to do this. If you pick the wrong product, you will be in for a world of painful customisations that will damage your operations in the longer term.

Of course, projects rarely have a single objective that’s exclusively sales or operations focussed. There is usually a weighting one way or the other, however.

If the operational side is more important, look at the software first.
If the marketing side is more important, go to an agency and ask them to recommend the CMS.
If you’re trying to do both, let the agencies and vendors decide who they want to partner with in order to deliver your requirements.

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Three little tips to reduce huff and puff

My two-year-old son is pleased to live in a house made of bricks. It affords him protection from the Big Bad Wolf.

But what the books don’t tell you is that while piglets 1 and 2 were sheltered by their less than robust housing, piglet 3 faced rocketing costs, toil, tears and the emergent threat of swine flu.

In the seldom-told sequel, pigs 1 and 2 are forced to vacate the house that was designed for one small piglet rather than three growing hogs. They lack the skill and resources to build their own brick houses and end up destitute and living in fear of Tom the piper’s son.

As an architect, piglet 3’s end vision is certainly the right one — or would be if he foresees having to accommodate his two brothers. But in order to fulfil that vision you need the skills, resources and time.

If you’ve an immediate problem finding the right shelter for your content, then long-term strategic planning for a robust future vision is likely to be the wrong approach. You need to find a quick way to protect your resources, assess the situation then plan your next step. You’re unlikely to face a fatal threat – it’ll just be lupine bluster – and even less likely to have enough time and money to mitigate against the problem anyway. Start building, see if it works and, if it doesn’t, tear it down again. Being able to manage even a small amount of your content in a robust way is better than just having a visionary strategy.

Those three tips:

Choose two high-value objectives; one that should be simple to achieve and the other likely to be complicated.
Select a technology to deliver these objectives that is in your existing skill set and technology stack. Only buy licences required to meet the project objectives.
Implement the project as quickly as possible and evaluate the success or otherwise six months later.

ECM doesn’t have to be a swine to implement. As long as you don’t try to go the whole hog from the start you’ll avoid making a pig’s ear of the project and be sure to bring home the bacon. It’s a ham-fisted analogy, but it’s no fairy tale.

Further reading on the failings of web strategy:

Philippe Parker on Fairy Tales | 15 May 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Persona non grata

These days, most content-managed websites are familiar with the concept of user-centric design. You don’t present your information in a way that mirrors your organisation; you focus on your audience’s requirements and how they can meet their goals on your website.

But how should you go about this design process? There are a bewildering array of techniques that fall under the general heading of usability.

At the most basic level, you can employ an expert. Someone with extensive experience of designing customer-focussed websites is going to be of a lot more value than a non-specialist. This is a quick way to get up and running.

To give the specialist some structure, you should provide heuristics about what you want your site to achieve. The expert can then analyse your site against these heuristics and tell you if it’s likely to meet your objectives.

This is still pretty subjective stuff, so the next step would be to develop persona: constructed character profiles which represent the kind of visitors you have on your site. You can then test your site’s objectives against these user profiles.

A more tangible way of doing this is to test the objectives against real people: recruit people from your user base and test their interaction with your site in a lab, or using a multivariate testing tool. There are many agencies which conduct this user testing, but it’s often difficult to get enough users to be truly representative sample.

Probably the most solid basis for user-centred design is to consider your website traffic analytics: click-throughs, bounce rates and page hot spots. This requires considerable investment in technology and analysis. These techniques all bring value, but with diminishing returns based on the effort and cost you need to commit.

Which one is right for you? The table below provides a very cursory guide.

Type of website	Testing technique
Simple web presence where web is not a business channel Do these sites even exist anymore?	Expert design
Brochureware: marketing-driven, but not the primary selling channel.	Heuristic evaluation
Large, content-driven news or information sites.	Persona development
Complex regulatory information or self-service intranet / extranet.	User testing
eCommerce / point-of-sale website.	Analytics-based

All the techniques will provide you with some return on investment, but it’s only the more complex or commercially-driven content that’s likely to benefit from serious user testing or analytics.

Some further reading on usability and persona development:

Philippe Parker on Persona | 13 May 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Is SharePoint viable as a cheap ECM?

Many organisations acquire Microsoft SharePoint as a tool to manage all their organisational knowledge: documents, wiki, web. As such it serves as a cheaper alternative to the top of the line enterprise content management products. It’s certainly cheaper to implement if you just run it as out-of-the-box as possible.

It also addresses the widespread issue of how you manage version control of documents that then need to be published directly to a website, which is why so many mid to upper tier web content management vendors provide SharePoint “connectors”: Morello and Tridion are good examples.

You need to take care before asserting that SharePoint is true ECM, however. It offers practically no document automation, no business process modelling and poor integration to other applications, particularly if they’re not Microsoft based. What you get from SharePoint is a collaborative document repository that offers you pretty limited web publishing capabilities. You wouldn’t want to use it to drive a busy transactional website.

You also need to look at your website’s publishing model before considering SharePoint in any context. The SharePoint – WCM model is best suited to a very devolved authoring group publishing what’s essentially extranet-type content. If you’re publishing marketing copy, you need a specialist team of copy writers and a centralised platform for publication.

SharePoint is undoubtedly cheaper than implementing true ECM, but you get what you pay for. Before you buy, make sure that:

You only want to integrate with other Microsoft software packages.
Your audience will relate to content being produced by a wide group of authors.
You require minimal automation of business process through the website.

Philippe Parker on Morello, SDL-Tridion, SharePoint | 11 May 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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My CMS vendor just got acquired; should I panic?

It’s all the rage for the CMS community; OpenText is acquiring Vignette.

What does this mean for clients of the two companies?

RedDot has been the web content management offering from OpenText for the last few years. It’s a pretty basic tool compared to Vignette, but this has distinct advantages: friendly user interface, quicker to implement, generally cheaper to develop basic functionality. I expect that RedDot will continue to be sold, but that there will be minimal product development. It will probably serve as a cheaper basic WCM in the same way as Alterian market Immediacy as a cheaper alternative to Morello.

The big challenge for the new company will be how to consolidate and exploit LiveLink and Vignette’s core content management offering, VCM. The offering that OpenText should be providing is end-to-end content management from documents and business process to web, but it’s going to be a substantial task to provide this through two pieces of software that are so established. LiveLink does the trick with documents and VCM does it with complex web content. But this certainly doesn’t mean that the two fit together neatly.

A significant benefit for OpenText is the acquisition of Vignette portal (VAP). This will enable OpenText to market web applications rather than just content-driven websites. Again, there will probably have to be some significant work done on the API level to LiveLink to turn this into a fully SOA-enabled platform. Nevertheless, if you’re doing business via the web — and surely everyone is these days — then a portal offering is a necessity for any enterprise content management vendor.

OpenText will be able to offer a product suite to match any of its competitors. But it will be a suite, not an integrated platform. Indeed the company has a poor track record in integrating its product suite: Gauss and ObTree anyone? Even RedDot stands pretty much alone from LiveLink. Oracle, despite its many acquisitions, has a far smoother integration of document and web content management, as does Interwoven.

So what does this mean for you if you’re about to buy? You still need to be wary of LiveLink’s web credentials; this is unlikely to improve for some time as the company attempts to make the various products work together smoothly. And if you’re about to buy RedDot, bargain hard, because I think the prices are likely to come down.

A few other thoughts on the acquisition:

Philippe Parker on Morello, Oracle, RedDot, Vignette | 7 May 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Stand and deliver

Adriaan Bloem points to the downtime on Oracle’s website following its acquistion of Sun as an indicator that dynamic delivery is generally unsatisfactory. Certainly that website looked like it needed a decent application server on Monday. I wonder where they could get one.

The static vs. dynamic delivery debate is specific to the kind of content you’re producing. Generally, dynamic delivery is well-suited to:

Time-critical content, such as news or user-generated content.
Content that requires lots of automatic relationships and “see also” type links, including product catalogues. This is easier to generate through dynamic queries than it is through a complex relational static publishing model. This is a particular strength of Vignette.
Segmentation and personalistion of content; a strength of FatWire. It can be really hard to deliver content aimed at specific users if you deploy static publishing, although SDL-Tridion has a go by implementing custom server tags into the application server layer.

More generally, you need to weigh up whether you need a dynamic model because you’re publishing lots of content that needs to be up to date, or a static model because you want to guarantee that the content will continue to be served. Either way, you need to be sure that you can change or remove content quickly as well as publish it, and you should follow best practice for delivery performance:

Ensure caching is in place and decent parameters are set; use a CDN if you have a global audience or lots of very large media files.
Optimise your images, CSS and JavaScript and try not to have too many of these being called from a single page.
Use compression techniques, such as GZIP delivery.
Ensure your CMS gives you a tool to purge your cache when you need to.

If Oracle are really concerned about their own website performance, expect them to buy Akamai some time soon.

Philippe Parker on FatWire, Oracle, Peformance, SDL-Tridion, Vignette | 22 April 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Setting standards

CMS vendors are under constant pressure to improve their products. They add features their competitors lack (or that are perceived as lacking in their own product), provide what they hope will be prettier and more intuitive administration interfaces and increasingly integrate with other applications.

Increasingly we see vendors trying to make their products meet industry-defined standards. This could be CMIS, ECM maturity, or feature tables that are readily comparable.

But how do these standards help you as a buyer or end-user of the CMS? A multi-lingual installation package or a product rated as highly mature do not guarantee a successful solution to your content management requirements. I applaud the vendors who are trying to improve the technology, but I don’t think the analysts and architects would be doing their clients a good service by telling them that these standards somehow make the products better.

As a client selecting or supporting your content management software, you need to think about the tasks that are most critical (e.g. must run on my infrastructure) and most frequent. If your CMS is easy to install but you can’t tell when content you’ve published will go live, you have a really serious problem. If your workflow requirements can’t be met, it doesn’t matter if the content sits in a JCR-compliant repository.

You need to focus on your own day-to-day needs, not on the industry telling you what a great product it offers. Set your own standards and be sceptical about other people’s.

Philippe Parker on Standards | 31 March 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Content type essentials

The concept of content type is so fundamental to CMS that you could argue any system lacking this definition really isn’t a CMS at all: it’s a blogging platform or page builder.

At the most basic level, content types are a classification tool used to distinguish groups of content. Typically, websites will have site sections, news stories, reports, and so on. But this basic classification is handled easily by metadata: just tagging a page as a “news story” and using that tag as a link to other news stories is very straightforward. It’s not really making any use of the content type metaphor.

So what are the benefits of content types?

1. They provide structure.

Larger sites need structure for several reasons: it helps contributors to enter the right kind of information (title, summary, event dates); it helps them to put content into the right areas of the website or intranet; and, it assures consistency in site design across pages that have the same function but different content.

2. They scale the system.

Being able to distinguish between a job, an event and a personal profile is essential if you have a large site with lots of contributors. Content types help with the information architecture of your site for public users and contributors alike; they enable you to introduce navigation that you just would be very difficult achieve without this concept.

3. They enable devolved ownership.

Most websites are “owned” by a marketing or communications team who are keen to ensure house style across the main publication, but who would be happy for other departments to own and maintain their own content that doesn’t require editorial review. If you don’t have content types, it’s a pretty difficult task to set up areas of the site that one department can contribute to without having free reign to change everything, particularly if you want to ensure that public website navigation doesn’t simply reflect your departmental structures. If you have structured content that doesn’t require editorial intervention (press releases, jobs, events, etc.) you can simply assign ownership of these content types to internal teams without compromising the editorial quality of your overall website.

If you’re struggling with findability or devolving ownership of content on your site, there’s a good chance that it’s because you’re lacking the structure to cope with the increasing size and complexity of your site content. Revisiting your defined content types could well be a good place to start.

Philippe Parker on Metadata | 21 January 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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How to get better CMS support

Janus Boye recently proposed that you cancel your maintenance contracts in order to save money. But before you think of this as a great money-spinner, there are a number of key issues you must consider.

Many maintenance contracts are tied into the licence agreement; cancel your maintenance and you lose the right to use the software. In this case, the vendor may not sue you, but how honest would you be in denying the company its cash?
If something goes seriously wrong with the core product — you discover a security flaw or an issue with the schema — then how do you fix it? Third parties will be extremely reluctant to fix this and any changes to the core product are likely to make re-entering support (when upgrading, for example) extremely complex. We’re talking low likelihood, high impact risks. The question is, do you want to tolerate these or transfer them to someone else?
A good relationship with the vendor is still preferable to a poor one. If you take all money and services away, what incentive do they have to provide you with a good service? The analogy shouldn’t be about not paying your insurance premium; it should be about having to return to work with the person you had a regretful fling with at the office Christmas party…

So what can you do to improve your CMS support?

Educate yourself: have procedures to handle common issues (restarting the servers, clearing the cache, etc.). Train internal staff to deal with these and provide procedures to out-of-hours support teams, be they internal or at your hosting company. This will cater for the vast majority of issues that don’t need any further investigation.
Get to the root of the problem. Are you unhappy with your software (or implementation), or simply with your supplier’s responsiveness. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the product, you should be selecting a new one. If the issue is service or cost then renegotiate the SLA, don’t throw it out.
Find someone who’ll support you better. If the software vendor cannot demonstrate their ability to meet your service level requirements, then ask them to recommend someone who will.
Negotiate your licences so that you get what you pay for. The help desk should be like any additional module that you’d have to purchase with the product. Why should you pay for something you don’t use?

Yes, there’s a downturn and you’re under pressure to save money. But you’re probably under more pressure to ensure that projects and services continue to be delivered. Why would you jeopardize these for the sake of a line item already in next year’s budget?

Focus on developing a good relationship with your supplier and you should find the quality of their service improves too.

Philippe Parker on 15 January 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Is taxonomy dead?

