L’enfer, Jean-Paul Sartre tells us, c’est les autres. This is so commonly and simplistically mistranslated as “hell is other people” that it’s become something of a fallacy. Hell for Sartre is not other people; it’s others. It’s about our faulty relationship with others and most particularly our psychological other, our id: the basic, instinctual drives that motivate us to seek out pleasure or avoid pain.

Those instinctual drives are very much at the heart of every project. A desire to move the organisation forward, to mitigate against business risks and seize profitable opportunities. And this desire underpins the project team, gives it a sense of togetherness, a common purpose. FTW! WOOT!

But this also means the team can just pile into a project without thinking it through, particularly if it’s being driven by someone with seniority in the organisation. The JFDI mentality prevails in these projects. Let’s just do it, get it over with and watch the cash roll in. Then, as complexity increases and mistakes are made, other emotional responses take over: blame-storming (particularly for teams who aren’t there: third-party suppliers or off-shore), hindsight, and the eventual withdrawal of project budgets. Suddenly you’ve gone from projected heaven to project hell.

Project management can of course help to control these urges. It provides the rational ego to counteract the emotional id. By introducing formal methodologies, you can moderate the project team’s urges and lead them to a more successful outcome. Theoretically, you could take any project and use ego-based techniques to deliver it. But that doesn’t mean you’d actually be delivering the right thing…

For that, you need a superego, a conscientious faculty to ensure you do the right thing. For projects, this means a governance process that ensures you have a reliable business case and that you continue to measure the business value of features that you implement, so you’re asking whether they’re valuable, rather than just whether they work or not.

• Super-ego-driven, conscientious projects will ask “is this worth doing?”
• Ego-driven projects will ask “is this working?”
• Id-driven projects will ask “why don’t I have this stuff?”

That’s an instinctive question, but the wrong question. It’s a question that’s asked by others and the question that will lead you to project hell.

Also worth reading:

Failure is not a positive by Piewords

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.

Some people seemed a bit miffed by my last post. All that silence and then I say their product’s not as beautiful as some others. But as Arsène Wenger said, “Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.”
Well I’m not in the business of software-bashing. I deal with clients who have complex systems that they’re trying to get the most of in order to boost their business. So I do want to highlight a point in the last post that some readers seemed to have missed: Tridion is a really useful tool for supporting a content strategy.

What do I mean by that? Well, as Brain Traffic tells us:

Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.

And isn’t that what you want WCM software to do? I’ve recommended Tridion on the basis that it gives web managers good visibility over who owns content on the site and where it should belong, as well as providing powerful ways to devolve ownership. There are few products that do this as well as Tridion in my opinion; although I seem to be in a minority when I say that I like the way TeamSite does it too.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like everything about the product. User interface may be a matter of personal taste (and one of the posts that I still haven’t written questions how important editorial UI is anyway). But I’m yet to see a really good demonstration of a product that supports both content strategy and customer engagement in an integrated way. I’ve seen bits and pieces in different products, but:

• where are the security and content-type models that we see for standard content being applied to UGC?
• where’s the personalisation of content based on a visitor’s publicly-shared profile, e.g. Twitter and Facebook?
• how are you tailoring your website content to relevant trends on the rest of web?
• how are the performance ratings of your page content then reflected in the way other users navigate content? Does your WCM even let you track those KPIs?
• can you promote content to a visitor based on what other people – and most specifically people that they trust – found useful or enjoyed?

Those are just examples, but fundamentally I think vendors have found this kind of integrated content engagement strategy a challenge because WCM and UGC approached content from polar opposites. I don’t think they’re wholly incompatible, but I think we’re still in an earlier stage of evolution than most vendors would want to acknowledge.

So let’s just say that true web engagement on content-driven sites is still somewhat immature, as I would suggest that there are others who might prefer to express that more robustly.

