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Contented Management

Contented Management

‘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.

Read more

Philippe Parker on | 26 October 2009

Contented Management

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 , , | 22 October 2009

Contented Management

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 | 19 October 2009