An argument about taxonomy has been brewing between two parties who both know what they’re talking about: Theresa Regli at CMS Watch and Patrick Lambe of Organising Knowledge. At the end of last year, CMS Watch proposed that “Taxonomies are dead. Long live metadata!”. As a taxonomist, Patrick Lambe took great umbrage.

I think that byline was a bit facile, but the article does prompt a serious debate about where taxonomy and more particularly expert taxonomists are heading. When organisations think web 2.0, they think wikis, user-generated content and tagging. They don’t think about well-organised content. Web 2.0 implies the death of expert taxonomy rather than the death of taxonomy itself.

People just don’t want taxonomists; they think they can organise content for themselves. While this may be true, it’s unfortunately also true that they just can’t organise content for anyone else. This creates a particular problem for systems which are dependent on finding very specific information: intranets, for example.

If you need your audience to be able to retrieve information reliably, don’t look to “audience development officers“: recognise that taxonomists do have an expertise that you’ll find useful. However, not all information needs to be structured, so feel free to challenge any taxonomist who tells you otherwise.

Philippe Parker on Taxonomy | 14 January 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Crystal balls are there to be broken

Guy Westlake, a senior product marketing manager at Vignette, has gazed into his crystal ball for trends and technologies in 2009. This is certainly worth a read, as Vignette continue to have some excellent product features and are one of the driving forces in both WCM and portal software development.
Of course there’s an element here of Vignette promoting its own product set — a case of gazing at navels rather than crystal balls? — but I hope Guy won’t mind if that I contradict some of his predictions. I do agree with quite a few!

1. Enterprise 2.0 takes off

The use of web 2.0-style tools (micro-blogging, RSS, tagging, etc.) as part of daily communication within a business should be a no-brainer, but many organisational cultures are way behind the curve. Early adopters are reaping the rewards of improved knowledge sharing, but the ethos of control, hierarchy and compliance hamper efforts to implement Enterprise 2.0. How do you convince people who send email attachments to half a dozen people for approval that there’s a better way of communicating if they can’t see beyond their clogged up inboxes?
One compelling case for web 2.0 tools is their use in project management: posting on project status with comments for feedback, using shared calendars and discussion boards for meetings, building networks of friends across departmental and organisational boundaries. But if you’re used to out-of-the-box services, be prepared! Implementing these kind of tools within the firewall is often considerably more complex: LDAP integration is just the first hurdle you’re likely to face.

2. Life in the cloud

So many cloud-based applications offer real benefits at seemingly ever-falling costs that the cloud appears to be the saviour of the web, particularly when recession hangs over IT budgets. But security questions remain: how sure can you be that information you want to keep in your organisation remains there? Businesses will have to become a lot more savvy about encryption methods before they start to really take advantage of what the cloud has to offer.
Nevertheless, those applications that are external to the firewall — including email — are ripe for cloud computing and I expect we’ll see many organisations taking “a punt” on these services just from a cost perspective.

3. Web 2.0 in the financial services sector

This is a banking compliance officer’s worst nightmare: anyone posting all kinds of comments to a bank’s public website. However, financial services have been the trail-blazers for web 2.0 on internal applications and I think we’ll see them pushing these applications to the public too.
The question is: what is the killer app? Social comparison sites for mortgages, savings and the like similar to Trip Advisor in the holiday industry are bound to become more prominent. But retaill banking is going to have to think long and hard about applications that they can find for online social media to gain market penetration.

4. Personalisation and the rise of ‘My Web’

Personalisation has not been the trend for web content and I see no evidence that it will become one. Personalisation has proven many times to be both costly and ineffective. The trend has been and will continue to be “our web” rather than “mine”.

Even the oft-cited Amazon example isn’t enclosing the individual in their own world: it’s making recommendations based on what other people bought who bought the same product and there’s a heavy use of communal rating functionality. I expect we’ll see more in the way of sites suggesting links other people followed (even Google is moving this way) rather than offering visitors options to configure the kind of content they want to see.

5. The future of online media is video

This is a marketeer’s dream. Unfortunately, the market is willing but not yet ready. There are significant challenges in engaging users with video based on current browsing habits. If you’re online at work, watching video is still viewed as at best anti-social and at worst as skiving. Watching at home still isn’t the experience that it should be, sat a few inches away from a small monitor displaying an even smaller video. Video on mobile devices is improving significantly however, so if mobile bandwidth prices start to fall, expect to see a rise in video clips for handheld devices. What’s more, these devices are likely to be far less effective at blocking out this content than most PC browsers.

6. The integrated brand experience

There’s is a slightly chicken and egg situation going on with multi-channel delivery. Sites won’t develop for small audience shares and those audiences won’t visit sites that don’t cater for them. I expect that we’ll see a few niche players here — probably around news and software sites for mobile devices — before we see any real obvious example (in Europe, at least) of business catering for multiple channels.

7. Social media – what next?

Social media has been about individual sites allowing lots of people to comment and contribute. The next step (we’re already seeing on many sites including BBC news) is for the site themselves to be social and provide links to resources they don’t control. I think this is a really good thing. For too long, organisations have focussed on enclosing themselves in their own “enterprise” models rather than seeing themselves as part of the web. Now they’ll begin sharing content and resources with each other more freely in order to become the “hub” that visitors come to on a regular basis. It’s best to be the daily starting point for browsing rather than the infrequent end point.

8. Semantic Web

Has the semantic web lost all meaning? It’s pushed so heavily by vendors, but how many compelling examples are there of it? Some of the technology is exciting, but let’s see a compelling business proposition for it.

Tidying up your content, organising it better and making it more search-friendly are still more effective ways of improving your website or intranet than the implementation of a semantic engine.

If the crystal ball isn’t right, what is?

I’m not disagreeing out of hand with Guy (apart from on personalisation and possibly the semantic web), but if I disbelieve his predictions, what do my own tarot cards propose?

There will be more opportunities to reach new audiences across multiple channels, but a correspondingly increased need to justify the costs of these new channels.
Intranet projects will struggle for attention. Challenges and costs associated with application integration in comparison to a cloud-based model will cause many internal implementations to be delayed. The focus will turn instead to communication beyond the firewall for market penetration and retention.
Websites will become social, sharing content not just from their own resources but from off-brand and off-message sites too, through the increased use of RSS.

Let’s review next year and see whether tarot is more effective than a crystal ball.

Philippe Parker on Adoption, Vignette | 19 December 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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When search is a good way to navigate

If your site has thousands of pages of content that you’re struggling to organise, it’s pretty tempting to scrap your CMS-driven navigation structures and just provide your visitors with a search-driven interface instead. You can achieve this in two ways.

Firstly, by providing a simple search box. After all, this is the way most people find new information through Google. Secondly, by using a search tool to push similar content to users; for example the right-hand column of this page provides links to pages that are classified under different themes. But before you view search as some kind of panacea for all your information architecture woes, let’s pause to reconsider these two methods.

In the first case, how do you know that the search results presented by Google are the most relevant pages to your query? Google has no real benchmark. Then weigh up how much effort people put into ensuring their content is optimised to appear at the top of the search results and then ask yourself what you’d have to do to ensure that relevant content for every search a user undertakes.

In the second case, consider that actually I’ve already (very loosely) made decisions about navigation by tagging every post. This is almost the same effort as organising the content into folder structures as you would in a CMS. In fact, for sites with lots of content it can be more difficult to tag all the content than to drop it into a folder structure; the folders provide a more complete classification metaphor that’s easier for people with less expert knowledge to implement.
So how do you decide when search is better for navigation than in a CMS? Here are my suggested criteria:

You have the money.
Implementing faceted search technologies can be significantly more expensive than using standard content management system functionality. Day rates for leading product professional services are often relatively high, there are licence costs and there’s an additional cost of integration, particularly if you need to tie a security model into the search tool.
You have few content types.
But you have lots of content. Structured navigation from search works well where you have similar kinds of content, with similar structures against which the search engine can execute straightforward queries. A product catalogue is an obvious example. The tool can filter on price, format, location, etc. which have definitive and distinct values.
Your content is distinct.
Categories need to be unique; semantic tools aren’t really advanced enough yet to tell you that apple is a fruit not an iPhone when displayed with orange unless orange is the network provider. Moreover, your pages need to be called something readily identifiable. If you have ten pages called “Help” or “Contact Us”, how will the search tool know which is the relevant resource for the site visitor?
Linking is obvious.
If you use search to provide your navigation, you relinquish editorial control, so it must be clear why pages in the navigation are related. On a medical site, for example, you might link to other conditions treated with the same drug. However, as soon as you’re trying to tell people something you can get in trouble if you automate. An example I often use is a page about health advice for eggs: should this link to information about required protein intake (i.e. eggs are good for you) or about cholesterol (i.e. eggs are bad for you)? Or should you exercise some editorial discretion and explain about balanced diets? There are few search engines that could perform the navigation required to achieve the latter example.

Practically, it’s generally simpler to use CMS to navigate, with a search option to help people who are stuck. The advantage of CMS-driven navigation is that the editorial control you can exercise should help you to push visitors to your site along a route you want them to take. However, if you’re happy to let your intrepid visitors explore your content, and you’ve nothing in particular you want to promote to them, then search engines can be a viable means to provide navigation.

My final analogy is that CMS-driven navigation is like a library, while search-driven navigation is more like a bookstore. In a library you’ve preplanned how visitors can find specific information. In a bookstore you’re encouraging them to browse, but they may never find what they came in for.

Philippe Parker on Taxonomy | 15 December 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Shortlisting your CMS

Having asked yourself what problems your content management system should address, you reach the stage in the selection exercise where you can shortlist some products. This does NOT mean going to Gartner, Butler or Forrester and picking whatever’s in the magic quadrant. That is a recipe for expensive mistakes.

There will be a lot of software on the market that can help to overcome your problems. You can whittle these down by placing other constraints on your selection process.

Due diligence: have you involved the right people?

Your project will need buy-in from various stakeholders. If you haven’t got their buy-in by the time you shortlist products, you’ll be facing all kinds of political issues even if you pick exactly the right tool. But you need input from all the relevant parties. What benefit do you get from excluding people in communications or marketing, hands-on content editors, technical support and development (whether these are in-house or a trusted service provider), the people in charge of your IT strategy, and of course, procurement. Not only do all these parties have a stake in the selection process; they’ll be able to contribute something constructive too.

How long will you keep the technology for?

Clearly your shouldn’t be looking to keep the technology for longer than the duration of your web or content strategy. If you’re planning to keep something for longer than you know what you’re going to do with it, you’ll probably get into a mess. So, if you have a clear strategy, you’ll want a product with a roadmap to match. If you’re just trying to satisfy short-term goals, you’ll probably want something that’s easy to deploy rather than highly extensible. Having an awareness of how long you’ll want to keep the software for will also help to inform your business case.

Do you really need just a single content management system?

Firstly, you need to understand the limitations of a CMS; it won’t do everything you need. You may need an additional search engine, it won’t satisfy eCommerce requirements, it probably won’t allow much in the way of personalisation, forms created in it will be pretty limited, it’s unlikely to stream live audio or video… these are all best served by distinct applications (which can mean a difficult integration project). So manage your stakeholders’ expectations and constrain your project objectives.

Now consider whether a single CMS is right for your organisations. Are different departments contributing to the CMS likely to need to share content or code? Or could they each have their own devolved system with a common interface for delivery, such as a portal? Will there be licencing or training cost benefits from a having a single CMS?

Work out your budget

Figure out what you can afford, then build your business case. As a rule of thumb, in order to get something workable and fully tested, you’ll need to spend upwards of 75% of your budget on services as opposed to software and database licences. This is likely to cross a whole range of software off your long-list right away.

Baseline your technology

Why does your CMS need to be Java or .Net? Is this your existing in-house skill set? If not, do you really want to invest in re-training? If you have no in-house team, do you really care what technology the CMS is built in? Shouldn’t it just be the cheapest available? Java and .Net are useful if you know you’re going to have a number of integration exercises with applications in those technologies. Otherwise your technological prerequisites may be a costly red herring.

Invite both software vendors and integration partners together

Encourage all participants to do pitch together. In my experience, no web CMS vendor has sufficient in-house experience to address all the services issues in a web project: information architecture, interface design, even systems integration. Conversely, the only services companies you’ll find who know a product inside out will be those who have ex-employees from the vendor. And even then, these developers won’t know the product roadmap or the best practice that the software supplier has gleaned from its many clients over the years. Get them together and have a happy menage-à-trois.

You now have your requirements and your constraints. You should be in a better positioni to shortlist suppliers. If you don’t know where to start in drawing up this list, you can contact us.

Philippe Parker on 12 December 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Basics of organising web content

There are a bewildering array of resources available on information architecture, user experience and interface design, so I just wanted to make a very quick post on how to approach the organisation of your web content.

Identify key user types (personas)
Identify key tasks they need to undertake (user journeys)
Develop navigation to enable journeys (site maps)
Develop user interface that will enable users to complete journeys (wire-frames)

Main advantages of doing things this way:

You’re not trying to fit in existing content unless it’s actually useful to your users.
You can identify content that’s missing easily.

There are more useful IA definitions at iaonesheeters.com

Philippe Parker on Interface Design, Persona, Taxonomy | 11 December 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why would you put FAQs on a website?

To be able to tell people that FAQ content is available on your site.

Who do FAQs help?

Only the person who needs to claim that the content is on the site.

Why don’t FAQs help visitors to your site?

Because visitors to your site don’t care whether their question has been asked by anyone else or not. All they want to do is accomplish a task.

But my FAQs are representative of what all visitors are asking, so don’t they bring value?

Think of it another way. Your site is providing a user manual for your services. By providing FAQs you’re offering them that user manual without a contents page. Is that helpful?

But isn’t it helpful to provide what most people want first?

Of course, but if I don’t want the most obvious answers, I’ll give up and go to another provider: either through a competitor website or I’ll pick up the telephone and harass your call centre. That probably defeats the purpose of your website.

Why is browsing FAQs a flawed argument?

