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Contented Management

Contented Management

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

Contented Management

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

Contented Management

Mencius, on collaboration technology

Mencius asserted human nature is naturally good, but that it needs to be nurtured in order to flourish. Your organisation may well have naturally talented staff who are predisposed to helping it succeed, but if they’re not given the tools to do so then you will never make the most of their talent.

Wikis, forums and other collaboration technologies provide the tools for organisations to get the most out of their staff. For public websites, ratings features, comments and social bookmarking enable authors to see which aspects of their content attract positive interest.

If your website ignores its public’s needs, or your systems deny their users the opportunity to add their feedback, they’ll just go somewhere else. If you’re lucky. Mencius also advocated the just overthrow of despots and one of my favourite Chinese stories, Outlaws of the Marsh, also known as the Water Margin very much follows this code.

So the message is clear. You can learn from your audiences and stakeholders, inside or outside your organisation. Provide them with the tools that will enable them to enhance your systems, and you will flourish with them.

Philippe Parker on , | 22 August 2008

Contented Management

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 | 21 August 2008

Contented Management

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 | 20 August 2008

Contented Management

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.

  1. Start by conducting paper-prototyping to determine requirements.
  2. Test wireframes and user journeys on real people.
  3. 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 | 19 August 2008

Contented Management

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:

  1. recklessness: consider what impact your decisions will have before you enforce them;
  2. cowardice: don’t be afraid to implement what you know is right;
  3. hasty temper: don’t be provoked into arguments with stakeholders or suppliers;
  4. delicacy of honor: you don’t need to appear all-knowing; recognise your weaknesses, be open about them and engage people to help;
  5. 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 | 18 August 2008