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Contented Management

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

Contented Management

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

Contented Management

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:

Philippe Parker on | 2 June 2009

Contented Management

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:

  1. A clear objective for your site.
  2. 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:

  1. Does the new content meet the website objective? If it does, process the request. If not, reject it.
  2. 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

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

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

Contented Management

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 , , , , | 17 March 2008

Contented Management

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

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).

Example of a full content lifecycle.

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 | 29 October 2007

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 | 25 October 2007