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

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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Contented Management

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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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 Government | 19 October 2009 | Tweet this | Follow @proops

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Contented Management

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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Contented Management

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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Contented Management

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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Contented Management

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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Contented Management

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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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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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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Contented Management

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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