Let’s say you’re describing your arrangements for dealing with business partners. If I want to become a partner, I should follow links to Partners > Becoming our partner. Why would I trawl through a long list of questions in order to find the right one. I want a simple and obvious path to the information I need.

Why can’t visitors just search the FAQs?

They’ll probably do this if you offer no other way to the information. But the success of their searches will depend on how well and how consistently you classify the questions and on having a really good search engine that will pull out relevant information.

Isn’t it easy to manage FAQs?

It might be easy to add an FAQ, but it’s extremely difficult to manage them. You’ll need to check that similar content doesn’t already exist, just framed with a different question. You’ll need to check that you’re removing questions that are obsolete, or simply not being asked any more. And you’ll need to ensure that questions are presented in the right order according to your site visitors’ behaviour.

So is there anything good about FAQs?

Not in their standard format of unsorted lists of questions and short answers.

So what should I do?

Review what people are contacting you about over other channels. This information should probably be on your website. Does it exist already? If it exists, is it being adequately promoted? Undertake some usability studies challenging people to find the information. What do you learn about your site navigation from this? If the content is prominent, is it well-written? Are people finding the content and misunderstanding it?

Isn’t this post just stating the obvious?

Yes, but it’s amazing how many people think their website needs FAQs but they never ask themselves why.

Philippe Parker on Taxonomy | 5 December 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Questions to ask before selecting a web content management system

This is a brain dump of open questions that I’ve asked previously when speaking to clients about their websites and their requirements for a content management system. This assumes that the technical prerequisites are being addressed elsewhere.

You can pix and mix these questions as you feel are appropriate to your context, but generally it takes about an hour to get through these with one or two people at a time. If you need to run larger workshops, I don’t think this approach would work.

Vision and Objectives

Is there a content strategy?
What goals are currently being met?
How do you want to interact with your customers?
How much integration is required with other systems?
Which services should be provided through the website?
What is “the Vision” from your team’s perspective?

Suppliers

Who is creating / editing content? With what frequency?
Who plans content?
Where / what is the content you are responsible for and how is it used?
Who do you work with during the content creation process? How effective are these relationships?
How do you collect information to write your content?
Do you usually know about other initiatives in the organisation and how they affect what you’re working on?
Do other departments see the documents you produce? Do you see theirs?
How do you handle authors working on content that may be published simultaneously to different parts of the site? (i.e. ensure content is the same when it needs to be and different when it needs to be).

Inputs

What are your current content creation processes? Which are effective / ineffective? Why?
What are the problems / frustrations you face in creating content?
What features would you like to see in an authoring, CMS or publishing tool?
How are documents created? Do you use or templates or style sheets?
What tools do you use in authoring? How effective are they?
What is the format of the content you create? What sources is it dependent on?
How do you add metadata?
Do you re-use content from elsewhere on the site?
How do you manage demand for content from customers?

Process

What do you do to control documents? Version / access controls?
How do you handle sign-off / review?
Who edits / transforms content?
How is it classified?
Who relates content across the site?
What workflow review is involved?
How will the content be reused / archived / reviewed?
What works well with the current process?
What are we trying to improve?
What sort of reporting is required?

Outputs

What format does the content need to be in? (Accessibility levels, email, print / DTP, mobile, .CSV)
Where is it stored / distributed / aggregated?
What templates are required?
How much content should be reusable?
What extra site functionality are you interested in seeing?
How much Interaction or interoperability is required with other sites (e.g. client extranets)?
What requirements do you have for searching?

Customers

Who do you consider your target audience?
How much interaction do you have with customers (feedback, surveys, consultations)?
Is there a need for personalised / targeted outputs?
What are your customers’ key areas of interest?
Do you have access to website statistics? How do you respond to these?
What attracts customers to the store?
What information on the site helps your customers get their job done?
What types of information do they look for in a document?
How much information do they find useful?
When do they use the content (on one-off projects or on a recurring basis?)
What do they like best about the content? What do you like least?
How do your customers prefer to receive information?

Philippe Parker on 2 December 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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One hand knowing what the other is doing

I have no idea whether left-brain vs. right-brain theories have any physiological grounding. Nevertheless, the concept that some people are more guided by intuitive feelings and others by rational judgement appears to be commonly-held.

These contradictory temperaments can be seen in departmental cultures when deploying content management software.

On the one hand, IT departments consider CMS to be applications that need to be fully-documented robust applications that conform to all kinds of architectural principles. Since the software will never meet all these standards, they have to be built by internally until some kind of compliant behemoth is unleashed.

On the other hand, the communications team expects the CMS to simply do everything out of the box using basic intuition. After all, Word is used to create and publish content, so why shouldn’t a web CMS do the same?

Of course suppliers are striving for a happy medium, where applications are robust and extendable but have a great deal of functionality off-the-shelf. But I think there are simple and important messages to communicate to both parties:

Even Word doesn’t provide you with the tools you need right away. More experienced users need to create templates that are on brand and conform to your processes. In the case of CMS, this needs a trained developer.

Most CMS are not designed to be heavily customisable applications. They’re meant to perform a simple function: enable the right people to publish the right content to the right places in a timely fashion. If you need to do more than this, then a CMS is one piece in the jigsaw puzzle, rather than being a piece of software that you can extend by yourself.

The message is to keep it simple. Pick the technology that meets a technical basis defined by IT, but only go to the absolute essentials (e.g. Java or .Net or LAMP, XML / web services, static or dynamic, LDAP compliant). This gives you a shortlist of products which the communications team then gets to choose from, focussing on all the features you get out of the box.

And if you’re tempted to tinker with the final product choice, don’t. You’ll be in for a world of pain when it comes to upgrade or roll out to other parts of the business.

The right CMS for your business is one where there are no quibbles over who owns it. If you let just one side of the brain choose, you’ll never satisfy the other.

Philippe Parker on psychology | 29 October 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Your links need to be quality content too

BBC News is one of the most popular sites on the web. It’s steeped in the high journalistic principles that have driven the corporation for the last 80-odd years or so.

The BBC can struggle to innovate on its website however. Since it has such a large audience and generally well-organised structure, it has become a sort of de facto standard for presentation of content-rich sites. Changing this standard makes visitors nervous. Perhaps more significantly, the corporation’s funding is significantly targeted on producing TV and radio rather than web, despite many of the corporation’s multi-platform aspirations. Innovation in the browser faces stringent public critique.

Nevertheless, there are experiments in improving web delivery. Recently, particularly for viewers in the UK, the site has seen an increase in the use of embedded video delivered via its iPlayer. There’s an obvious attempt to make the website more multimedia, but it does beg the question, will people watch video in a browser at work? People scan the news, particularly on the web. They’re a great deal less likely to sit and watch a video.

Then you have the issue of external links. The web is, after all, about a worldwide information network, so your own information becomes richer as you link to content beyond your site. The problem is that you don’t own that content, which means that it can say things that you disagree with or that might make you look less than impartial (important in the case of the BBC).

Consequently, the BBC has a disclaimer for any external links. But it does beg the question, why have they introduced inline links to Wikipedia?

Clearly Wikipedia is very Web 2.0 for the BBC marketing team, at the heart of the social web. But that brings real problems for a sites whose content is supposed to be reliable. Wikipedia is inherently unreliable, even though it is peer-reviewed in extremis. The BBC has no way of checking that the biographies supplied on the site are accurate, but it treats this as additional reference information and by doing so undermines the its own journalism.

I’m a fan of the BBC News website and I recognise that the corporation struggles to fulfil both its official remit and target new markets, but the quality of your content can be measured not just by what it says and how it is written, but by where it positions itself in the web. If you reference external sites whose authority is questionable, you undermine the value of your own content.

Visitors to BBC news are looking for accurate content. By hopping on the Wikipedia bandwagon, the BBC is undermining its users’ objectives.

Philippe Parker on 27 August 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Keeping content in the system

There’s been a spate of high-profile document and data leaks in UK government recently (although it’s not confined to the public sector). Doubtless this will encourage firms like Oracle to market their information rights software, but is this really addressing the problem?

These data losses generally haven’t come from wilful hacking or from the wrong people getting access to information they shouldn’t have. They’ve come from people taking information outside the system in which it’s normally held securely. What’s provoking this?

Firstly, there’s a poor design in the software themselves.
How can we have a system that enables you to download the entire records of everyone in a pensions system? Under what circumstances would anyone want this data? Under what circumstances should they be allowed to download this data? There are very few occasions when someone would require access to such extensive data, and when they do, why don’t they just access it in the software that displays it normally? There must be a shortcoming in the software design, whether this is in the user interface or its availability across networks. This is the case for both the loss of data from DWP and MoJ. The software allowed people to perform a task that was inherently insecure; secure systems shouldn’t allow that degree of flexibility.

Secondly, there’s the way that wider security systems and processes have been designed.
What are these protecting against? If you work, as we do, for government organisations, you’ll come face to face with real difficulties in distributing information securely using existing systems. You can’t email some kinds of documents, because email systems and firewalls block them out. You can’t put them on an FTP server, because these are inherently insecure and in any case end users’ ports are blocked. You can’t use SSH, as many government networks block this protocol because they can’t monitor the encrypted data.

So you’re left with physical media (USB keys, CDs, DVDs) to transfer data around. And if you’re doing this frequently with large amounts of data, it’s tedious to keep encrypting it. On top of that, you still have to give relevant access to all the people who’re meant to have access to the documents. It’s little wonder that individuals don’t bother and simply copy things locally, even though they know they shouldn’t.

The way that systems have been implemented not only makes these security breaches possible, it actively encourages them through poor design and catering for the wrong kind of security breaches.

Systems need to be designed to keep secure content within the system. If your system is correctly designed, you shouldn’t need to take data outside it. Oracle’s approach is to say you can take the content out of the system but it needs to reference a central server in order to view it; but there are still many flaws in their approach which I won’t go into here. Since when do you have a document that you can’t control by uploading to a CMS that’s accessed over a secure connection, with relevant access privileges applied? As soon as you allow someone to download it, you’re asking for bad publicity.

We have a tendency to blame the people who circumvent the system, when it’s the system itself that’s at fault.

Philippe Parker on 26 August 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Lao Tzu, on agile development

Taoism tells us that it is practically impossible to understand the world fully. Everything we describe falls short of what it actually is, since our language is limited. We naturally want to see things as complete, but everything is part of a wider whole that we are incapable of relating accurately and completely.

The way to understand the world is through continual contemplation. We actually begin to understand by comprehending what we have not yet understood.
A waterfall approach to gathering requirements would therefore be anathema to a Taoist. How can you say a requirement is complete without understanding how it will be met, or indeed what it will look like once its complete, or if the requirement was correct to start off with?

Requirements, design and implementation are part of the same whole: what the project will deliver. Instead of engaging in a futile activity to capture every requirement before you move on to designing how you’ll meet them, you need to engage the whole team in assessing what a requirement really looks like tangibly in the target system. That means discovering the requirement, prototyping and reviewing through a series of iterations, until the feature meets its objectives. These are the principles of agile development.

The subtlety of individual requirements is almost impossible to capture in a strict, documented fashion. If you want to see your requirements met, rather than your project brief adhered too, a more contemplative and iterative approach is necessary.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on China | 21 August 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Han Fei, on content management functionality

Confucianism has long been a predominant philosophy in China, but it was opposed by Legalism, which held that individual opinion meant little in the face of the interest of the state.

In the web content management world, it is the public website that commands our exclusive attention. The only relevant question is: Is the site meeting its objectives and delivering required information and services to its visitors?

Adequate governance needs to be put in place to ensure that it is impossible to break what makes the website successful. If you allow people too much flexibility, they’ll make self-interested decisions rather than good decisions.

When a sage governs a state, he does not rely on the people to do good out of their own will. Instead, he sees to it that they are not allowed to do what is not good. If he relies on people to do good out of their own will, within the borders of the state not even ten persons can be counted on.

So, if you’ve accepted that your templates are well-designed, why would you enable people to move content around? Just give them a web-based form to enter content. It’s less glamorous for the content editor, but much more likely to produce the right effect. Similarly, provide people with enforced structures in which to classify content. This will ensure consistency and a better end-user experience. Otherwise, people will simply drop content into new website sections that they think might be more relevant, rather than those that everyone is used to getting the information from. If you decide your food is spicy, don’t give people an option to make it Mexican or Chinese or Indian. It’s spicy.

Clearly, this command-and-control approach may be difficult for some organisations to implement. But remember what Han Fei tells us: “An enlightened ruler holds up facts and discards all that is without practical value.” If your design and approach can be proven, no one in your team should be allowed to break your website by undermining these principles.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on China | 20 August 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Confucius, on user-centric design

Perhaps the longest-standing philosophical text from China known to Europeans are the Analects. These discuss filial respect and devotion, self-betterment and how the state can best exploit individual skills. There’s a running theme of humility as an essential virtue, and this is a quality that is prodigiously important in web interface design.

The sage, Confucius tells us, is not afflicted by men not knowing him, but is afflicted by not knowing men. Translate this to a website and you should see that we shouldn’t be affected by not being able to disseminate our range of services, just so long as our users can access them simply.

There’s no point in showing how artfully you can put your brand across on your website if your audience can’t use it. Consequently, you need to base your designs on real user experiences and continue to revise them based on their interactions with your site.

Start by conducting paper-prototyping to determine requirements.
Test wireframes and user journeys on real people.
Continue to monitor the design by implementing continual soft changes and evaluating their impact.

A good website responds to its audience.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on China | 19 August 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Content management lessons from China: Sun Tzu

China is in fashion. The Olympics, with its spectacular opening ceremony, has brought the Middle Kingdom and its culture to the fore. So we’re going to hop on the bandwagon by looking at some of the better-known examples of Chinese thought and consider how they might influence on web content management (WCM).

