I should point out that as Mr Rose has entered into the world of white-paper wordsmithery, it seems he has, technically speaking, set himself up as a competitor to my day job -therefore this post is by me, not the Gilbane me and these views are my own.. etc… etc..

So, if you read my tweets you’ll know I am already a fan of his writing, I have an embarrassing blog crush on  Robert’s Adaptive Marketer blog and this paper is true to form – it’s a crisp nine pages, sharply observed and based on research that shows that today’s digital marketer is relying on services outside the server room to engage with their audience – from the mainstream of content management or web analytics, to test and target and lead nurturing.

At the Gilbane Group we have (oh heck, should that be they have if I am blogging as me) observed the trend for our clients to reach for SaaS solutions for some time. Mary Laplante published a cracking paper at the beginning of 2009 that concluded that this was driven by two pressures; tight fiscal control over capital expenditure and a drive to quickly deploy innovative technical solutions.

Whilst clearly financial prudence is a continued pressure as we crawl out of recent recession, SaaS based solutions and other services available outside of the server room are an increasingly essential part of the marketer’s solution palette as they strive for agility to keep pace with the changes in the way we engage with consumers over the social web.

So, why is that? SaaS lowers the barrier to entry for digital marketers, often poorly served by long standing enterprise procurement and information technology implementation processes more suited to the provision of infrastructure, than providing for the subtle, fluid and dynamic needs of customer engagement today.

This low barrier to entry of adopting services provided outside the server room enables marketers to quickly add the pieces needed for web engagement, but critically the lower barriers to exit, removes risk and enables marketers to be innovative. They are able to take a ‘suck it and see’ attitude and experiment with new technologies and engagement channels, knowing that they’ll quickly get a measure of their success, with a near instant return on the value of the tools or alternatively to try something else.

That’s not to say that SaaS solutions should not be procured without due diligence, they are still a significant investment in internal commitment, if not capital costs. The advantage is that during that process of due diligence questions like hardware procurement, technology support, budget for upgrades etc. dissolve and the focus returns to functionality and business value. Procuring the right business solution – uncompromised by whether the techies like the colour of the database.

It’s not a silver bullet, lots of options and discussions I’d like to explore here – but as we build out our persuasive, relevant engagement tiers, hubs or web experiences – SaaS clearly has it’s place.

Image of a cloud courtesy of akakumo and reproduced under creative commons license.

Further reading:

• Marketing From The Cloud – How Digital Marketers Are Using Software As A Service.
• Communicating SaaS WCM Value – A Guide to Understanding the Business Case for Software-as-a-Service Solutions for Web Content Management (PDF)
• Into the Engagement Tier…

In the pressure to be engaging over the web, neglecting website governance and not ensuring the quality of your content is like running a restaurant, switching on the neon sign, hiring the most charming front of house staff and then not paying attention to the cleanliness of the plates.

As I have written in a  guest post shortly to be published on Fierce Content Management – while the cool kids are wondering who this visitor is and how do we serve them relevant content to their iPad – someone or something needs to be watching out for the quality of that experience.

Out in the world of the content publisher, there is an increasing demand for content – we have multiple sites, we need to create relevant content for different audience segments, we need to participate in the social web and publish to multiple web destinations.

More content means more authors and a demand that content management delivers on its promise as a framework that democratizes the process; we need web content management to be adopted outside marketing and communications.  Organizations can no longer rely on emailing content to a small group of gatekeepers in marcoms that can ensure that each communication to leave the enterprise is on message, correctly spelt and brand compliant.

We are also delivering and syndicating our content to a wider audience, to multiple web destinations and devices and our corporate website is no longer the sole destination for content consumption. If I stretch my restaurant analogy, the diner wants it their way, to go or delivered to their plate – wherever they are.

In a restaurant, the odd grubby plate can be excused by that charming maître d’ – maybe a free bottle of wine and an apology – but as our content consumer is eating on the go, reading an RSS feed or browsing a mobile app – there is no beautiful brand context that can distract them from the fact we can’t spell the name of our own product.

The paper (sponsored by Magus) looks at whether our current CMS tools are the answer as we found that regardless of content technology implementations, for various reasons that I explore – these mistakes still make it through.

