Forgive the cheesy title, but yes I gave a presentation at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising (TfMA) show last week where I talked about the place of content and in web or digital engagement. Or as marketing put it in the show guide synopsis: ”The importance of good content management and governance as a [...]
Optical Image Technology (OIT) and client Panhandle Farmers Mutual Insurance Company of West Virginia has been named one of three national finalists for the 2010 AIIM Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award in the small company category. The award recognizes excellence in the field of enterprise content management (ECM) technology, showcasing projects that have achieved a strong return on investment. The “best practices” designation denotes processes that are quantifiable, adaptable, and repeatable.
One of the first insurers in the region to transition from paper to electronic files and processing, Panhandle implemented OIT’s DocFinity® document and content management software for front-end scanning and secure electronic file access. Ultimately, Panhandle’s DocFinity integration with their web-based policy administration system, company portal, website, and more eliminated paper-based processing and enabled secure remote access for agents and customers.
According to the Guardian (see BBC tells news staff to embrace social media). BBC news journalists have been advised to use social media as a primary source
of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News. He took
over last week and said it was important for editorial staff to make better use
of social media and become more collaborative in producing stories. They quote
him, "This isn't just a kind of fad from someone who's an enthusiast of
technology. I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things.
It's not discretionary."
articles is one of several ways that traditional television news media needs to
make use of social media to survive the social media onslaught. For BBC news
editors, Twitter and RSS readers have now become essential tools and aggregating
and curating content with attribution are essential skills. In addition, BBC's
journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding
of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand.
a number of major traditional media organizations about using the Darwin
Awareness Engine™ to help with their news harvesting efforts. It allows you to
see what is going on around a topic and find the unexpected, as well as the
news breaking in real time.
editor post in October. This is another related trend I have reported on here
(see Mainstream News Take on Social Media Directors. The Guardian concludes by noting that as technology is
changing the nature of journalism, the BBC is trying to keeping up with the
pace. Horrocks is quoted again, "If you don't like it, if you think that
level of change or that different way of working isn't right for me, then go
and do something else, because it's going to happen. You're not going to be
able to stop it."
When visiting a local company last month, I was given a glimpse of their requirements for their new Knowledge Services Framework vision and requirements. It was inspiring and incredible. They had mapped all the functions that they perform, identified existing systems that matched, and then had measured each of them to the following vision.
Here is their requirements as presented. The highlights are theirs.
leverage consumer applications proven to augment existing work processes (parity plus)
specifically targeted to business requirements and opportunities
access with only a browser and an internet connection
no reliance on proprietary systems or technology
development based on open industry standards
built upon a semantic web framework
embraces and enables BYOC model
no operating system dependency
provides web service capabilities
tuned options for mobile devices
no browser dependency
no net cost increase
no desktop footprint
100% cloud ready
Vision into Reality
Okay, very pretty and exciting, but we all know from experience that idealistic visions are usually really good on slides, but falter in reality. Can this be made to work in a large (multi-billion dollar), established company with a full suite of legacy products?
After what I saw, I would say Yes.
They had looked at their existing systems and if they didn’t meet the requirements, the vendors were told the issues and given a chance, over 1-2 years, to update their product. When they didn’t, they were replaced. This isn’t the act of rash adopters. This is planned and thought-out.
For new functionality, like blogs and enhanced collaboration spaces, they identified new products, many of them open source, that met their requirements. With open standards, like CMIS, they were plugged-in to the architecture.
They are building a private cloud that allows them to install applications into either Amazon’s platform or locally based upon their needs. They are currently using Amazon’s cloud primarily for development now, but will start mixing it up shortly.
Someone brought in a Mac and said that he now did all his work on it. He had one Windows image to work with a legacy piece of software that needed IE, finance related I believe, but he demonstrated the freedom from the tightly configured company-owned laptop. With a browser and Internet connection, he was good.
They are looking into Semantic capabilities. They want to uniquely adapt the social web with the semantic web in context of [their] business processes. They have a firm grasp of what they are trying to accomplish and are talking to multiple people about how do execute. They aren’t leaning on one “expert”, but seeking a complete picture.