Sun Tzu, on effective management

The Art of War was a favourite text for the Reagan-ite wannabe executive who viewed business as a perpetual battle. Yet effective management is rarely about deceiving others and taking control over their realm, despite what some departmental managers may think. Indeed, Sun Tzu stresses the need for delegation as a means to enjoying more control. Management is about delivering an end product.

There are five main obstacles to success:

recklessness: consider what impact your decisions will have before you enforce them;
cowardice: don’t be afraid to implement what you know is right;
hasty temper: don’t be provoked into arguments with stakeholders or suppliers;
delicacy of honor: you don’t need to appear all-knowing; recognise your weaknesses, be open about them and engage people to help;
over-solicitude for the team: people will be unhappy during the project, but if they see that what you’re doing is right, they’ll buy into the cause.

Successful implementations are about pursuing a common objective without having to appease people along the way. So delegate responsibility to your implementation team and ensure that they enforce your decisions for you.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on China | 18 August 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Information in a bear market

Dennis D. McDonald continues to propose interesting thoughts on information management. This one – on the importance of social media in post-merger organisations – struck a particular chord with me.

A previous project I ran was to implement an internal knowledge management portal for a company that had been through several rapid mergers of some pretty small companies into a pretty large one. The company’s success is based on its staff expertise and wealth of project experience, but the full range and depth of this knowledge lay fragmented across a few people from the various entities that constituted the new whole. As a consequence, the sales team didn’t know that they could use staff who’d already engaged with a particular client, or that there were case studies for similar projects including case studies and lessons learned. The wheel was being reinvented. It was obvious that some kind of networking tool that enabled staff to identify expertise in people and projects would lend the business a helping hand and could be implemented with relative ease.

Instead, the directors decided that a search engine that could span all the company’s file servers would be more cost-effective. But how many useful results did the staff get from keyword searches? For all the typical reasons – little classification, poor naming conventions, poor security, inappropriate technology – close to none. The content was there but the information wasn’t.

Just as art only becomes art once you place it in a gallery, content only becomes information when you identify it as useful. The quality of the information, like art, is debatable, but it has no chance of being used if you don’t suggest to people that it’s useful information. Following a merger, staff need to know: these are the kind of people who work here and this is what they know about. To find out more, ask them.

Yet even in the most obvious of cases for implementing simple information management tools, their raison d’être can be by-passed. The company in question didn’t implement a networking tool and nearly two years later still doesn’t know some of its clients, the skills of many of its staff or the scope of most of its past projects. Many staff have left. Yet is the company bothered? Absolutely not.

The directors simply changed the strategy. If the sales team weren’t paying attention to certain clients or types of projects, it’s because they weren’t important enough. The strategy dictated that employees focus on bigger and better in their portfolio, as befitted the newly-merged company status. Who needs the past when you have the future?

It’s a bullish policy in a bullish market, but when things inevitably turn bearish, there’ll be a scramble to avoid repeating the mistakes of previous engagements, find people with relevant knowledge, return to reliable clients who weren’t in the big league. By then, both employees and clients could be long gone, and gleaning information from fragmentary content may well prove impossible.

While your work is easy, information has little value. As soon as your work gets tough, it’s the people and companies with the information who’ll profit.

Updated: Alan Pelz-Sharpe has also written about ECM technologies and recession.

Philippe Parker on 27 March 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Missing the SharePoint

Let me firstly qualify this post by saying that I’m not inherently anti-Microsoft. I don’t use a Mac, I do use Microsoft Windows (even the mobile version) and Office and I’m using the beta version of Office Live Workspaces. But I just can’t fathom why people choose to use SharePoint.

As a pure document repository it is mostly harmless. It follows Microsoft security models so will only show users documents from file systems and folders they should have access to. Unless you’ve been unbelievably rigorous and consistent in your file naming and metadata conventions, however, its search will be utterly useless. Just search a MOSS intranet for “agenda” if you don’t believe me. The search is also hampered by some strange behaviour when looking at external systems with case sensitive URLs, so try before you buy. No wonder Microsoft have bought Fast.

There are some nice collaboration features: user homepages, instant messaging; but these are bound up in inaccessible HTML. So are the Web Parts, Microsoft’s equivalent of Java-based portlets. This is also true of many Java portals which are heavily dependent on JavaScript functionality and HTML table layouts.

There is a big difference between SharePoint and other portals, however. Java portal technology is built to the JSR standards, notably JSR168. This means that you can take pre-developed portlets and simply expose them through your portal. You can even send these to other portals through WSRP. But not with SharePoint. It doesn’t comply with Java Content Repository standards, so you’ll struggle to put develop a service oriented architecture around it. If you needed a single point of entry for web services that you can develop in .Net, you’d have to look at BEA’s AquaLogic, not SharePoint.

So what is SharePoint for? It doesn’t fit into a service oriented architecture, uses security models from file servers, doesn’t do federated search well and isn’t built to open standards. Do you really want to put that sort of technology at the hub of your organisation?

You can try out SharePoint through the Microsoft Online Customer Portal, although you’ll need a Windows Live ID.

Philippe Parker on AquaLogic, Fast, SharePoint | 25 March 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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More enterprise myths

It’s true to say that enterprise is a loaded word: it means a lot more to some than to others. We have enterprise content management (ECM), enterprise search, enterprise portals, enterprise resource planning… People like Nicholas Carr have been railing against these all-encompassing applications for years now, questioning how applications that cost so much to install and configure can deliver tangible business benefit, particularly compared to smaller, more targeted systems. The Gilbane Group on the other hand dislike the term enterprise because they believe it’s pure marketing spiel, particularly in the case of content management where few vendors offer the full range of content management products.

It is of course possible to go to a single supplier and get the full WCM, DM, RM, DAM, JCR and IDM gamut of acronyms. The leaders are IBM and Oracle, but Day, Vignette and Open Text all have products covering the main functionality. You have to take care of course that just because the products are owned by the same company and are labelled as a single product family, this does not mean that they can actually talk to each other. Many is the client persuaded to implement a product portfolio from off the shelf, only to spend months and hundreds of thousands on systems integration.

Leaving aside the truth that vendors relate and the more palpable realities their clients are faced with, ask yourself this: why would you need an enterprise application for content management anyway?

Enterprise means not simply across your whole organisation but unique to your organisation. Your ECM will be different to someone else’s, with different security privileges, workflow, storage and retrieval requirements.

Except it’s not.

What you’re trying to do in your organisation is being attempted in every other organisation of a similar scale or vertical. All your competitors, all your partners, all your suppliers and clients will need to control their information and distribute it to the right people. And they want to do it in similar ways, which is why all these vendors are able to sell their content management technologies to so many clients. The thing is, if your requirements aren’t unique, do you need a system that’s unique?

Of course you don’t.

People like Andrew McAfee and JP Rangaswami have been using and writing about disruptive technologies for years. Technologies like wikis, blogs and tagging are disruptive because they upset standard business models and processes where you procure a single technology and then tell everyone how to use it. Under the disruptive model, you let people use a set of tools the way they find most productive. You can add anything to a wiki without it going through workflow, you use blogs instead of email, you use tags instead of a taxonomy. Depending on where you look, these technologies have been more or less successful.

But for me the issue is that it’s not blogs and wikis that are disruptive, it’s the enterprise technologies themselves. Why do organisations feel the need to procure these tools that few people know how to implement and even fewer know how to use? Why not just pick a few technologies that are out there already? The procurement and implementation of these systems actually disrupts the things your organisation is good at, often having a greater negative impact than the business benefits the system will eventually entail. Yes, an enterprise system gives you one butt to kick, but you still have to do some butt-kicking.
For example, why set up a massive LDAP directory that a bunch of systems administrators need to maintain, when you can use OpenID? If you used this to authenticate people, they can use the same username and password for their social life as their daily business. Isn’t this simpler for everyone? Why set up project team servers? Just let each project team set up a blogger account with a new blog for each project and restrict who can view it. They can use the same email address for their email, calendar, and even documents. And those documents could be shared as a wiki. Some of these technologies will work better than others, and there are of course security implications.

Your organisation does not need to control technology, it needs to exploit it. So before you procure a new CMS ask yourself:

Am I trying to do something that is already being done by some of my staff using existing tools?
Why can’t I extend those tools to support my business?
Do I really want to manage a new supplier, a new project and on-going support?

Isn’t it easier to view web technologies as a facility your enterprise makes use of, like roads or a rail system? Let your employees make their own way to work, don’t go out and buy a bus to round them all up in.

Philippe Parker on Day, IBM, Oracle, RedDot, Vignette | 20 March 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Managing content management software

InfoWorld publishes annual awards for data management applications. It selected Oracle UCM (formerly Stellent) as the best enterprise content management application and SDL-Tridion as the best web CMS. Both of these products have their strengths: UCM enables you to share documents stored natively in Microsoft Word as web pages relatively easily, while Tridion boasts impressive workflow capabilities likely to meet any web publishing need. Nevertheless, these products have a common shortcoming in a significant area.

While content management software is designed to manage content — words and media are processed, stored and delivered in a controlled fashion — this management itself needs to be managed: workflows need to be created, users added and withdrawn, permissions changed. The most important aspect of this management is changing how content is defined. This generally takes two forms: management of a taxonomy or classification system, and management of the “content types”, or schema that defines whether you’re looking at a press release, event or personal profile. It is extremely unlikely that you’ll get all these definitions right when you first set up your CMS, so the ability to alter and extend the systems is paramount.

Tridion and Oracle both struggle in this area. As a static publishing system, if you want to update a component (content type) in Tridion, you need to republish your schema, add content definitions in each place you’ve made a schema change and then republish the content. In UCM meanwhile, if you can navigate to the relevant administration area to actually make the change and fathom out the unnecessarily ugly interface, you still need to republish the schema and all the affected content even though it’s dynamically driven! You even need to do this if you make a change to the metadata schema, because this isn’t stored in the database as an index, but as a string in a field. This is something you’d expect Oracle to correct pronto with the 11g release due Q4 2008.

You might have thought this kind of thing would be pretty high up most vendors’ agenda, but this is a problem for many CMS. Vignette works ok unless you customise the schema, which many users do. You probably need to look at Mediasurface Morello if you think your content types are likely to change. The product allows you to rename and add fields as required. You need to change the presentation template if you want to see the field you’ve added displayed on a web page, and you run into trouble if your new field needs to be mandatory since your existing content won’t include this information, but it’s considerably easier to manage the content management this way than to republish an entire site.

So caveat emptor. Updating your schema should be an essential part of any CMS product selection, irrespective of awards.

Philippe Parker on Metadata, Morello, Oracle, SDL-Tridion, Vignette | 17 March 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Fear and loathing in requirements

We’ve previously mentioned that the fear of being left behind often motivates web strategy, even though this just leads to mediocre web presence. Why does this happen? It’s because our heads are ruled by fear, as this Newsweek article points out. As a consequence we make poor choices, trying to come up with functionality-driven requirements rather than finding the problem we’re trying to solve.

A typical example is to implement folksonomies for relatively small websites. Folksonomy (or social tagging) works for large sites with an engaged readership. The sheer volume of tags and people tagging supports rather than counteracts other classification systems. But this simply won’t work if your editors are adding more content than your audience is actively classifying.

Similarly, you may look at other websites with rich media and think that’s what’s driving visitors to their site, when the opposite may be true. Just look at what happened when The Register introduced video reviews for an audience that browses the site while at work.

These kinds of implementations are often driven by the fear of being left behind, losing audience and revenue. Many organisations feel they should be on Web “version 2.0″ by now, irrespective of whether they can articulate what that functionality is or what purpose it will solve. So how do you fight the fear? You need to set out some clear business-driven objectives for the web.

These objectives are common across practically every organisation: increase market share, reduce costs, reinforce brand, improve communication with customers and so forth. Every system requirement that you specify will need to meet one of these objectives. If a requirement is completely off the wall, then it’s either not relevant for the organisation or the organisation needs to reassess its objectives. When you record your requirements, these should be mapped to an objective and validated by the body responsible for meeting the objective: the marketing team, customer relations, IT, etc.

Once you’ve recorded all your requirements, you can develop functional solutions for each one. Again, the relationships between requirement and functionality should be tracked, so when you come to decide about functionality that will be in project scope, you have a clear idea why you’re implementing any given feature. You’ll then be able to ensure that requirements are driving functionality, rather than the other way around.

Diagram showing the relationship between strategy, objectives, requirements and functionality.

Just as your organisational objectives will corroborate your organisational strategy, so the requirements you document will inform the technical strategy you adopt. Do your requirements suggest the need for a web content management system, or an enterprise version to manage documents, or federated search, or wiki tools? You should be able to design a technical strategy once you have an overview of the requirements. This strategy will also inform the functionality you specify to meet the requirements. If your strategy dictates project teams should collaborate using blogs, this should be consistent across your web presence; you shouldn’t end up with a mix of blogs, Word documents and forums. If you can achieve this level of consistency, your technical and organisational strategies will be appropriately aligned.

So stave off your fear of being left behind technologically. Being at the technological bleeding edge will bring you little reward, as Get Strategic points out. Focus instead about meeting your business goals and ensuring that your technology is being designed with these in mind. Didn’t you want business 2.0 rather than web 2.0?

Philippe Parker on psychology | 18 January 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Are open standards by-passing enterprise implementations?

A significant challenge for medium to large organisations is managing the exchange of information between all the applications. This might mean having a common login for your users across all your websites, or being able to display different content depending on a visitor’s geographic location.Ordinarily, the approach has been to create complex integrations of content management systems with user directories (LDAP), web services and portals to expose information from back-end systems in a standardised way.The single biggest issue with this approach is cost. You need sufficient kit to ensure scalable dynamic delivery of the applications, licences for all the software involved and significant design and implementation time. You always hit hurdles during the project as you discover data models weren’t quite what you expected, or your LDAP directory has been customised to hold data slightly differently, or you can’t get one portlet to communicate with another… It’s time-consuming and often frustrating.