As SDL continues to release modules and connectors to enhance the breadth of its web engagement offering, many of its customers find themselves operating dated user interfaces and struggling with the obscurities of Visual Basic scripting. If you put Tridion side by side with newer .Net CMS like Sitecore or EPiServer, you’d see the difference straight away.
Alterian’s WCM has a much slicker editorial user interface and delivers dynamic rather than static content. How you scale your website, integrate with other systems and personalise content therefore requires a completely different technical approach.

This personalisation aspect is particularly relevant as both vendors have been positioning themselves in the web engagement / customer experience market. Even though SDL is at the crest of Forrester’s online customer experience wave (and remains firmly ensconced in Gartner’s magic quadrant for web content management), I would argue that neither tool is that well-suited to handling the kind of user-generated content that some lighter weight open source tools like Drupal can offer. SDL seems to me to be particularly well geared to organisations that have a thought-through web content strategy, while what sets Alterian apart in online engagement is its social media marketing tool, SM2. Indeed, this is what SDL seems to covet most:

“We think that there are synergies with the marketing analytics and content delivery,” Mark Lancaster, SDL executive chairman, told the Financial Times.

Allow me to express some degree of scepticism here. Alterian have owned both WCM and SMM technology for over three years and made little (if any) headway in their integration. SDL may have greater resources to achieve this, but we’re looking at completely different products here. Any quick fixes would simply be a rebranding exercise with no under-the-bonnet coordination. Of course, SDL may have a clever plan and I stand to be corrected on that point.

Overall, I’m quite positive about the takeover. I think SDL will benefit from the niche benefits that Alterian brings, particularly in terms of focus on improving editorial interfaces. I think there’s a great opportunity for Alterian partners who previously worked with Immediacy to get to grips with a Tridion CMS that’s similar but more powerful than what they were previously used to. And I think that customers, particularly in Europe, will get a broader set of implementation partners to work with who have great web experience.
Yes, it’s yet another merger and apparently less choice in the market, but actually for the two software development teams, I hope it’s an opportunity for them to learn from each other and for synergy to mean establishing a really good, forward-thinking product rather than just an excuse to downsize.

See also:

• SDL Acquires Alterian, Beefing Up Its Customer Experience Story
• What the SDL acquisition of Alterian means for customers

The recent superinjunctions cases in England have highlighted one particular issue: you may have content that you want people to come to you for, but they can get it in lots of different places on the web.

In this case a number of celebrities have sought to protect their privacy in the face of allegations made about them and have won orders preventing anyone repeating them. But some of these cases have “gone viral” with those allegations being repeated on Twitter and elsewhere, potentially outside the jurisdiction of English courts. This calls into question whether the injunctions can be sustained: given that most people now know the identity of the people involved and the allegations, why prevent the mainstream media from repeating them?

Let’s put to one side the moral and legal questions this raises and instead focus on the commercial issue for publishers: News International researched and developed one of the stories and is now unable to report on it. Not only does the celebrity have no control over the content, but the publisher has lost it too.

This situation can happen to any publisher in less extreme circumstances: you’re trying to lead a discussion on your website, probably about your products and services, but the real discussions are happening outside it, in other areas of the web. Access to content is competitive; and we’re talking way beyond SEO. The competitions is based on three factors:

1. driving people to your site and maintaining their interaction there;
2. recognising the debate that happens outside yoru site and interacting with it;
3. having a content strategy that enables you to do both (1) and (2) in the tone and manner that you want to engage your audience in.

Number 1 is pretty traditional and many organisations have recognised it for a long time, although the methods for attracting visitors to your site are continually evolving. Search engines are probably of diminishing value, with marketing via social media increasing. But affiliate and offline campaigns can also help to attract visitors.

Number 2 is where a lot of organisations fall down. There’s a fairly blinkered view that if content isn’t on your own website, people aren’t talking about it. Out of site, out of mind. Yet most organisations’ products and services are evaluated beyond their own content management processes. Web managers can no longer be managers just for their own site but for the online presence of the organisaiton they represent.