I’ll be writing a more detailed post about it on the Gilbane blog later this week as we confirm the details of some follow up events and I welcome your feedback.

Image courtesy of eraphernalia_vintage reproduced under creative commons license

I say web engagement; some say web experience, Forrester say persuasive content and these guys are saying:

a customer experience management platform – that engages, contextualizes, and optimizes user experience and interactions to build brand awareness, loyalty, and revenue.

The Day FAQ can be found here and the press release from Adobe here.

In either case the idea is the same, using web analytics data to provide insight into your visitors to deliver relevant content – and I’ve got to say if its web analytics you want and a great content engine you need – then on paper it’s difficult not to be excited by what the marriage of Omniture and Day can bring to this space.

I obviously caveat that with ‘on paper’ – my experience of getting insight out of Omniture to deliver dynamic content was not easy (although I understand that Genesis has really come on since then) and I’ve witnessed first-hand the challenges of maintaining the post honeymoon sparkle of an ‘on-paper’ marriage made in heaven.

I’ve painted the Adobe role in this as merely paying for the wedding, which might be unkind and reflective of my bias/experience in viewing this space – I get the Omniture/Day thing, the Adobe strategy there, but from an Adobe product perspective I don’t think we are seeing that yet.

As an aside, and to torturously extend this dating/marriage analogy – this is an interesting observation from Jeff Potts (an active Alfresco community member) as we all wonder what this means for Adobe/Alfresco relationship:

I can’t help but feel like the proud parent who’s daughter brought home a keeper, only to find out the guy’s been dating a hottie from Switzerland the whole time.

So, first impressions – this looks positive, it could mean an injection of resources into recent resurgence we’ve seen of Day (certainly in the UK) – but, as ever, the opinions and experiences of joint customers will be the ones to listen to.

…and yes, I’ve busted my ‘not mention vendors’ rule on this blog, but these opinions are mine, etc..

Image of wedding cake couple courtesy of randomwire edited and reproduced under creative commons license.

To know me professionally, is to know that when it comes to the tribes of CMS folks, I am firmly in the WCM teepee.

I disagreed the first time this discussion rolled around, as the millennium clicked over – we were all going to use portal platforms and content management functionality would be in our application server infrastructure (we don’t and it didn’t).

The difference between the systems we are building for tomorrow and then – is that it was a web site centric world and in most applications the term CMS was interchangeable with WCM. Our digital engagement activities were single threaded in a website groove and the end was very much the driver for the means.

Also, mainstream requirement trends like dynamic delivery with the content editorial usability requirement for in-context editing mean’t a preference for management and delivery to be tightly coupled.

I am summarizing wildly – but the supposedly ‘niche’ WCM vendors then went on to rule the school.

Is it now time to unpick that? I think so, but why?

I think there are two pressures and they are content and delivery.

Starting with delivery, even if we are only concerned with web engagement, we are in the age of the ‘splinternet’ (in this context, a term coined by Josh Bierhoff)

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web [..] our site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don’t work anywhere else.

But it’s not just devices, our websites are less the single and only web destination, folks consume information about our products and services from various places – Facebook and Twitter to name two.

Plus, of course the needs of customer, consumer and citizen engagement means that we can chuck in multiple touch points, in e-mail, call centres and real life.

So, we have a fragmented communication channel and across these we need to be consistent and if and when these folks do get to our websites, they are expecting a compelling, relevant web experience. Your brochure is not welcome here.

You quickly start to build a set of complex delivery requirements, that appear (I stress appear) to dwarf those of your content production.

Could we call this the engagement tier? Where we pull this stuff together, of understanding the context of the user, the device – finding the right content and delivering it. (No, no, not a portal, this could be an e-mail, a tweet or an iPad application)

So, that’s delivery – I talked about two pressures – what about content?

Content no longer forms an orderly queue out of our marketing and communication organisations to be fed to our cradled audience through a teat.

Content production is being equally fractured, with content to be marshalled from more internal sources as we find the voices that can respond across these channels and an ever increasing volume of external content being produced about our products and services.

To deliver these relevant, engagement experiences, we need to make it easy for our contributors, we need to know our content, where is it, what is it about and whether it’s fit for purpose? Sounds like getting back to some down home, good, honest content management?