Once you complete integration to all your applications, they appear as a common platform for everyone interacting with your services. Except that people don’t use the internet to interact just with your services. They want to check their email, spend time on their networking sites, shop… why should they have to go to your site just to get hold of information that should be available anywhere?

Who buys a washing machine by going to the Hotpoint site? They go to a price comparison site or a reliable distributor first. You should be able to syndicate your content any partner site. And when I’ve remembered my login to all your services, wouldn’t it be good to have the same username and password across all these partner sites? For example, you login to check your current account balance, and it’s the same login to check your mortgage status with another bank!

All right, you can retain login credentials in your browser, in a particularly insecure way. And why would you expect Barclay’s and Abbey to share login credentials? Because it’s what customers need.

We’re seeing the emergence now of true data portability. Increasingly, large web organisations (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr) are subscribing to a model of open standards for information exchange that mean you’ll be able to enter your information once and choose which data you share with which websites. Consider OpenID which already provides single sign-on across many sites on the web. This is exactly what many enterprises are struggling to achieve across applications which they actually own!

So what does this emerging approach mean for enterprise implementations? It means you need to question the value of creating complex data integrations. Service oriented architecture through a portal is no longer the only method for integrating your systems, so you need to conduct some due diligence to satisfy this kind of expenditure.

Data portability is, of course, no panacea. Standards are still emerging. But if you’re going to jump on a web services bandwagon, it’s probably a good idea to be on the same train as Google and other leading web presences.

Philippe Parker on Standards | 16 January 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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4 steps to the right CMS

The main reason for choosing a new technology is to reap its benefits. But the processes that organisations follow can obscure these benefits rather than unearth what’s feasible. So let me add a few points that may help to steer you in a direction where you can get the most from a new CMS selection exercise.

1. Accept that different technologies will make a difference
Your organisation has to understand that different technologies will provide different benefits. There will inevitably be people who tell you that it’s just technology and which one you choose won’t make that much difference; they all perform the same basic function after all.

There is an element of truth in this argument, but there are some very significant differences between WCM software and their suppliers, notably:

financial stability, product maturity and the number of service partners in your geography;
delivery mechanisms (static or dynamic) and product scalability;
integration capabilities and an open API;
user management, persistence and personalisation options;
classification management;
community and marketing features;

2. You will need a spreadsheet
Technology selection is not about scoring matrices, with coefficients for requirements and complex calculations. However, if you are going to satisfy the finance director you will need to prove that the technology you’ve selected does meet the requirements set out in the business case. Moreover, you will certainly need a check-list of technical prerequisites that any software should adhere to in order to make a shortlist. Don’t forget to tell the vendors which email clients your editors will be using and which operating systems and versions of Office their tool should integrate with.

3. You will need scenarios
No matter how command-and-control the culture within your organisation, if you enforce a technology that’s meant to be devolved to lots of users — particularly if they’re in multiple locations— that is difficult to use, you will be in for a lot of trouble. You’ll have to expect increased training and support costs as well as brooding resentment about the new technology. People will find workarounds to the very processes you were looking to instill.

Engage the people who are actually going to use the CMS and get them to help you to articulate the main issues they have with managing publishing content. Then invite the vendors to demonstrate these tasks to this audience. A few key points on these demonstrations:

Don’t tell the vendors how you want things to work. Explain the problem and ask them to demonstrate a solution.
Create scenarios for the tasks you perform the most frequently. If you only create a new workflow once every six months, the fact that you can do this in Visio is pretty irrelevant. Concentrate on content creation, review and relationships.
Think about how the content is managed rather than its delivery. In the end, any product can be made to generate accessible HTML, provide streaming media and publish printer-friendly views. Concentrate on short and long documents, content sharing and classification and take a hard look at the authoring interfaces which your teams will be using every day.

4. Allow the vendors to impress you
Always give the vendors twenty minutes to show them what else their product can do that you haven’t asked for. It’s the opportunity for the sales team to show off why the product inspires them and to show you why you want to work with their product rather than someone else’s. A content management system is not only supposed to enforce your editorial processes; it should inform them too. If you’ve been struggling with a technology for a number of years it may be hard for you to see what’s possible, but some new product feature may resolve a problem that you previously thought intractable.

Take a look at what the product has to offer and see if you have any business problems now that the tool can resolve that may have been out of scope. Don’t get hung up on features for their own sake, but if the product rings a bell and the sales team have done their job, you’ll be well on the way to picking the right piece of software.

Philippe Parker on 2 January 2008 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Create a commercial persona

There’s a lot of stuff on the web about knowing your audience. It’s pretty obvious really: understand who the people are who visit your site, the kind of people who you want to attract to your site, and provide content and services to them in a way they understand. The process for doing this is well-documented too. You may already have developed a number of personae to represent your audience, but have you created a persona who will pay money to be associated with your site?

Your readership and advertisers may have surprisingly divergent requirements. Advertisers aren’t necessarily interested in your audience: they’re interested in your audience’s money and in their own reputation. We’ve all been to deeply unattractive sites with great content (this site may well be one of them) and we’re satisfied with the look and feel because we know our way around.

But when it comes to advertising your product on an ugly page, it’s a quite different proposition. You can attract loads of traffic to your site, but why would a prestige supplier want to promote their product on an ugly page? Advertisers are attracted by things that are new: rich media, web 2.0 functionality (whatever that may be), boxes with curved edges, regular font sizes in Helvetica… All right, that’s quite a cynical view, but it’s hard to sell space on a site that is visually unattractive.

So even if your audience are telling you that they like the simplicity of your pages, pause to think. If they’ll put up with ugly pages, they’ll put up with beautiful pages as long as the content is good. And if you have beautiful pages, you may even make some money out of your content.

Philippe Parker on Persona | 20 December 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

You speak the language, we do the grammar

When I was at university, I was one of a somewhat rare group who enjoyed structuralist critical theory. In a nutshell, this states that since all literature is made up of components of grammar (phonemes, adjectives, syntax, etc.) you can describe any text according to this grammar. At its most basic a narrative is state X → event Y → state Z which is different to state X.

Perhaps this is why content management appeals to me. There’s a set of paradigms (content types) that can be described through adjectives (metadata). There are verbs (workflow) and syntax (navigation), and content can be represented in different declensions (templates). But what the content management system is expressing is different each time. The content is the language, while the CMS is the grammar.

So an FAQ has similar composition whether it’s aimed at specialist user communities or the general public; a press release has the same structure whether it’s displayed in English or in French; content can have different “skins” depending on the person viewing the page. When implementing your content, I really don’t care what the content contains, just how people are going to produce and consume it.

A key point to remember about grammar however is that it evolves. Common usage changes the rules. How many supermarkets state “10 items or less” rather than the correct “10 items or fewer”? And how many people know the difference?

So you have to be aware that your requirements will change and the grammatical model for your CMS may need to evolve. If you pick a model with more complex content management processes — component-based systems like Tridion or Percussion say — you may find your users struggling initially. But if you pick simple page-based tools like EpiServer, your contributors may not be able to express themselves in the way they want, such as creating more complex content relationships.

So when picking a CMS technology, you need to think about the complexity of your content management tasks, the processes and structure you’ll want to exploit. Does the system speak your language? Try a few phrases and see. Get the suppliers to show you how you would achieve key tasks around content creation, publication and relationships and pick the language that isn’t double-Dutch.

Philippe Parker on EPiServer, Percussion, SDL-Tridion | 19 December 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Oracle’s challenge: know your product

Last week I attended the Oracle User Group UK conference, with warm enthusiasm and a heavy cold. User groups can be a great way for clients to share implementation experiences, as well as an opportunity to collar suppliers and get a less sanitised view on product roadmaps. I have heard that the Stellent user community wasn’t particularly active, but Oracle are well used to running user groups for the rest of their product range, so this was part of a very large event.

One speaker (I’ll preserve his anonymity) who seemed to strike a chord with delegates raised the point that his organisation’s implementation partner seemed relatively uninformed about Stellent, and that poor decisions around customisation and bespoke development had led to a poor reputation for the product. We’ve already discussed the product vs. implementation issue in a previous post, but the fact that lots of Stellent clients seemed to have the same problem suggests two things to me.

Firstly, the product may be difficult to implement well. Customisations tend to be required for content entry, so perhaps Stellent didn’t know its audience as well as it should have done. This view is perhaps corroborated by the latest release of version 10gR3 which is now bundled with the Ephox rich text editor (already supplied with IBM content manager and Vignette). This attempts to address some of Site Studio’s issues with cross-platform compatibility and accessibility.

Secondly, there’s a problem with product understanding, not just among implementation partners but within Oracle itself. The Stellent partner base in the UK has traditionally been relatively small. Small systems integrators have focussed on the product’s document management capabilities, with web publishing seen as something of a bonus feature rather than an end in itself. The partners are not web specialists, while the real web specialists — design and build media agencies — haven’t really invested in the product because they see it as more than just web, potentially stretching their capabilities. This is exacerbated by the need to train developers in a proprietary scripting language, IDOC.

Now the limited numbers of the core Stellent team are being swelled by Oracle’s professional services arm. But these aren’t content management specialists, and that’s obvious to many clients who may balk at paying Oracle’s day rates in return for staff on a steep learning curve.

So the user group is turning out to be a really useful forum for all involved. Clients can avoid repeating each other’s implementation errors, while the supplier gets to grips with the common business challenges their client base is trying to address. It’s a bit of role reversal, but hopefully this form of social networking will lead to ECM 2.0.

Philippe Parker on IBM, Oracle, Vignette | 10 December 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Websites are like cars

Visiting a website is just like driving a car.

Or at least it should be. I’ll try not to labour the analogy.

The other evening I was watching the TV programme about cars, Top Gear. The presenters were looking at how long it took to standardise on three pedals in the same order, gear stick, ignition, etc. No one imposed this standard: Cadillac invented the layout and Austin copied it in the 7, a prodigiously popular car that was copied across the world. Ever since, when you get in a new car, you know how to speed up and slow down, irrespective of make and model.

The experience is of course completely different if you’re on the track in a Ferrari, off road in a Land Rover or commuting in a Nissan Micra. And you always need a moment to get your bearings: adjust the mirrors, find the windscreen wipers, gauge the clutch. This — as you probably figured out — is exactly the same for websites.

You should be able to go to any website and know what to do instantly. The experience will be very different on facebook to John Lewis to Dresdner Kleinwort, but the principles remain the same: people need to be able to perform a task in a way that’s obvious. If they have a great experience achieving the task, so much the better; but don’t put obstacles in their way.

What sort of obstacles do I mean? They’re obvious really…

Grouping links that don’t belong together, like Print this page and Find out more.
Labeling similar functionality differently across the site: e.g. Go / Submit / Enter buttons on forms.
Giving your site a name and brand that’s different to your domain name.
Challenging a visitor to say who they are in order to get more information, when the distinction is unclear: e.g. Investors / Public.
Delaying people with irrelevant promotions (example).
Making things that aren’t links look like links, and vice versa.
Making people guess how to get to content, either through poor naming of your navigation or through navigation interfaces that show only some of the options.
Putting core functionality in different places on your web pages.
Having stuff no one uses: empty forums and wikis, folksonomies that aren’t updated, related links that no one follows.
Mimicking browser functionality: to increase font sizes, link back in history, bookmark a page.

All right, so these aren’t web standards, but why would you want to do these things differently to every popular website out there? Do you believe that your users are really so different from those of any other website? What’s wrong with following a conventional layout and stamping your own look and feel on it?

To return to our analogy, if I pick up a hire car and the accelerator is on the left, I’m going to hand the keys straight back at the desk; even if it means trading a Bugatti for a Perouda.

Visitors are only ever going to experience your websites if they actually use them.

Philippe Parker on 7 December 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Breaking through to great websites

In the previous post we looked at how Jim Collins’ analysis of companies that made a tangible progression from being good to great put themselves in a position to make those changes possible, and applied this logic to websites. In this post we’re going to look at how to achieve breakthrough in creating great websites once you’ve been through the necessary buildup.

Hedgehog concept

Collins describes at length what he calls a hedgehog, so don’t expect me to plagiarise the concept, just read the book. The main thrust of the concept is that businesses and — I propose — websites must focus on one big thing and be great at it; don’t dip into other peripheral activities. If the core activity is well-founded, this is where you’re going to achieve sustained success, not somewhere else.

How do you define what that one big thing should be? There are three questions you need to ask:

What you can be the best in the world at?
And conversely, what you cannot be the best in the world at? This is not about a strategy or desire, but about an understanding of where your strengths and opportunities lie.
I’ve previously criticised clients who declare in their tender documentation that they want to build a world-class website when they don’t have a world-class budget, but I’m reconsidering this position. The web is of course worldwide, so if you’re going to compete, you need to be providing something that your global competitors don’t. Now that may well be a local view: a local commercial service or information specific to a geography. But the salient point is that if the website isn’t attracting its target audience and at least challenging both its online and offline competition, then it’s not doing its job. Moreover, if it isn’t a website you can be proud of, you’re not doing your job.
The web is still a relatively new economy, with all kinds of business models that are still in their infancy. There’s room for more world-class websites out there and yours should be one of them.
What drives your economic engine?
In Collins’ world, this question involves a deep understanding of the economic models in your sector. In the web world, it translates to a relatively simple question: What makes your website worth visiting?
Is it the information you provide, the way you collate information from multiple sources and present in one place, the brand your visitors buy into, a need to participate and engage with like-minded people? You have to be able to identify why the website is important to other people.
What are you deeply passionate about?
Just as important as ensuring your web presence is important to other people is ensuring that it’s important to you and your organisation. If you’re not interested in producing content for your site, you shouldn’t bother. Just get rid of it. Don’t pad it out.
Let the website reflect your organisation’s professional integrity. Let it be something where your teams can prove they’re the right people to be setting a vision. Let it reflect the outputs of heated debates you’ve had with your stakeholders about what the website should say about your organisation and how you want to be perceived. Show that you’ve encouraged input and that people believe in what’s on the web. Don’t let your website become straplines and mission statements.