Number 3 then takes on an increasing importance. Do you want to engage in the debate beyond your site? There’s a danger of being sucked into constant rebuttals or distracting side-issues. And how do you want to have those conversations? Do you need a different tone on Facebook or in discussion forums from your main corporate site?

Web content management is changing radically. Where WCMS were supposed to give organisations degrees of control over their online presence, how people use the web to access information is changing. If you don’t recognise that fact, people will get your content from elsewhere and from someone else’s perspective. You can’t expect people to base your reputation on what you tell them.

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.

I am going to make a point about content management and better websites, but bear with me.

The web can be a really annoying place. But I found this tweet from Alain de Botton particularly ill-conceived:

A chief effect of the internet is to boost the already unhelpfully strong sense that the answers are ‘out there’ rather than within.

Why did it annoy me so much?

Firstly, because it confuses the medium with the content. There are lots of answers “out there” and not just on the internet. Does a TCP / IP protocol make ideas less robust than if they appear on a printed page? It’s a completely ridiculous notion. It’s one that those of us who work with the web still need to counter in many organisations where people still see the web as a frivolous fad; a notion that runs absolutely contrary to some of the web’s most successful sites, particularly those providing health information.

Secondly, because there’s a hypocrisy in attempting to broadcast aphorisms over the very medium that you’re criticising. This made me wonder if the tweet was a joke, or some kind of ironic experiment to see if people would retweet something non-sensical. And over a hundred did. Were they doing it in jest too?

Thirdly, because de Botton writes and sells books about philosophy and now he seems to be telling us that other people (like him) don’t have the answer, and that we should focus on introspection. This is probably a reference to the Socratic principle “know thyself” but this shouldn’t be at the expense of trying to discover objective truths. You can know yourself but be ignorant about the world around you: Socrates’ pupil, Plato, was a key figure in European philosophy but still defended slavery.

So what does this mean for content management?

There are many objective truths and certainties, but there are many more that are still to be proven. Establishing those truths is a competitive business. Scientists, explorers, researchers, all compete to establish a truth in a particular domain.

Similarly, your organisation holds truths that are more or less well articulated: terms of business, HR policy, progress reports, invoices.

Getting to these truths is a fundmental issue for content management. As users, we know that your website, or intranet, or digital asset management system should hold the piece of information that will answer my question. If we can’t find the right information, we’ll just invent it. But deep down, we know it’s there somewhere.

So problem 1 is: how do we make sure that our audiences can find the right information? Through better classification, more effective tools and encouraging people to tell their peers that this content is the right content.

Problem 2 is: how do I make sure that people get the right message from the information when they find it? By providing clear content that is constructed in a way that is appropriate to your audience: well written, well-produced, accessible.

The truth should be in your systems. If it isn’t, your audience will go somewhere else, “out there”, to find it.

There are so many large websites which bear the curse of being CMS-driven rather than people-driven. It hangs like an albatross around the neck of visitors.

We know that navigation structures and labels should reflect your audience rather than your organisation. But there’s more to it than that. If you design your website based on content management practices, you’ll condemn your visitors to wander aimlessly through oceans of content rather than make a swift voyage home.

Typically, when you deploy a CMS you do some kind of card sort. You audit your content, group what’s relevant, label the groups and those labels become your putative navigation. If you’ve enough money and sense you’ll test that navigation on some users. This is a pretty straightforward way of coming up with a structure that people understand. But that’s not the same as the navigation that people need. You’ve just prioritised your taxonomy over your visitor’s user journey.

Instead of looking at what you have, ask yourself two questions.

1. Which tasks do the audience most want to achieve on your website?
2. Which tasks do you most want them to achieve (for example, because it saves you money compared to offline channels)?

Those should be two primary drivers for defining navigation. Don’t get caught up in what you have. Focus on what’s needed.

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.

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.