If we are going to start talking about this tier, this could also make our ECM and CMIS discussions more interesting, if we start to figure out how we surface our enterprise (small e) content into that engagement tier.

I’m not sure we’ll buy these from different vendors, I’m confident we already have. I am also fairly sure an engagement tier is about as heterogeneous as they come, with specialist vendors both large and small playing a role.

I think we are going to have to start to watch this space, what do you think?

• Moving ECM from “Point” to “Platform”
• Low Cost of Ownership
• Unified ECM
• High Return on Investment
• Leveraging Fastest Growing Middleware Stack
• Effective Standardization
• Content Platform for the Enterprise
• Improved Business Responsiveness
• Content Management for Enterprise Applications and Portal
• Risk Mitigation

I don’t think I am breaking any NDA by sharing that, as this says absolutely nothing.

Also, you may say – “but Truscott, you hilarious young man, you’ve taken it out of context” – but trust me. I didn’t.

The rest of the slides said it was big, enterprise, billions, DOD compliant and leading – with lots of architectures and TLA’s….

I can see the value in big, but being big doesn’t absolve your responsibility to be valuable and being able to put that in a form I understand – or more importantly in a form a business user, the guy that writes the cheques, a visitor to your website or shareholder understands.

I spent 30 minutes thinking – Yes, but what is it for? What does it do? How does it help?

What do you think?

Image of robot by KB35 reproduced under creative commons license.

I like this kind of book (I read a lot of Seth Godin - yeah, yeah, who doesn’t?) where authors bring to life their serious marketing theory and techniques through stories – but this one surprised me.

Here’s what the author says on his website, as a reading guide:

1. The Tipping Point is that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. At what point does it become obvious that something has reached a boiling point and is about to tip?

2. The possibility of sudden change is at the center of the idea of the Tipping Point — big changes occurring as a result of small events. If we agree that we are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time, is it reassuring to think that we can predict radical change by pinning their tipping points? Can we really ensure that the unexpected becomes the expected?

Now that’s what I expected to learn.

What I didn’t expect to learn was about the Tipping Point being applied to Revere’s ride at the dawn of American Independence, fighting violent crime in New York, TV for kids, research into why people smoke, the reasons why groups of 150 are good and the relationship to the evolution of our brains…. and, and, and…  a whole host of absolutely fascinating stories.

Clearly Gladwell knows his stuff, these stories brought the points  to life, making it a super read and elevating this book from a simple marketing book, to something I’d recommend to anyone.

Interested? Here are (affiliate) links to it on the Amazon US and Amazon UK websites – or read more on the authors website.

Firstly, almost without exception the sessions talked about strategy – not always saying the word ‘strategy’, but certainly of taking a higher level view of objectives – whether we were talking about Intranets, Social Media, Web Engagement or User Experience – a pause for thought before diving into the tools seems the order of the day.

On ‘diving in’ – this conversation really started during the Industry Analyst Debate – sparked off by this post by Andrew McAfee on whether to or not to pilot new tools. It seemed in the end to end in a draw (or possibly with a fight with McAfee – who wasn’t there) depending on the initiative. Clearly some initiatives and tools are easy, low impact and  naturally infectious and others need a bit of work.

But, this idea of ‘diving in’cropped up in later discussions, for example on user experience when we were discussing the web customer experience (an excellent session by Melissa Casburn @mcasburn and Randy Woods @randywoods) - where the take away was to try stuff, even using a bit of good old fashioned gut feel – but to measure and test the results.

Measure, yes, but be a slave to the data – not so much – a point that came out a few times – but was extremely well expressed by Robert Rose (@Robert_Rose) in the last session of the last day (and to learn more about his thinking, I’d suggest reading this blog post).

I completely agree with his assertion that data is only there for efficiency – who cares how many visitors if they are not relevant to your business? (Or as I say, your website is not a popularity contest – umm… unless it is).

Tools didn’t get ignored, I really enjoyed being free to chat to the vendors (I’ve talked about this before) and one WCM got mentioned in more than one session and seems to be making a name for itself as a ‘marketing aware’ product. The fact that this year the WCM track was called “Customers and Engagement” I think says a lot about an industry that has move from IT, to users and is now focusing on the audience.