You’ll find the big thing for your website where the answers to these three questions intersect. Put all your effort into this one thing and abandon everything else. Collins suggests having a “stop doing” list.

Culture of discipline

Content management systems were invented to cater for two main problems: providing editors with the means to publish content efficiently without needing to know about web technologies like HTML, and providing a means of controlling the content that is added by those editors, so that it conforms to predefined styles and patterns appropriate to the website.

This rigour is often welcome, allowing you to remain on brand, but you need a degree of entrepreneurship too. What does a site where all the content looks exactly the same say about your organisation? Perhaps that it’s completely process-driven and unlikely to ever dig its way out of a hole…

The system may be able to constrain your editors, but that doesn’t mean that it should. The editorial team should actually understand why those constraints are there: the benefits of consistency, or of an informed approach to information architecture and navigation, of being on-brand. Once they understand and agree with these principles, you won’t need to build systems to enforce standards: the editors will do this for themselves. You’ll be able to de-systematise the constraints as a culture of discipline pervades the way content is produced for the web. If someone then breaks the mould, you’ll know that they’re doing it for a reason, because the mould is too rigid or insufficient for emerging needs.

Just as the project sponsors and stakeholders needed to cast off empire-building and egotism, so the editorial team need to espouse the ideal of a common good. Their professional integrity will translate into a disciplined approach and your website will benefit as a consequence.

Technology accelerators

We haven’t even mentioned technology yet. Cultures rather than systems of discipline may prompt ideas of Enterprise 2.0, wikis and blogs. But Collins tells us that in his team’s analysis of business success, technology was never the primary cause of either success or decline. This is almost certainly true of websites.

So many times you’ll see organisations where the technology tail is wagging the business dog. Someone will tell you that they need a portal, or SOA, or ECM, or the semantic web. Why? What are you trying to achieve? Are you just trying to increase the IT budget?

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with these technologies, indeed they may be the best way of supporting the one big thing you’re trying to achieve. But they are absolutely not an end in themselves. Collins found that in businesses, technology could accelerate momentum, but could not create it. Tellingly, he also found that “Those who turn good into great are motivated by a deep creative urge and inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake. Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity, in contrast, are motivated more by the fear of being left behind.”

Only pick technologies that will help you deliver your one big idea. If you don’t need to deliver information in a single place aggregated live from diverse systems, why are you even considering portal technologies? If you don’t need to link documents, email and web content, how will ECM help you achieve your goals?

Conclusion

Good to Great is really based on just two concepts: teamwork and focus. You need to form a team to identify and challenge the problems that your website poses. You then need to focus obsessively on the one thing that is most important for fixing those problems, casting everything else aside. Collins doesn’t tell us that this is easy. But if you can follow his process, you’ll be well on your way to having a really great website.

Philippe Parker on 2 December 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Building up to great websites

I’ve been reading Jim Collins‘ Good to Great and it’s a thought-provoking study, based on mountains of empirical research. It discusses what Collins calls the physics of how good companies become great companies, significantly out-performing their competitors. But it’s striking that a number of the key attributes of companies that make the leap from good to great can also be applied to websites and to WCM in particular. In this post I’ll focus on what Collins calls buildup, before moving onto breakthrough.

Level 5 leadership

Collins found that all the top-performing companies he analysed were led by people who combined personal humility with professional willpower. It’s easy to extend these characteristics to websites, where a major barrier to success is vanity. If the website is your “baby” or reflects the parochial concerns of your departmental or organisational structures, it will never be a great website.

While sponsors and stakeholders empire build, or focus too much on the website and not enough on the web as Gerry McGovern points out, you cannot achieve your potential. The message should not be “when I was in my last job, I did it this way”. The message should be “we need to improve, we need to stop doing things badly”. This is a matter of professional integrity and resolve, not a way to boost egos.

First who… then what

If you recognise that you don’t have the skills or time to do everything yourself, you’ll also see the need to be supported by a good team of editorial, information design, creative, technical and project management people. You just need to get them on the bus. If they’re any good and have encountered similar problems before, you won’t need to set directions for them. They’ll see the need to improve and will be able to start advising you where the problems are.

For example, when Contented Management staff go into a project, we don’t expect to be told the big vision or what a project should look like. If you know that already, you don’t need us. You just need a bunch of body-shopping coders to implement the changes. You bring us on board because we sign up to helping you the best way we know how.

So don’t decide where the bus is going before the right people are on board. A strong team can set a common vision; whoever came up with the idea in the first place is immaterial. If the idea is right, everyone should buy into it and pursue it relentlessly, just wanting to be a part of a website they can be proud of having helped to develop.

Confront the brutal facts

Above all, the common vision needs above all to be well-informed. There’s absolutely no point in speculation. Collins talks about the importance of a climate where the truth is heard.

Many people just want to know what’s convenient: that your WCM is a great platform for managing content, that it’s robust and performs well, that the users love it, that the websites it generates are standards compliant, that your projects follow best practice methodologies, and so forth. The reality may be quite different, but how do you find out?

Collins proposes four ways to get to the truth:

Lead with questions, not answers.
Hopefully previous posts on requirements will give you some indication of what you should be asking, but I think an important point here is that people won’t simply accept the truth just because you tell them it’s staring them in the face. Site owners may tell you that they have high bounce rates, where visitors come to a single page and then leave again, because they’ve found all the information they need on that one page. But is that really what’s required? What about cross-selling opportunities, or more complete views of the information, or suggested further reading? Do none of your visitors want those things?
Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
Just because there are standards out there, doesn’t mean you have to use them. A CMS can compel editors to display their content in certain formats, but there’s not much point if the editorial team doesn’t buy into it. Discuss how your audiences consume your content now and how you want them to consume it in future. If you choose to standardise, do so because your stakeholders agree with the obvious benefits. But give yourselves some leeway, so that stakeholders can have a non-standard feature if they can prove its business case.
Conduct autopsies, without blame.
Undoubtedly one of the toughest things to do is to figure out why something went wrong. I’ve had assessments carried out on the projects I’ve run, and I’ve had to run many reviews of failed projects that someone else has been responsible for. But how many projects ever run smoothly?
You need to accept that things are going to go wrong and that a collective effort is required to put them right again. We prosper and suffer together. If a person makes a mistake, someone else should be there to support them.
This brings us back to leadership style. Fixing problems is a matter of professional integrity, not of ego-bashing. And if the right people are on the bus, they should be looking out for each other.
Build “red flag” mechanisms.
Being able to confront the brutal facts depends on having the facts in the first place. I’m going to talk about Key Performance Indicators at a later date, but you need to know when something is going wrong as soon as possible. This could be lack of site traffic, high drop-off rates, people preferring other information channels (such as print, or even call centres!), difficulties in estimating and planning enhancements, high costs… anything associated with running a website.
One of the first tasks you’re going to have before you embark on real improvements to your web environment is to be able to determine just where things are going wrong, so you can either fix them or abandon that activity entirely.

As Collins repeatedly notes, great companies don’t focus principally on what to do, they focus equally on what not to do and what to stop doing. If you get this right, you’ll get the breakthrough, which I’m going to cover in the next post.

Philippe Parker on 30 November 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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PICKing the fishbone

So, you have your SWOT and your fishbone, now you need to prioritise your requirements.

There are lots of ways of doing this, but I think you’ll have gathered from my previous posts that I’m always keen to do things the simplest way possible and refine things from there.

Take all your requirements from the end points on your fishbone, and write them all down on post-it notes.
Hold a couple of rapid, 15-minute sessions with business stakeholders and ask them to stick the requirements to a flipchart sheet, with the most important at the top and the least important at the bottom, so you end up with a kind of requirements priority ladder.
Hold a follow-up session with the technical stakeholders who will need to deliver the project: designers, developers, project manager. Don’t tell them that the requirements are prioritised by importance (although they’ll probably guess). Just ask them to review the requirements and move them further to the right of your sheet depending on how time-consuming or difficult they are to achieve.
Draw a 2 x 2 grid around the post-it notes. The 2 x 2 grid is a business analyst’s cliché, but also a friend. The vertical axis is benefit and the horizontal axis is difficulty. You’ll end up with a PICK chart, shown below.

Requirements charted against benefits and costs
You should just implement the requirements in the top left of the grid. They’ll bring value and are relatively easy to do, so they should be in your project scope right away. Conversely, those in the bottom right should be scrapped as their value is questionable and they’re hard to do, so the business case will never be proven.

Requirements in the bottom left grid should be challenged. Just because we can do them, doesn’t mean that we should. What real benefit will there be for the organisation if we implement them? Won’t they just divert our focus from our main project objectives?

We may well implement requirements in the top right of the grid, however. We know from the outset that their implementation will be difficult and costly, but if we can prove their benefit then we shouldn’t rule them out. These requirements may involve some prototyping and benchmarking, but shouldn’t be excluded just because they’re hard to do.
If there are lots of requirements in the Possible group, you can always repeat the exercise just for those requirements and include only those in the top left. You should also retain a record of those requirements that were in the Kill group, as in future there may be more value in doing them and they may be easier to implement with changes to work practices or evolving technologies.

The advantage of the approach articulated in this and the previous two posts is that it’s relatively quick and simple, while retaining a focus on real problems and how likely you are to be able to solve them. Obviously, there are more refined approaches than this, but if you just need to get things done, this approach is worth trying.

Philippe Parker on 22 November 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Fishing for requirements

Following on from my post about SWOT, how do you exploit this analysis to come up with the requirements you’ve identified with your web content management system? Here’s a rapid approach:

Distribute your SWOT analysis to your stakeholders and set up workshops involving between three and five participants in each.
You’ll need a large whiteboard. Each workshop shouldn’t need more than 30 minutes: 5 minutes to introduce the activity, 15 minutes to run it and 10 minutes to recap.
Draw a horizontal line in the centre of the whiteboard. To the left of the line write a one or two-word phrase that describes the objective or result you’re trying to achieve: for example, “improved WCM”.
Take the key areas identified as weaknesses, opportunities and threats and draw them as spokes coming off the horizontal line: e.g. content, performance, usability, competitor offerings.
Now work with your participants to identify the subjects you need to tackle in order to address the issues identified in the SWOT. Ideas should follow on from the categories you’re suggesting: e.g. competitors are offering RSS feeds, email subscription, personalised news, etc. What else can you offer that your competitor doesn’t currently provide?
The idea is to get as many ideas as possible around the themes you’ve identified. At this stage, it’s about quantity not quality. Keeping forking new lines off the themes as you go along, so eventually you end up with ideas that are four or five levels off the main horizontal line.

You’ll end up with something like this, although hopefully more detailed. Click on the image to view the full-size diagram.

Since all the ideas have been made with reference to the original weaknesses, opportunities and threats, they should all be in line with real issues that your SWOT has identified.

You’ll get a feel for the level of detail as you go along, but try not to get too bogged down in any one area: keep the ideas moving along.

At the end of the exercise, you should end up with a skeleton of ideas that looks something like a fishbone. Draw a fish around it to make it look like one if that helps!

What the fishbone will help you do is to drive out requirements that you may not have considered previously. The higher-level ideas should stimulate the more granular issues and focus your stakeholders on the central issues identified in the SWOT, rather than simply bringing their own agenda to the table.

What the fish won’t tell you whether those requirements are feasible or valuable, so the next step we’ll look at is prioritisation.

Philippe Parker on 19 November 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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What should be in a WCM SWOT?

The first step in any brownfield implementation is to assess what you have already. Indeed, you should be assessing your web content management on a regular basis, particularly if your online business is seasonal. But what are the ground rules for that assessment and what should it cover? I’d recommend a rapid SWOT-check.

SWOT analysis is a long-standing if relatively simple technique used across many types of business to provide the executive with a summary of the current situation. It should be easy to read and quick to determine, rather than involve weeks of assessment and long reports. It should be a couple of pages document or four slides that highlight the most salient issues. You can find some templates on Business Balls.

The contents of your SWOT should cover all the facets of WCM: commercials, technical, design, operational.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Does your WCM meet performance and availability expectations?
Is the site W3C compliant and accessible?
Does it meet usability criteria for both consumers and contributors?
Does the content meet quality expectations for target audiences?
Are you able to track key performance indicators? What are they telling you?
Are the business objectives for the WCM in tandem with organisational objectives and strategy?
If so, are these objectives represented in the site’s look, feel and functionality?
What extra functionality are your competitors offering? What advantages does this give them?

Opportunities and Threats

Porter’s five forces for competitive advantage provide us with a good baseline for assessing opportunities and threats. In WCM terms, these translate as follows:

Potential entrants: Are you considering all the delivery channels: syndication, mobile, widgets, etc.
Buyers: Which markets could you expand into? What are your audience expectations as they begin to consume other web technologies (Facebook, Youtube, iGoogle)?
Substitutes: Do collaborative tools like blogs and wikis threaten your content management processes? If you have a large Enterprise Content Management platform, is this challenged by Software As A Service, or by Basic Content Services?
Suppliers: How dependent is the system on a single supplier, whether internal or external? What contingencies do you have in place should you lose this resource? If you’re going to make enhancements, what sort of training or procurement implications would this have?
How do I exploit all the content which might be relevant to my audiences? How do I make the information I’m presenting be cohesive and comprehensive?

Who should make the assessment?

Lots of questions, but who should answer them? You need someone sufficiently distanced from the site as it stands that they won’t simply rubber-stamp the current situation or rubbish it completely. But the person (or people) undertaking the SWOT also needs to be engaged with the site and its users.

So you need to engage an independent expert who then runs a brainstorm with stakeholders around the bullet points listed above, but who you give sufficient licence to that they can be completely honest about your implementation. You’re asking someone to take a sword to the site not to themselves, so expect to hear things that you’d really rather not have known.

