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

Beautiful doesn’t always mean effective

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

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

A solid financial basis

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

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

Living off past glories?

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

The long-term view

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

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

Where’s the support?

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

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

It’s not about loyalty

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

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

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

So where did it all go wrong?

No stakeholder involvement

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

No content strategy

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

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

Lessons learned?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, do you:

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

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

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

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

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:

• WCM Magic Quadrant – Sorry guys, but I am a fan of Gartner
• What has the Ministry of Magic Quadrants got against me?
• Gartner Magic Quadrant lawsuit: Sour grapes or real gripes?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple of useful links:

• FatWire products
• Jon Marks’ view

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

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

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

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

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

More on technology selection:

• Tony Byrne – Top 5 Technology Selection Pitfalls
• James Robertson – Top 10 mistakes when selecting a CMS
• More from Contented Management