I’ve read a lot of people talking about transforming the Enterprise with new technologies. I’ve seen them talk about enabling people to work. This is a complete transformation. Will users leverage the new stuff? Well, they’ll have to use a lot of it because it will be where critical information is stored. The champions have also been selling the idea across the company as the technology evolved to meet their requirements.
It is some cool stuff, potentially the coolest I have seen in technology world to date. I wish them all the luck in the world and hope that I get an opportunity to help out.
This is one project I would not delegate to my team. I’m not worried that they couldn’t deliver, I just want to play with the cool toys in the beautiful architecture.
This is a rant. I rarely write rants, but here is one. It is based on one of my largest pet peeves in the technology industry. It is about a commonly accepted term and not about the people who use it.
It is about “CMS”. This is a term that for many is synonymous with Web Content Management. This just gives me the screaming heebie jeebies. Let me illustrate.
I was at a meeting in DC called the Web Content Mavens recently. The topics of discussion should be obvious. I made a comment to a group there that there is content that isn’t web content. This person, an experienced “CMS” implementer did not believe that any such “content” existed. I used the easy examples of Word and Excel files. She immediately jumped to the conclusion that if it wasn’t web content, it was documents. I then fired some examples at her:
Her eyes lit up as if I had just revealed a whole new world of content to her. I didn’t. I revealed the world of content, not a new one. She hadn’t been living in the world of content. She had been in the world of web content.
There is more to Content Management than managing Web Content!!!
Being able to publish or host a website does not make something a CMS!!!
The Growing Itch
I first noticed the problem several years ago. I went to an event focused on Content Management Systems and noticed that everything focused on publishing a website. Ah, Web Content Management, I know a little on this topic, I thought to myself.
The problem is that people don’t think of it as WCM, or any similar terms. They think of it as CMS. This drives me NUTS! There are systems out there that manage content, quite well, but don’t publish to the web. They don’t get considered a CMS by many people.
I hate the term. It is a term that has such potential, but so many people use it in such a limited fashion. Qualify the thing with “Web CMS” or create a new friggin term.
Let’s look at some of the people using the term (keep in mind I like and respect most, if not all, of the people behind these sites)
There is a big world out there. All you Web CMS people need to give the term CMS back! It doesn’t belong to you. A long time ago you took it while the broader content community was trying to futz with the term ECM. By the time we realized what was happening, you had taken the term.
To whome does the term belong? That is a topic for another day.
A Quick Breath
This isn’t personal. Far from it. I read the websites listed above and find them valuable.
Pretty much everybody who reads this will have entered the industry with the term CMS firmly entrenched, incorrectly, into daily use. That is life. I had to get this off of my chest so that when I occasionally twitch when the topic of “What is a CMS” comes up in conversation, you know why.
I’m also going to not respond to comments. I’ll allow them and read them, but I’m not going to get sucked into an argument over a rant. This is a rant and there is a lot of irrational emotion that fuels it.
“Repeat after me, this is not an information revolution, it is a relationship revolution”Tweet by John Hagel (@jhagel)
The cool technologies that are transforming the competitive landscape and how companies operate are not prototypes in some electronic giant’s lab. They’re in the marketplace, and affordable. You don’t have to overhaul your IT architectures to implement them. If anything, they improve the value of that architecture that you spent gillions putting in place.And, as a bonus, these technologies promise to, in the words of one CIO, “make IT fun again!” The promise of new, cool technology depends on IT-smart business leaders, who discover the potential in them through experimentation and application. These are learn-by-doing technologies that are not programmable by IT. Employees will “reprogram” how their companies operate based on how they use these technology. IT’s job is to teach, coach, observe, and scale. Imagine the impact of having everyone in the business 10% smarter about IT? It’d do a lot more good than making everyone in IT 100% smarter about the business.
Often the best source for innovation is the team within your business. A great leader can turn them into entrepreneurs who are hungrily looking for new opportunities. The key is empowerment. By empowering people you enable them to achieve goals through their own ideas and efforts. The leader sets the destination, but the team chooses the route.
…crowdsourcing is the asking of a large group for their contributions. Just because individuals in the community post original contributions, doesn’t mean other employees can’t collaborate around them. In fact, that’s an incredibly valuable basis for getting top ideas…If traditional collaboration is the process of executing on a known objective, crowdsourced collaboration is the process of discovering and building ideas that are not yet known…Crowdsourced collaboration creates new opportunities, and traditional collaboration executes on them.
Of course not. For years, the prevailing practices for productivity were project and process management. Now that we’ve begun to recognize the critical role of collaboration, and collaborative software for improving productivity….(Good) Collaboration software helps connect geographically dispersed teams, dramatically improves communication, and creates a shared workspace where team members can contribute, aggregate and iterate information and work. Shared workspaces help the team create and maintain a shared view and understanding of their problem space – the military calls this a “common operating picture”. The logical (and critical) next step is to enable this team to plan, track and execute with the same level of ease and convenience as they can now communicate and aggregate work.
Keith Errington: “Web 2.0 – Collaboration vs. Control“
…this leads us to the more fundamental problem behind Web 2.0 adoption. The people making the decisions at a strategic level, need to understand these technologies, what they mean and what they can and cannot do. Then they have to see how they can be used to meet their organizational objectives. And then they need to implement them to the depth appropriate to the proposed strategy and with the right level of control. They need to understand the implications of the success of such projects to both the budget and the corporate culture. But one of the strengths of these technologies is that often their effect adds up to much more than the sum of the parts – that they generate new paradigms and evolve into systems that defy strategy and planning. They cross departmental boundaries and break down barriers between the organization, its customers, and its suppliers. And once users get the taste of openness and collaboration, they generally want more – it’s difficult to get that genie back in the bottle.
The Gilbane Group is gearing up quickly for another one of their conferences. The Gilbane Content Management Conference in San Francisco will be held May 18-20, 2010. This year’s conference will cover a number of topics including Web technologies, content management, and collaboration tools.
Web, content, and collaboration technology have reached a new level of maturity. This is true in terms of technology, but more importantly, it is true in terms of what businesses expect to be able to do with these tools. Web and enterprise content management permeate every aspect of an organization. Public facing internet sites are the front door to an organizations’ products and services, and where customers, partners and investors engage with the corporate brand and develop perceptions. Internal websites, whether in the form of intranets, blogs, wikis, or portals, provide knowledge workers increasingly efficient ways to collaborate and share knowledge. Customer and internal-facing applications share requirements that call for a number of enterprise content, publishing and infrastructure technologies, such as multi-lingual, social media, search, and integration software.
Gilbane San Francisco is organized into four tracks so that whether you are responsible for marketing, IT, a business unit, or an internal function, you will be able to easily navigate among the conference sessions. The four tracks include:
CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for Gilbane San Francisco 2010. If you plan on going to the conference, CMS Report has some good news that is going to save you some money. Our sponsorship of the conference entitles CMSReport.com readers to receive a special $200 discount to the conference. To receive the $200 discount, you’ll need to use the code “cmsreport” when you’re asked for it during the registration process.
I smiled at this the other day -”Software Developers: The New Rock Stars of Marketing” - it comes from the article ’Out of the Box’ published a few weeks ago in the UK Financial Times, that talks about the role of technology in marketing in the new media age. The smile is because this is pinned up [...]
Seth Gottlieb at Content Here is on a roll lately with some great thinking.
His post on The Myth of the Occasional CMS User was timely based on some conversations we’ve been having around the office. There is a lot to unpack in it, and of course anything with Myth in the title catches our attention.
Seth summarizes a frequent pain point with CMS rollouts:
“Often, one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information. The implicit assumption is that everyone wants to directly maintain their portion of the website but technology is standing in the way”
He goes onto explain all the reasons why this can wreak havoc and have people assigning blame to the wrong areas. He correctly points out that CMS failure often comes down to expectation setting, a topic we’ve covered here on the Myth as well.
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen organizations buy a CMS, take their same content structure, and simply distribute authoring ownership to every far flung corner of the organization. And let’s not entirely blame the organizations. It’s how CMS is sold. And it’s a myth, straight up.
Here’s a familiar scene.
You have dozens of users in CMS tool 101 training sessions with no idea why they are there, no familiarity with the publishing model and no incentive to learn how to keep their piece of content up to date which rarely needs to be updated anyway. This never ends well.
And the CMS technology itself only magnifies this problem. Content management systems do a lot of things well, but they are not built for the occasional user. Far from it.
They typically expose all the functionality you need to build pages and sites, but they are not organized around supporting task-based content entry. And occasional users have very specific tasks.
I know vendors will disagree, highlighting things like inline editing, roles based security and workflow. But in almost all cases, it still doesn’t work for the occasional user. The pain far outweighs the gain.
So, I’ll take it one step further than Seth. Stop letting people use your CMS unless they are an integrated part of your web and editorial team and need to be in it on a regular basis. Even then, they may not need to be in the tool.
Seriously, don’t let them in. Even if they beg.
Build other processes for allowing them to request updates and get content into the system. Lie if you have to (sorry, all out of seats!).
Your content publishing process should be oriented to serving your site visitors (content consumers) not the internal structure of your company.
Build an editorial process and team that supports getting this content published in the most effective way possible and stop forcing administrative assistants to sit through tools training.
Everyone will be better off.
Related posts:
by Ted Schadler
Apple just announced its media tablet (we coined these things mobile media tablets in 2005 in private client conversations and in print in 2007) amidst much excitement and surprisingly little secrecy. There wasn't much if anything in the announcement that the bloggers hadn't anticipated.
This product will appear in 60 days with WiFi and in 90 days unlocked with AT&T data plan for $629 and $29/month. It will catch on quickly as an employee-provisioned third device, particularly for Mobile Professionals, 28% of the workforce. IT will support it in many organizations. After all, it's just a big iPhone to them and already 20% of firms support them.
Most of the media coverage will discuss the impact on consumer markets. I'm going to talk about the impact on businesses and on information & knowledge management professionals, the IT executive responsible for making the workforce successful with technology.
Make no mistake, this is an attractive business tool. Laptops will be left at home.
One thing's for sure, Apple knows how to time the market. And the market it's timed this time around is an important one: information workers self-provisioning what they need rather than what their employers provide. We have called this trend Technology Populism(AKA consumerization of IT), and it's important enough that we're writing a book called Groundswell Heroes about how to harness it.
Apple also timed the rest of it right. The technology, the media industry, the digital experience, the developer ecosystem, the retail presence, the applications, the operating system, the increasingly HTML5-enabled Web, the price, and the wireless industry is ready for this product.
Oh, I'm sure it will have problems. Despite the claims, battery life's sure to be inadequate for someone on the go all day, for example. But the iPad extends all the things that Apple's already got up and running. And Apple has addressed the usual problems already: cost, availability, accessories, wireless access.
And it offers some superior characteristics for the things that Mobile Professionals care about. Mobile Professionals are one of the four Workforce Personas we've defined. This segment is 28% of the US information workforce defined by a high need for mobility and a lot of applications. Mobile Professionals care about:
This thing will take off among high net worth mobile pros. And IT should be okay with that, at least in non-regulated industries where the lack of application management and device control tools are not big issues. After all, iPad is really just a big iPhone.
And in April 2009, 17% of enterprises and 25% of SMBs supported iPhone and in September 2009,16% of US information workers used iPhones for work, even at the world's largest organizations.
Now, some "What it Means" (WIM) points:
WIM #1: The importance of great document tools just increased. Apple's support of iWorks on the iPad gives execs what they need to present on the road and leave the laptop at home. Microsoft should build best-in-class iPad software in the Office formats. (Or watch execs move key material to the iWorks formats.) Adobe should take responsibility for a great PDF reader. And these readers must also be great presentation tools.
WIM #2: The importance of application push just got greater. Apple should make this a priority in its v4 release of the software. (We expect to see the v4 release in July 2010.)
WIM #3: Google has even more need now to retain control over the Android experience so developers can target that platform with the same relative ease as they can target the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad market.
WIM #4: The market for device and application management just got more important. Apple, make the management APIs a key initiative to allow vendors like Good, Box Tone, and Sybase to solve that problem. (Device management vendors, feel free to comment below if you want to be included in the conversation.)
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