Why is this approach useful

Too many times, project teams are given a brief that’s just an abstract assortment of ideas. A SWOT analysis provides a structured way of getting to the root of the problem. As I said at the start, this is just the first step. Steps two and three are about identifying requirements that tackle the issues the SWOT raises and prioritising those requirements so that you can figure out what’s worth changing. I’ll tackle these two steps in subsequent postings.

Philippe Parker on 15 November 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Suitable content for a CMS

One of the biggest challenges for organisations with complex web architectures, particularly those trying to implement SOA, is deciding just what is appropriate for a content management system and what goes into AN Other application. Oscar Berg has had a stab, but I thought I’d try to give a few guidelines.

An indication that a project may be a good fit is if it meets any of these criteria:

Written (as opposed to numerical) content to be published within or outside the organisation and administered through a web browser.
Documents to be published internally or externally.
Digital assets used in conjunction with web or document publishing.
Information aggregated from other sources that subsequently needs to be edited by staff before it is published to an internal or external website.

An indication of a poor fit would be a project with the following requirements:

Structured numerical databases: this is more appropriate to a bespoke database application.
Draft, unpublished information that belongs to an individual, rather than to the organisation: this can be achieved with a file server.
Loose, collaboratively-created content, such as blogs, discussion forums and wikis, that don’t require peer review. This content is usually best managed through dedicated collaboration technologies.
Aggregated content that can be presented “live” on websites without editorial intervention. This can be achieved through a portal or an application server.
Integration of back-end applications to be presented through a common, browser-based interface. This can be achieved through a portal.
Archiving records to less expensive data allocations based on frequency of access or age of assets. This is a feature of a more advanced records management system.
eCommerce sites requiring automated cross-sell functionality.

There are some grey areas which might combine a CMS with another technology:

“Advanced” personalisation, where a website has to remember who you are while you’re on the website and deliver different content to you based on your profile. This is pretty straightforward in a CMS when applied to the homepage using cookies, but anything beyond this requirement is going to be complex to implement, particularly if your CMS is stateless.
Streaming media will require an additional dedicated server.
Single sign-on functionality would benefit from an identity management tool.
Web-based applications such as polls that need to be included on a website but are unlikely to be managed through the CMS.

Philippe Parker on 29 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Identifying online and offline workflow

It’s all very well me asking if your workflow is effective, but not much use without a practical example.

In enterprise content management, workflows are often deployed to represent the full content lifecycle, as in the diagram below (click on the image to get a full size version).

These steps could all be recreated in your content management system and managed in an online environment, with notifications being sent via email to the relevant users at each step in the process. You’d need to ask, however, who would benefit?

This sort of workflow is likely to be less effective to implement in an online environment with comments flying around via email than a bunch of relevant people sitting down together and discussing the subject in question. Yes, there probably needs to be an audit trail with a clear indication of who changed what when, but this is only at certain stage gates. In fact, you could probably constrain almost any workflow to something along the following model:

Author creates draft → Internal review (reject or approve) → External review (reject or approve) → Publish → Archive after 6 months.

All the intermittent issues of who should comment on what kind of detail at what stage are tacitly understood, rather than made explicit online. But the review processes can only be instigated once the previous stage gate is complete, so you still have control over publication and, depending on your CMS, you have a more or less robust audit trail. Why over-complicate matters? Enterprise 1.01 will usually do.

Philippe Parker on Workflow | | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Is your workflow effective?

I was recently working for an investment bank trying to flesh out compliance requirements and reconcile these with the needs of the marketing team.

- As someone in marketing publishes a new piece of content, I asked, do you need to check it’s compliant?

- Yes, responded the compliance officer.

- So do you need to be alerted by email when new content is ready to go live?

- No.

- How will you know when the content needs your approval then?

- They’ll come and talk to me.

- This is a large organisation. Do all the marketing people know who you are and how to get hold of you?

- Yes, they’re used to it for print materials.

- And is this how your colleagues prefer to act too?

- Yes.

- So you wouldn’t find any efficiencies in being able to login to the CMS to preview content before it’s published?

- We don’t really mind what format it’s in: a hard copy or transcript, or we’ll sit and watch a video or listen to a podcast. Everyone publishing marketing material knows the basic compliance rules, it just needs us to give the document a quick once-over before it goes out and that’s best resolved by chatting about it.

- The content may be going out in many languages and to many different geographies, should they all operate this way?

- There are slightly different compliance rules in different countries, but generally the compliance officers in each country work in the same way. They’ll just review the translation, ensure it doesn’t breach any special cases and trust the marketing people they work with.

- What about other content contributors, such as researchers? There’s a fair amount of churn in those areas so they’re less likely to know the rules.

- Research gets published to our subscribers only, so doesn’t follow the same compliance rules. We don’t need to review it.

- So as far as you’re concerned, the technology doesn’t need to enforce any workflows other than the reviews specified by the marketing department and their relationship with each operational area.

- No, we’ll just discuss everything face to face.

Increasingly we see CMS implementations focusing on how to translate business process improvement into CMS workflows. Content management systems are particularly adept at providing compliance rules around publishing rights and version management so should be ideally suited to enforcing and improving the publishing process. But wherever I go, I find resistance to enforcement of workflows by the technology. Why is that?

Part of the reason is of course general resistance to change. Another is transparency: everyone needs to know what it takes to push a piece of content live. They need to know that once they’ve made their amendments, whether this means the public can view their content or if someone else needs to approve. Some CMS workflows can obscure this. Another reason is fear of over-engineering: it’s far too easy to create overly complicated and unmanageable workflows that users then try to circumvent.

But the main reason is that many technologists conceive that we should always interact through technology, that IT automatically means efficiency, even where offline processes, however informal, can be even more effective. We don’t always need global collaboration software to publish a web page.

The key for the business analyst is to identify where the CMS can make real process improvements and provide value through its audit trail, rather than forcing authors into activities that hinder when they should be making lives easier.

Philippe Parker on Workflow | 25 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Projecting failure

There are countless reasons why project fail, which you’ll doubtless be able to Google if you haven’t experienced them for yourself already. Poor requirements definition, lack of leadership, weak controls, over-ambition and poor communication are among the reasons cited. But the real reason that many projects fail is because they are projects.

They fail because they’re difficult; that’s why they’re projects.

You don’t create a project for things that you know are easy. Maybe if you started creating projects for each person to start-up their PC each morning, you’d have some impressive project KPIs… This isn’t about being flippant, however, it’s about setting expectations. You run projects to exercise some degree of control so that you understand when something will be delivered, at what cost and who needs to be involved in delivery. Other work can be written off as business as usual, but a project needs its own attention. So you already know that it’s going to be tricky, that you’re not sure how best to address the problem… why then do you think that by putting in some kind of methodology everything would be hunky-dory?

They fail because the controls you have in place tell you they’re failing.

What the methodology does provide you with are the controls to monitor the work you’re doing. You should be able to monitor effort, milestones, risks and then manage these. But more importantly, if things are going wrong, the controls should be telling you sooner rather than later, so you know your project is slipping. With business as usual where the controls don’t exist, you don’t know things are going wrong until it’s too late: for example, you’re losing market share.

So the fact that it’s a project means that it’s more likely to go wrong and it’s more likely to tell you that it’s going wrong. So why are we so surprised when it breaches tolerance?

It’s not about defeatism: we have worked on successful projects. But let’s challenge the expectations before the blame-storming begins. Could we have implemented the system without running a project? Did we get any benefits from running the project at all? What can we learn from this project that went well, that we can implement in future?

To run your projects successfully you need honesty, clarity and experience. The first step is to be honest, clear and experienced enough to recognise that it ain’t easy, and that decent project management will tell us just how tough it is.

Philippe Parker on 18 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Devolution, or the origin of pages

You have the software, you have the infrastructure, you have the business process… now where’s the content?

The knowledge chain
Content management depends on a technical knowledge chain rather like the food chain you see in the animal kingdom. The first link in the chain are your drones, doing the bulk of the content harvesting and compiling in your CMS. You then get the eager beavers in your editorial team who control the flow of the content by slowing its course and discarding anything that doesn’t serve the common purpose. There’s also a need for a great deal of donkey work: general tasks like administering users and braying at the drones and beavers who try to buck the system. Finally, you have the code monkeys, the tech geeks who seem to spend their entire time fooling about and gawping, but who still consider themselves primates because they can use a mouse with an opposable thumb.

The problem with this technical knowledge chain is that in many organisations, each layer is of an equal size. This means that there aren’t enough people contributing content and but too many people performing administrative functions, while the technology layer spends time fixing things rather than making enhancements. If you could delegate the simpler daily tasks further down the chain, reserving the few meaty tasks for the more technically skilled species higher up, you could ensure that only the fittest content survives to be published on your website. These CMS animals need to devolve.

The case for devolution
Devolution isn’t just a theory: it’s founded on solid evidence. Many organisations have thought in the past that by spending half a dozen days creating a CMS training programme they can then rest and everything will take care of itself. But the reality of your CMS world is a little different. Over time, the technical team will have adopted a position as alpha male. They dominate the environment to suit them, which means that it may be over-engineered and difficult to change. The authors and editors will have had comparatively little impact on the CMS world around them: they tend to be more dependent on the resources that their environment affords them.

Environmental impact
But if your CMS ecosystem is going to succeed, it needs these authors to break their symbiotic relationship with their super-users so that they can cross-pollinate content and allow the world to flourish. To achieve this, your CMS environment must evolve to meet its inhabitants’ requirements.

People with fewer technical skills outnumber each layer above: contributors, editors, administrators, technical.

The end result is a skills pyramid, where you invest the least effort in the people who contribute the most, because the resources are there for them to prosper. When your contributors are comfortable with the system, this makes it easier for the editorial team to assess content quality. They don’t need to focus on administrative tasks, but can refer these to a dedicated team of first-line support as required. And the technologists aren’t bugged by the mundane concerns of lesser species, but can get on with doing more important things instead.

Intelligent Design
Devolution is supported by intelligent design. Your CMS environment should be technically simple with transparent publishing models and familiar editorial interfaces. If you can focus on adapting the environment to help your users rather than training your users to fit with your software, then the technically meek but editorially able shall inherit the earth.

Philippe Parker on Adoption, psychology | 17 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Is it “what” or “how” that broke it?

A typical question I get asked when assessing failing CMS implementations is whether there’s a fundamental flaw in the product or in the way it’s been implemented. Some products are more difficult to implement than others, but businesses can be hasty in wanting to throw technology away when the implementation has failed to meet expectations.

While you can make any product do anything if you have an endless supply of time, money and ingenuity, it’s useful to have some idea about whether you need to throw your core product away to achieve your goals feasibly. So I thought I’d list a few typical warning signs that might prompt you to initiate a technology selection project:

Wrong technology stack — You’d have thought this would be obvious; but if you’re living in a Java world and you have a .Net, ColdFusion or LAMP product, you’re in trouble. This also applies to legacy systems coming out of support.
Unfriendly URLs — You could get around this with some clever rewrite rules, but it’s extremely tricky to do this in a really scalable and cost-effective way.
Incompatible workflow — If your CMS doesn’t allow you to implement your online publishing processes, you have a serious problem. Integrating a distinct workflow tool could be more trouble than it’s worth.
Running Active X components on a Mac — This is a way to alienate your user base. Don’t use anything that relies on Active X. Even if you’ve locked down all your editors’ PCs to use the same version of Windows, these components can be a headache. There’s plenty of tools out there that use cross-platform, browser-based technologies, so why give yourself this burden?
Auto-generated non-compliant mark-up — Many portals (including MOSS Sharepoint) provide you with default templates into which your content is published. Trouble is, they rely on HTML table layouts and JavaScript that are a long way off best practice for being well-formed and accessible. If this is important to you, it can take a lot of effort to fix. You have to weigh up this level of effort against the advantages the product gives you, or against simply throwing the tool away.
Poor security — A requirement that’s more obvious to some organisations than others. Some CMS (dynamic-delivery products tend to be more susceptible than those using static delivery methods) are prone to brute force attacks, so if you could be vulnerable to DDoS you should get this evaluated. You should also ensure that your product doesn’t suffer from SQL injections.
Lack of integration standards — If your CMS doesn’t work with your LDAP directory, you’re in for a world of pain…
Poor version comparison — As with workflow, does the CMS provide you with versioning and audit capabilities that match your business processes? If not, there are tools you can integrate with no little effort, but why wouldn’t you just pick a CMS that does all the red-lining and version comparison for you?

This isn’t an exhaustive list. What characterises these issues is that while you could address them with some outside-the-box thinking, the problem is likely to be so ingrained in the product that dumping your current technology is a more viable approach. And at that stage, when you look to select a new technology, all the points listed above should be the technical prerequisites you have when inviting suppliers to tender. During the selection process, you can then concentrate on organisational fit. This is a subject I’ll return to later.

But what if the reason your implementation is struggling isn’t listed above? It could well be down to the implementation. Most common things people blame on the product, but are actually a problem with how the product has been implemented are:

Performance — Hardly ever down to the product, in my experience. Can almost always be improved, if not completely solved, by improving infrastructure (not necessarily more licences) and information architecture.
Unfriendly WYSIWYG editorial interface — There are lots of free or cheap tools out on the market which provide friendly and standards-based ways for editors to add rich content to your CMS.
Poor classification systems — Products have limitations about implementing taxonomies and classification systems, but typically if you’ve trouble managing these in enterprise products, it’s more likely to be because of how you chose to do it rather than a fundamental flaw with the product itself. It may well require some bespoke work, but doesn’t mean abandoning your entire system.
Having to publish in multiple places to generate a single piece of content — This problem is more often found with component-based content management systems, such as Tridion and Percussion. Editors have to publish blocks of related content that then go through independent workflow processes only to be assembled on the same page. There’s an advantage that these are re-used elsewhere on the site, or translated into other languages more efficiently, but the big disadvantage is that editors are confused by what needs to be published in order to make one simple update. In my experience, the business blames the technology when it’s just down to how it’s been put together.

