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.

From a content publishing perspective (rather than a marketing trend) this isn’t really a big deal is it? Surely these guys have merely changed platform – moving to platforms that have greater focus on community tools. Should we now consider YouTube and Facebook as web content management systems or at least web publishing platforms?

Well.. I think.. yes.. and errr.. no.

The core functionality of any content management system, whether its digital assets, structured text content or documents – are the principles of not just authoring/uploading and publishing content – but of governance, permissions models, brand protection and approval processes – stuff these social media platforms simply don’t have.

Does this move suggest that perhaps Coke has surrendered all that back end control for some community features? I think, probably not.

The key I think is the quote from the New Media Age article where Prinz Pinakatt, Coke’s interactive marketing manager for Europe says:

“We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform.”

They want to publish content to where their audience is – and their community hangs out on Facebook and YouTube. Of course it’s the community that these platforms have attracted that is their value to these brands, rather than their functional and technical capabilities.

Build it and they will come. That’s the normal mantra of community building on the web, build a fantastic destination, invest in attracting visitors and encourage them to interact, engage and form your tribe.

But, hey with these social media networks – someone else has already built it and the people have already arrived.

As I referred to in my last post, there is a lot of talk about the redefinition of WCM, of separating the management bit from web delivery - publishing to social media networks could be a strong use case of that. That organisations are increasingly going to think of these sites as part of their multi-channel publishing strategy.

Of course the nice thing about the “build it and they will come” philosophy is that you exclusively own that community, you can listen to their interactions through web analytics and personalize or adapt your content and delivery in response.

A social media publishing strategy therefore needs a social media listening strategy to build that insight – but more of that in future posts.

But for now, as web publishers, looking to engage our visitors we need to rethink our idea of what the ‘destination’ is.

Coke Triumphant image courtesy of Oliver Scott reproduced under Creative Commons License.

Content is still king and as I catch up with three weeks or so of my RSS reader, it seems that at the end of last year – the decade – that there was a new CMS blogging trend and it’s for talking about trends, the CMS blogosphere was alive with predictions. All worthy of comment and I thought maybe I can chuck in some thoughts of my own.

For starters I’d better set some context, of what I think about our market historically, so you know where I stand.

Content Management has gone through various trends, casting my mind back, it was once believed that the CMS services (CMS only mean’t web publishing back then) would be commoditised down into the application server and that the application server in turn would be part of the operating system. We would then build content management and deliver applications (or portals) on this common back end – and of course this Java centric world view never came to pass.

Back then a CMS was an IT enabler and part of the infrastructure and that infrastructure grew to become managing all content and knowledge of an enterprise – an Enterprise Content Management System – it’s reach extending to Digital Asset Management, Document Management – the world became obsessed by compliance, records management and the vision moved from the geek to the librarian – of turning organisations into filing systems.

All very worthwhile, but in the meantime the budget and requirements pendulum swung toward the business – and marketing specifically – as they didn’t like the IT focus of these early CMS implementations, didn’t get the greater good of ECM and wanted to focus on the marketing problem at hand – a website they could own.

So, an agile, diverse, vibrant bunch of open source, small to mid-tier vendors rushed into the space the old titans of CMS (now ECM guys) had disconnected from. The focus was on ease of use, of rapid implementation, of appealing to this newly empowered business user and for some, their chums at the agency with easily accessible and cheap site building skills like PHP and ASP.NET.

And increasingly, through social media making people at ease with web publishing – a democratisation of content authoring.

Yes I know, I’ve simplistically crashed through quite a lot of history in a few crude paragraphs, but in a nutshell – we’ve gone from pleasing the geeks, then the librarians to it being all about the business user, the marketer or the communicator.

This broad band of website building offerings, delivery models and tools that enable real people to add pages to a website, from a range of vendors – the ECM leviathans to open source projects – came to be known as WCM. And it is a broad church of technologies, best practice, capabilities (from a blog, a brochureware site to a multi-national roll out of hundreds of personalised sites) and of course prices.

To some a WCM is nothing more than a PHP UI on a database, or maybe it’s a web delivery infrastructure and to others its an intelligent purveyor of well understood personalised content to the discerning, well understood visitor – its hard to tell what’s out of the box and what’s down down to the skill of the crew that builds with it.

Which brings me back to my trend topic and the predictions - this nebulous haze of requirements, product and solution capability has attracted a fair amount of comment, as my fellow bloggers swish around the tea leaves for what’s next.

The general view is that WCM – the acronym, the definition of this as a software space is up for debate and that maybe 2010 is the year we see some changes.

Barb Mosher in Emerging Trends in Web Content Management over at CMSWire says:

we really need to think less about WCM as the only way to categorize a product/solution/platform and start thinking tag lines like “Web Publishing Framework”, “Integrated Online Marketing”, “Content Creation and Management”. Are we caught up in trying to define a market that is changing so rapidly that it really defies definition?

Laurence Hart (@piewords) also touches on this, in his Predictions for 2010 post:

Constantly Hyping Acronyms Of Systems: WCM is suffering. It doesn’t really cover mobile platforms well and there are big differences in the presentation and the management of the landscape.

Enterprise Content Management and WCM will go their separate ways. Okay, that isn’t going to happen, but it NEEDS to happen. Why? Because it is distracting them from their core, which is the platform and their core applications.

This last comment was inspired by the CMSWatch predictions, one of which being that Document Management and ECM will go their separate ways (so if ECM and WCM are splitting, who’s left at the ECM party?). CMSWatch also inspired a typically entertaining post from Jon Marks – in which he says:

Enterprise Content Management is well defined. The term WCM is horseshit, unnecessary and should take a long walk off a short pier….. I can already see the news headlines: LONDON, 2009 – SHOCK HORROR! WCM Geek Demands Death of term WCM. But it’s true. I’m of the camp that wished the term WCM would cease to exist.

Jon then goes onto de-construct WCM into its constituent parts, with an underlying content infrastructure layer with common standards (CMIS/JCR), separated from a delivery framework.

His post inspired Seth Gottlieb at Content Here, who agrees, wondering if we should go back to calling it CM  - you should also check out Peter Monks and The Case for Killing “WCM”, inspired by Jon (and he nicely puts how we WCM folks feel about Jon calling us losers!). Then, if you haven’t had your WCM predictions fill, then I’d also suggest a look at this from Peter Monks on his shiny new personal blog.

I am not sure how one goes about creating the tipping point that defines a new software segments or niche, how do we get customers asking for one of these new website-publishing-but-not-WCM-doohickies?

Clearly the analysts are key to this, CMSWatch had a stab at realigning their tiers and I think that’s definitely work in progress and needs at least a bit more explanation, Gartner have got back into WCM after a long absence of ECM focus and Forrester have long observed WCM as part of the marketing platform mix. But – I am sure that CMSWire, Jon, Peter, Seth, Barb and Lawrence have more influence than they admit, so perhaps it could be the year of the death of the definition of WCM as we know it today.

OK, so I had better venture my own predictions, it would be rude not having had a look at what these folks have had to say.

Personally, I think whatever we call it – we’ve had the era of IT, the librarian and the business user/marketer – and whilst clearly all of these folks should be catered for in the WCM of 2010 – I think it’s the era of the audience, our community, citizens or customers – the visitor.

Yes folks, it’s web engagement – sorry, did I say I wan’t going to talk about that…?

Image of cystal ball published under Creative Commons License, courtesy of  Bitterjug

Wow.. I was astonished by the original Clay article. In 2009 folks are still advocating self building a CMS? Not for some specialist task, but just for managing web content! I then started hacking together a comment for Ron’s blog and it started turning into this, full blown post. 

OK, so previous generations CMS products were pretty close to being IT development frameworks and if this were still the case – I could have some sympathy for Clay’s point of view. If your CMS vendor (or open source project) of choice is handing you a bag of bolts and suggesting you get on with it, then as a developer I would agree that development frameworks have moved on and could be a better bag of bolts.

In those days we’d propose that an organisation build a contribition user interface (or Content Management Application as we used to call them) and a website (or a Content Delivery Application) based on a bunch of API’s – which was what the customer purchased. In those days we recognised that the CMA was 70% of the effort.

A hand rolled ‘CMA’ was nothing like the business user focused tools of today. Today a CMS, and you can pick one from a wide selection of commercial and open source developers, is a sophisticated business user’s tool. We are way past the “here’s a fancy database and a bunch of API’s – now go build” formative years of this market. 

If we imagine that development frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, put you at that same starting point we were at in the late 90′s (which is a very poor assumption) – does anyone still want to direct 70% of their development on the management application – before you even start delighting your site visitors?  

Clay is of the opinion (and seems this is his view on all developed software) that:

“..it has too many opinions. Those opinions were though of by somebody other than you and the needs of your organization. The more developed a content management system (or any piece of software, really) the more “opinions” it has.

That’s quite a position to take. 

I’d prefer to take that statement and replace ‘opinions’ with ‘experience’. Opinions come for free, experience is hard earned. I can be less sure about all open source projects, but the good ones and all recognised commercial products have years and years of experience equity (and R&D dollars) being applied to each release.  

The bright people on a software project agonize over design, architectural decisions, best ways to make it scalable – they do this through personal experience, innovative ideas, customer feedback – a host of experience based scenarios.  

There is such a broad range of products in this CMS market – you are going to need to have something pretty special to compete or to render obsolete that ocean of existing IP.  

The CMS market is being described increasingly as commodotized and certainly the basics are; WYSIWYG editorial, create pages, change navigation, add images, add meta-data etc etc.. are all there. Why would I want to build all that stuff again? 

Do I want to spend 70% of my budget competing with all of that? Will it stretch to the cost of learning all those lessons as I overcome my inexperience? Will my project delight my content contributors as much as my visitors? 

And that last point is important, back to todays CMS being a business user tool – I have said in this blog before a CMS projects success hinges on that contributor adoption – for fresh content – the life blood of your website.

I would also guess that a user interface that suits Clay, a developer, is not necessarily going to be right for the marketing team that will have to feed this thing.      

Plus of course if, or maybe when, things get sticky, you’ve got a community, support or a warranty to fall back on and a bunch of people who know how your stuff works. 

Clay singles out Drupal and implies a frustration in working with it – my suggestion would be to get involved with that community – apply his development cajonas to becoming the change he wishes to see. (Apologies Gandhi).  The world of CMS is a broad church and if the Drupal community won’t embrace his ideas, there are plenty of others.

Of note of course, is that Clay published these ideas using a blogging tool… a focused kind of CMS.    

I’ve already gone on too long – this is the classic ‘build vs buy’ argument, covered in detail elsewhere – and exposes the gulf between writing code and developing software.