This audience focus is increasingly the remit of us as content management professionals and it really shone through in a lot of the sessions – whether you are talking about an Intranet, content technologies, web experience or analytics.

Plenty of folks covered the conference with twitter and blog posts, but I would really recommend Sue Ann Reed’s blog – this girl can type as fast as I can talk (almost!) and was astonishingly live blogging the event and won her attendance through the generosity of Robert Rose.  Also CMSWire did a great job too – here are a collection of Gilbane SF posts.

So, my take aways:

- Take a breath, think about what you are doing before choosing/blaming/changing tools

- Try stuff, but measure the results

- Don’t get too hung up on the numbers

- Find ‘marketing aware’ tools

Does that sound about right to you?

My observation is that the problem with pairing these two together is that while they both ‘manage’ assets, we define ‘manage’ differently in these two scenarios – in ECM ‘manage’ also includes the storage of the asset, whereas in ERP ‘manage’ is just to know about it. I think in the CMS world we should learn from that.

In other words – an ERP system isn’t the warehouse, it isn’t the specialist paint line, the drying oven, the big thing that goes kachugga-kachagga that spits out a new thing or the people that crank the handle.

In Enterprise Content Management (or whatever you call your CMS implementation) – it is often all of those things – it is the tool for creating content, for storing content, for checking,  and for publishing. We overlay onto management and understanding of the thing – with the doing things with it.

So, while making content has a small bill of material (people and knowledge) we assume that our systems will cover everything from harvesting the raw material to arranging it neatly on the shelves. It’s the combine harvester, kachugga-kachagga machine, the shelf, the store etc.

Whereas ERP just lets you know the cost of the thing, where it is, how many you’ve got, that it passed through testing, how many people bought one yesterday and what it will take to make another one.

If we think about what an ERP system knows about things, with content we obviously call that meta-data, work flow processes and web logs.

And when we talk about audience engagement or ECM – what we know about things is as critical as the thing itself.

But how many organisations know how many items of content they have that features the name of their CEO?

Or how many feature the main keyword that describes the thing they want to be known for?

Or have any description at all?

Or how many are incomplete or broken?

Or even simply how many content items they have?

Lets make it easier – lets ignore the morass of content stuffed into virtual cupboards in the office and think about the stuff that the audience can see.

How many do you think Google, your employee, or your customer can find of these?

It’s not ERP if you can’t do a simple stock take.

If you still can’t get over the fact that there is no ‘M’ in ERP, those guys have an identity crises as much as we CMS folks do – don’t believe me – read this!

“M” Image is from a Fritz Lang film  poster, read more about that film here.

Here’s the challenge from Jon’s post:

So, here is the deal. I challenge any CMS vendor to rate these in order of priority:

• Editors – A user interface that is a editor or publisher’s wet dream
• Performance – The fastest, most stable and scalable CMS in the world
• Features – The richest set of features any CMS could dream of offering
• Developers – An open, standard, extensible product that makes developers salivate
• Website – A product that can give you a kick-ass website, really really quickly

I recommend that you can read the rest of his post and the comments, as he invites CMS vendors to both naval gaze and offer up which one of these children is their favourite.

My take – I guess it goes without saying that in every R&D project office, of every vendor and for every open source developer – this argument is or should be happening – it was certainly my experience – but the frustration is that with a finite developer resource you end up with a compromise.

Compromise is a bad word and here and on Jon’s blog – we have the luxury of donning our smoking jackets, filling our pipes and pontificating on what’s right and proper and not have to deal with the grubby commercial realities. The truth of course is that a vendor has to prioritize based on return on that R&D investment.

But, let’s not let that stop us!

So, looking at the comments on Jon’s post as I write this – two experienced CMS practitioners, Philipe Parker and Zahoor Hussain both sat firmly on the fence, with a view that is was down to the project.

I think Philippe and Zahoor are right – client engagements vary and of course some clients need more of one thing than another, but I think what Jon is driving at is to look at this issue through a vendors eyes of building a single product.

But – is this a single product for a single market?

If my CMS is aimed squarely at the Mom and Pop store market, it would be wasted R&D effort to focus on performance or features, in fact if I focused my effort on the ‘kick-ass website’ creator requirement – I may not even need to offer much up to developers.

This hints at an issue in our market – bit like the WordPress debate… broad church.. big undefined market.. etc etc.. It’s also worth noting that Jon refers to a website, so you hear a collective sigh as the CMS crowd mutter – ‘a CMS is not just WCM’…  (a respectful nod to you folks, but I digress..).

Anyway, lets try and play the game – prioritize..

I agree with Adrian Mateljan, who in his comment defines performance to include stability and reliability.

I don’t think that every CMS should be efficient enough to run every News International website on a rusty old 486 under Rupert Murdoch’s desk – but having something that is there when the visitor or content author have the good grace to turn up has to be #1.

The problem with performance, for a CMS buyer is it is such a complex intangible, with a variety of factors at play – and for vendors, once you’ve got the basics right, squeezing out the extra horsepower is a difficult internal investment sell vs the sexy stuff that helps the product in a demo.

Also today, ‘throwing tin at it’ seems to be an economically viable scalability option for some – I was talking to someone involved in a serious government website project – using a large rollout of a LAMP stack open source product – who was scaling horizontally quickly and cheaply, cloning extra machines and replicating databases. And it was really, really working for them.

So, yes having a reliable platform is priority #1. After that, it gets hazy for me.

Starting with Developers – would seem to be a stuck on, no brainer #2 – right?

A WCM project is no longer ‘crank the handle and spit out a brochure’ – it’s build me a web engagement or experience platform, it’s integrate to social media, it’s show people my back office, it’s mobile apps, it’s marketing platforms, analytics, lead generation etc etc..

The problem for the buyer is that it’s a blessing and a curse, a good developer platform offers great opportunity, but can mask some of the missing ‘out of the box’ must haves for editors as well as product features.

The good news is if a pretty boy pre-sales hacker can build something that fits your scenario overnight, imagine what your crew can do with it in production? The bad news is the hangover of supporting and maintaining the bespoke work.

It is of course a trade off – in a previous life I saw a straightforward, but large government project turn to a behemoth as a systems integrator cut out the ‘out of the box’ vendor functionality (to the point that the software was a tiny bit of the solution) for something beautifully bespoke – but in the process turned themselves into a software developer with all of that maintenance and support responsibility shared by just one client. Bad news for the client as the budget ballooned.

I’ve also seen a client case study presented at an industry event, where the vendor and implementation partner (and presumably the client) were buoyant about a project that was based clearly on a developer platform CMS, the slides spoke of the thousands of lines of code and man years it took to implement – but, it’s a successful project.
There’s a balance here somewhere, can you build and support what you need more efficiently than taking the out of the box, possibly compromised feature?

Yes ‘possibly compromised’ – it’s hell for vendors to build broad adoption into a feature (rather than offering an API and saying get on with it) it means making decisions for the hypothetical customer. Those decisions are hard, the edge cases you need to build to, the current customers you need to satisfy, the future proofing, the support.. etc. This sometimes means that it might not fit your requirement exactly.

Take the example of Jon’s requirement “kick ass websites, really, really quickly”:

Vendor A has the sexiest website cookie cutter you have ever seen, hell even YOUR marketers could work it (but the geeks suspect some back end ugliness there somewhere) . Vendor B has the API that would allow you to roll-out your websites, your way (eventually). Which do you choose? Do you, take the big red D pill or is it a cocktail of E, F and W?

I also think there is a great discussion point here about the crew you have on-board, a debate Jon has championed himself. You want to be innovative and engaging – it’s not going to just come out of the vendors box, a well marshalled set of great, creative developers could be your projects rock stars – differentiating your business.

With my background, I have to talk about the E – Editors. As I’ve written previously, nothing is going to starve to death your beautiful website like a lack of content. Or shackle your progress to engagement nirvana if people are still emailing you press releases to post. But, without P or possibly D – where are you going to post to?

As I said at the outset, it is a compromise – I’d suggest that vendors really want to please everyone – but they have a certain skill set, inspiration, experience, set of customers or whetever that gives them strengths and weaknesses – and buyers need to match those with their requirements.

It would be nice if we could marshal this unruly market into buyer shaped niches, where short lists pick themselves. But, in the meantime in a procurement (boring old advice I know) it’s important that buyers get advice, look at reference sites, carry out POC’s, talk to an implementation partner that understand and have done this kind of thing  before.

Your choice, your compromise? What do you think?

I found this really interesting and it sparked a Twitter conversation with the most learned of my fellow content management professionals – Philippe Parker (@proops) and Zahoor Hussain (@izahoor) and I started to feel that 140 chars wasn’t cutting it and was inspired to blog.

There is a feeling of an industry coming of age in this story, that the implementation of our industries software has a marked and profound effect on organisations, this ‘C’ level attention I’ve been talking about recently.

I have used the industrial revolution analogy in the title as clearly one of the benefits of implementing a CMS system is around efficiency. The most basic ROI of doing more with the same or maybe less resources – the same crude metric for implementing spinning looms instead of spinning wheels – that revolutionised the textile industry and therefore presumably the clothes we wear today.

In addition easier to use tools enable artists with no craft skills to create stuff – move to today where even I can upload my company logo or a witty message onto a website and some machine somewhere will reel off a T shirt for me – I don’t need to know how to spin, sew, screen print or any of that stuff.

I can extend the analogy slightly further, in that the  industrialisation of making stuff created a more consistent quality product that was available to the masses. Much like CMS systems, being easier (and cheaper) to use than hand crafting html, with their spell checkers, accessibility compliance, metadata tagging, XHTML standards, navigation management  and work-flow processes – create better, more consistent content, delivered efficiently, at an acceptable price (maybe!) for the masses.

I feel sorry for the vendor involved, caught up on the front line here (and in the full contact sport that is being a CMS vendor, someone will score a cheap shot on this). I am fairly sure the Luddites really didn’t give a stuff about the make of loom they were destroying during their futile effort to hold back change.

(Clearly I could be wrong, it might be about the product and the journalists might be striking because the vendors product UI makes their eyes bleed – but I doubt it!)

Of course, there is something more subtle going on here than just Luddites burning computers and this blog post by Roy Greenslade – a journalist from the the Guardian Newspaper – touches on a lot of great points. The issue is far more complex than I could cover in this blog, in an industry widely commented as facing huge threats and change.

But, reading the Greenslade article you get an insight into not just the industrial relations faux par committed (the bit that’s making the mainstream news) – but also, reading it as a Content Management Professional (as Philippe and Zahoor pointed out in their tweets) about the CMS implementation Pandora’s box they have opened.

How many times have we seen CMS projects, with a super bit of software, lovingly moulded and crafted by some great folks in a project to fit their perception of the business – ultimately fail as there was no buy in from the people that use the thing?

A process that works best starting from the procurement – I’ve seen great projects, ambitious projects – build fantastic foundations for success by getting those stakeholders into the process early. Do know you what? Those projects are the ones that beat the widely quoted industry average of a 3 year project/software churn.

Those very efficiency savings and ROI figures don’t look so rosy if you factor in the real possibility of the users  hating it (even if they don’t officially go on strike) that only 50% of the team will adopt the software, that this will be the peak as those numbers dwindle as they either scrape together budget to do their own thing, continue to use existing tools, email you their content in word documents or work on a way to replace the system. Seriously, user adoption is the most critical factor in the success of a project, post the ticker tape parade of go-live.

That’s where my analogy falls apart, this is not the industrial revolution, we’re not implementing new machines, operated by less people with lower skills, – OK so they just don’t need to be HTML craftsman, but they still need to be good writers – as Greenslade puts it in his blog -

it is clear that “content” is not a substitute for “journalism”

I am not suggesting that in a single blog post  I have the answers to, what is obviously a complex issue for the Johnstone Press – but at face value, the story does highlight that implementing a CMS is an opportunity, but one that in every organisation must be considered seriously.

Whilst it does perhaps open up journalism or publication to the less skilled masses (as I demonstrate by writing this) -  a CMS is not a content loom churning out more content, it relies on the quality raw material.

That raw material is reliant on good quality, knowledgeable people that needs to be respected as you build the machine – it is, if you like a better spinning wheel, requiring deft operation by a knowledge worker – not by a sooty faced Victorian child.