Hopefully this will steer you down the right path when you need to decide whose arse to kick: software supplier or systems integrator / design agency. But more than that, it should give you an idea about where to focus your energy for new requirements: do you need to run a technology selection project or can you build on the platform you have currently? We all know that things break, but if you know whether it’s the what or the how that’ll do it, you should be able to put some contingency in place, saving some blushes and some money.

Philippe Parker on Percussion, SDL-Tridion, SharePoint | 16 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Ajax: hero or zero?

As yet another vendor introduces AJAX to their WCM offering, it’s worth considering what benefits these interfaces bring you. Last year, Jonathan Downes and Joe Walker at CMS Watch provided a great introduction to the subject of Ajax in content management systems, but there are a couple of other points you should consider.

Firstly, in the last year or so, users have become much more familiar with these kinds of interfaces. Most webmail systems make use of the tool and there are countless portal-type sites and map applications that use JavaScript to create smoother browser-based interfaces. This should mean that people will be more comfortable with richer interfaces than with simple web forms.

Secondly, Downes and Walker tell us that Ajax generally equates to better performance. While the interface may give the end-user an impression of efficiency, this isn’t necessarily the case for the server. Remember that with each interaction, you’re sending a request — albeit small — to the server. Given that most CMS licences run on a per CPU basis and many environments have as a consequence been under-specified, introducing these tiny rapid requests could put some serious strain on your hardware and your budget.

These interfaces can be more user-friendly than some client software, but as with any CMS selection process you just need to be wary, size your environment appropriately and test with real editorial users to see if they get the desired usability benefits. It’s pretty safe to say that the smaller the number of users, the more benefit and least risk in deploying these kinds of tools.

A final word of caution: in the Iliad, Ajax was certainly mighty. But he was passed over by his peers for a hero with more guile and ended up destroying himself. Is this the sort of technology you want to unleash in your CMS campaign?

Philippe Parker on Adoption, Interface Design, Performance, Vyre | 14 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Introducing taxonomy

Lots of people talk about taxonomy in content management, but its meaning and importance can be confused, so I’m going to try and provide a more concrete definition.

Taxonomy is about classification. It describes ways of naming, arranging and ordering things within a system. Those things may be books in a library, or plants and animals in biology.

Taxonomies are usually hierarchical and based on restricted terms. In biology, for example, there are a limited number of kingdoms, phyla, and classes. In the Dewey Decimal System, these restricted terms are based on numbers: Phonology (414) is an element of Language (400). These relationships are often described as ontological.

Dewi Decimal taxonomy: 400s as a subset of Language

Some things can belong in more than one place in certain classification systems. For example, a dish on a menu may be available as both a starter and a main course. These ways of looking at the item are often termed “facets”; so a Greek salad is both a type of dish (salad) and a course (starter).

Image showing Greek salad as a side and starter, while Russian is available as a starter only.

The “thing” in question may also have one or more synonyms which form part of a taxonomy. There is some overlap here with the functions of a thesaurus.

A recent innovation brought to the fore by websites like del.icio.us and Flickr is the concept of “folksonomy”. This allows participants to “tag” any page, image, or document according to their own vocabulary. As more people tag pages, these become related by shared terms, building up the classification system. This taxonomy is unrestricted: what one person calls design, another may call art, creativity, or even Photoshop.

How are taxonomy and content management related?
Content management typically addresses a number of key areas:

Production: providing the tools to enable people to create content.
Authorisation: ensuring that only relevant people are able to view and amend content.
Workflow: delivering content to people within the system once it passes through certain stage gates.
Storage and retrieval: providing a mechanism to store, find and re-use content held in the system.

Content management systems (CMS) can make use of taxonomy for authorisation and workflow, but they are dependent on taxonomy for storage and retrieval. Each page, document, or other asset held in the CMS is stored according to a predefined classification method.

There are different metaphors for this method. The taxonomy may be represented as types of document (e.g. contract), as departments with their own document silos (e.g. legal, marketing, human resources), as folders that represent some other business function (e.g. project start-up, initiation, execution, closure), or flagged with a value from a predefined list. Most CMS will use a combination of these classification systems so that content can be retrieved more easily.

Taxonomy vs. metadata

Taxonomy is often applied as metadata: that is data about data. Office documents have metadata assigned to them such as author and revision date. (To see this in your Office application choose File >> Properties and click on the summary tab.) Web pages also have metadata. There are a number of ways to view this, but the simplest is to choose View >> Source in your browser menu. Close to the top of the page you’ll see some HTML tags beginning meta name=”". The name attribute is the type of metadata they describe (description, copyright, keywords, author, etc.) while the content attribute holds the metadata itself. Metadata is often assigned from pre-designated classifications, so is an important part of any taxonomy project.

Where can I see taxonomy on the web?

In its simplest form, taxonomy on the web is represented as website navigation. Many of the techniques applied to develop taxonomy are used to develop more user-friendly websites. This includes activities like card sorting.

More complex taxonomies can be found at dmoz.org (a directory of websites) or, for medical research, GoPubMed.

Philippe Parker on Metadata, Taxonomy | 9 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Solid architectural foundations

I confess, I’m a sceptic when it comes to architects, for two main reasons.

1. What qualifies someone to be an architect in the first place?

If you meet an architect in the construction world, you know they’ll have studied the minutiae of building design for many years. But if you meet a user experience architect, an information architect, a system architect, or indeed an enterprise architect, what qualifies them for that role? How do you know if they’re any good?

There are some recognised models for “enterprise architecture”, provided by the Zachman Instititute for Framework Advancement or The Open Group Architecture Framework, but these don’t actually tell you whether your architect is sufficiently clued up about your CMS publishing model that s/he can get it to work with a proprietary HR system.

2. What use is someone who designs your project then walks away from it when you actually start implementation?

I think I’d like to be a project architect. I could come up with all the tasks, dependencies and deliverables to design a project, then hand it over to someone else and say “deliver that”. I’d know what all the tasks are likely to be, identify risks, assumptions and approach, but someone else could own delivery post initiation / inception. Anything goes wrong, it’s not my fault: I told you how to do it, so if the project goes wrong then it must be your fault.

It’s just the same for development. How many projects have you seen where the technical architect needs to be called in to resolve an issue because the development team couldn’t apply the technical design?

These days, Service Orientation is the order of the day, which makes having an architect a prerequisite for any web CMS project. So how do I overcome my scepticism and define what an architect should do and if they’re any good or not?

Pranshu Jain provides some insights into what you should expect from your architect: fundamentally the role is about picking the technologies that enable the business to meet its objectives. But this approach has led to some organisations having less technical architects who understand what various software packages do, but who don’t understand the in depth technical details of how the architectural components relate. This spells project disaster.

So my message to architects out there is get your hands dirty. Get involved in the project development and take ownership if things start to go wrong. It will help you to design better systems in future.

And my message to project sponsors and managers is that if you’re recruiting an architect and they don’t know what a reverse proxy is, they’re not going to be much use to you.

Philippe Parker on 8 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

The mirror stage in content management

If you’re considering whether your organisation needs collaborative software or a CMS to fulfil its content management needs, you’re doubtless being confronted by a bewildering range of products that all seem to provide the tools to meet your requirements. So how do you decide if you need a wiki, a portal, or ECM?

It’s down to psychology, not technology.

Let’s refer to the Mirror Stage, a psychoanalytical concept developed by Jacques Lacan during the 1940s. The concept describes how infants imagine themselves to be at one with a mother who satisfies their every need. When a child cries, its mother will feed it, change it, put it to bed, or comfort it. When a child reaches between six and eighteen months old, it starts to realise that its identity is separate to its mother’s. It recognises itself in a mirror, has to learn to feed itself and will be told off by its father. In short, it enters a symbolic order where it now has to conform to social constraints in order to get what it wants. The early imaginary state provides gratification without context, while the symbolic order provides context but imposes boundaries.

Which psychological order do your contributors belong to? Do you want or provide an environment for them to express themselves freely, or do you need to contextualise them and the content they produce?

Collaborative tools assume a shared identity. Just as an infant considers its mother to be an extension of itself that responds to its every whim, users look to collaborative software as a personal tool that instantly fulfils their need for self-expression. In this imaginary order, contributors “write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them“. Compare this to a content management system, where you have both context and boundaries: contributors recognise that their content can only be published if it meets predetermined social criteria.

Some examples:

Folskonomy vs. Taxonomy: The most obvious difference between imaginary and symbolic orders in content classification. In folksonomy, users enter terms that help them understand their content and they imagine that other users understand these terms. In taxonomy, these terms are given a context and only predefined terms can be used according to a preordained structure.
Intranets: Is your intranet an environment for generating knowledge or enshrining it? If your staff use it to discover what’s going on across multiple locations and projects, they assume that content is representative of the work they do. If the intranet holds authoritative information that employees want to refer to (for example, HR policy), you need a tool that confirms their place in the organisation and that reasserts social context.
Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0 sites: People who use social networking sites subconsciously assume that what is valid for them is valid for others: that their tags make sense, that their ratings (of YouTube videos for example) are relevant, that people will follow their myspace page. These assumptions may well be right, but context is limited to these assumptions. If I put a photo of Sophie onto Flickr and tag it accordingly, this tells me that there are other photos of people called Sophie on the site, but doesn’t tell me that it’s Sophie Marceau and I’m interested in pictures of French film actresses. It’s not clear of course that this is the information people are looking for, but a content managed system would presume this in its design. So if you go to a report on a football match on the BBC news website, it will provide links to more news about each club involved, league tables, fixtures, weather forecasts for that area and so on. The contributor doesn’t elect to have all this correlated information: the CMS provides the context automatically and imposes an authoritative order.

Of course, collaborative environments aren’t completely without context: any user who logs into the system has a distinct identity within the organisation. But the mirror stage in content management comes when you start to impose structure and workflow. If you need your contributors to put content in a specific place for easier retrieval, or to have their contributions approved before they’re viewed by a wider audience, then you’re imposing a symbolic order.

So when choosing your approach, ask yourself are you a mother or father to your users? Are you coaxing them, encouraging them to express themselves freely, or are you imposing a paternalistic authority?

If your organisation is essentially the same thing as your contributors, then an unstructured wiki is a viable option. This covers social networking sites, or collaborative research intranets. But if your organisation represents something more than the people it comprises, in line with a Gestalt psychology, then you need a content management system that enforces a shared identity rather than assumes it.

Philippe Parker on psychology, Taxonomy | 4 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

Enterprise too? ECM’s long tail

Over the years, the content management market has seen a great deal of consolidation through acquisition, creating vendors with more extensive product ranges that they tout as enterprise almost by default. If you have web, document, digital asset and records management then you must be enterprise.

There are a number of problems with this consolidation that are well-documented, notably the maturity of product integration; just because you buy Oracle UCM (Stellent) doesn’t mean it works out of the box with Oracle WebCenter. But there’s another issue too: not all the clients are enterprise. Once you’ve sold your massive projects into big corporate clients, how do you tap into the long tail?

Increasingly we’re seeing the larger vendors buy up smaller companies not just to become more enterprise, but to reach a broader market that can’t afford enterprise licence fees. We see this in SDL’s acquisition of Tridion, very much a mid-tier WCM. It’s also been in evidence with the RedDot / Open Text product offering, with the RedDot WCM being able to offer trendier features aimed a less “enterprise” installations, such as User Generated Content plug-ins.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this non-enterprise approach is Mediasurface. Even though Mediasurface is a WCM rather than ECM offering, it has many clients who would struggle to pay for the core product licence, Morello client, database licence, and Solaris servers. Yet it has many small clients who it does well from, particularly in UK local government. To increase its stake in this market, Mediasurface has acquired both Immediacy and the SilverBullet hosted CMS offering, rebranded as Pepperio. This enables the company to dip more easily into the long tail.

So why is this important for you, the customer?

On the positive side, it means that if you’re a small customer you can still get a product from an established vendor rather than a high-risk niche supplier. If you’re a large customer, it enables the vendor to leverage the features of the products in its portfolio to provide you with a more comprehensive system, potentially in a more agile way.

On the negative side, if you do go for a small product from one of these companies, you have to ensure that you don’t turn yourself into a small fish in a big pond. If you go for a small WCM package and you need something quick, you’re more likely to get it when you represent 10% of the supplier’s revenue than if you represent less than 1%. And if you are the big fish, don’t expect the small pond to be anything other than a set of nearly joined up puddles.

Philippe Parker on Morello, Oracle, RedDot, SDL-Tridion | 3 October 2007 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

The new technology

The website redesign

The acronym or buzzword

Choosing the right name

Also worth reading:

You need to demonstrate the tangible benefits your project will deliver as quickly as possible.

Events are being stretched.

We could understand our market a lot better if we just took the time.

See also:

1. Content management applies to off-site content too

2. The web is a competition

3. Designers need to think a lot harder about multi-platform

1. Blanket cull

2. Stick to your guns

3. Additional governance

Budgetary control is not the same as leadership

You’re in a hole, stop digging

Beautiful doesn’t always mean effective

A solid financial basis

Living off past glories?

The long-term view

Where’s the support?

It’s not about loyalty

No stakeholder involvement

No content strategy

Lessons learned?

Further reading

Editorial interface

Pages vs. elements

Content structures

Technology

Bewilderment

Discovery

Catharsis

Promotion

Engagement

Alas, poor clients

The industry protests too much, methinks

Slings (and boxes) and arrows

The play’s the thing

More on #fixwcm

More on #jboye09

Saying is easier than listening.

More is easier than less.

You get more than you need.

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1. Get adequate direction

2. Engage with the whole audience

3. Use actions, not just words

Will content need to be managed?

Will content need context?

Will content need to be deleted?

Get your website out of the scullery!

1. Make your content presentable.

2. Get out and network.

3. Keep that glass slipper.

1. Stock-take

2. Rolling assessments

3. Pre-classification

Key reading: