#fixwcm - some thoughts from the front line...

Sadly, travel and work commitments have clashed with this year's J Boye conference in Aarhus but I was pleased to see plenty of engaging Twitter and blog coverage from the first day's presentations and, in particular, the opportunity to contribute via the #fixwcm hashtag on Twitter.

No doubt the Twitter, blog and presentation file coverage of this debate represents a fraction of the overall debate so I risk going over old ground with this post but then, as a deafened person, I'm used to not hearing the full story and having to fill in the blanks sometimes - so nothing new there then ;)

The biggest blank for me in the debate, from following it remotely, was a lack of comment from the CMS buyers and users themselves. Perhaps they were in the audience listening intently as the analysts, commentators and vendors tweeted and blogged around them, or were too busy with their day jobs to enter the debate online.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I thought I'd add some further commentary from that CMS buyer and user perspective. In particular I'm looking at this from experiences over the last couple of years of working for product manufacturers with a global presence.

Well over 60% of people start their product research online via the manufacturer's website. There is an expectation that the manufacturer's site has the latest, most in-depth and up-to-date content about the product in which they are interested and so it is vitally important that manufacturers manage online content effectively and efficiently. The web itself has both facilitated and accelerated a global marketplace and many manufacturers need to operate in multiple countries today to survive and prosper. This makes website globalisation and localisation increasingly important for a broader range of organisations.

So, given that context, the premise of the debate was that Web Content Management is broken and needs fixing. For me, I think it's important to start with the definition and I am naturally drawn to the CMS Watch introduction and definition of Web Content Management.  It defines WCM as "A system that lets you apply management principles to content." and goes on to list 10 key areas that constitute a WCM capability - from authoring to multi-channel deployment.

Personally I concur with comments I saw yesterday about WCM going through a painful evolutionary phase rather than being broken and needing fixing. What I've been experiencing over the last couple of years is growing frustration with the processes and tools we are using to manage content and I think this stems from these main areas...

1. Microsoft's ubiquitous desktop computing presence

Long held wisdom suggests that we have naturally accepted Microsoft's ubiquitous presence in our lives because it is only through such ubiquity that modern computing has revolutionised how we work and live. In many respects though, this ubiquity has defined how we do things, whether it is starting to write content in a Word document or producing endless 'death by Powerpoint'. These habits and rituals, developed over many years now are hard to break. I find it quite staggering for instance that the collective wisdom of a very established global manufacturer is contained in folder after folder after folder of files on shared drives with seemingly very little actual captured knowledge, context or lifecycle management. Organisations and the people within them tend to stick with what they know and what has become second nature to them, even if at a fundamental level there are much better ways in which they could be doing things. Logic suggests for instance that generating content in a web first 'Wave-like' collaborative way would ultimately be far more effective than in disconnected Word documents but habit and ritual of the long-standing, largely disconnected desktop environment will persist for many years.

2. Web application capabilities moving faster in home life than at work

A key aspect of Web 2.0 as defined originally by Tim O'Reilly is the network effect. It's worked with staggering success in recent years with the applications we've adopted outside of the workplace. And that's the key point here. In many organisations these applications are stopped at the firewall. I'm sitting here in an open plan office of 200 plus people and the only person who can access any 'web 2.0' type application is me. So while community driven, virally dispersed applications have become part of daily lives at home many organisations actively block their usage in the workplace. Right now for instance I am dealing with some digital asset management issues within the system we are currently using and I long for the fast, dynamic, intuitive and highly productive interface that Flickr provides.

In my previous role and in my current one, a lot of the web editors I am working with on a daily basis fall into the 'millenial' generation. It's not surprising therefore that I receive regular comments about how they wished the internal web publishing system worked more like Google or Facebook or YouTube or Wordpress. However, having spent time in a software product management role, I know just how complicated it will be for the WCM system developers to get such rich interface functionality into their products to meet the expectations raised by the 'web 2.0' giants and they constantly have to evaluate the time and effort required for fixing long-standing pain points versus that required to create business winning new features. I sense here that Open Source philosophies and approaches have raised expectations about how users themselves can influence a product's development path and presented a real challenge to proprietary vendors to improve how they listen to and respond to user needs.

3. Challenges to long-held management principles

Having spent over 20 years in the workplace now I have never felt so strongly that technology is currently defining two very distinct worlds - the corporate one and the social one. A point I made yesterday in a #fixwcm tweet is that "many organisations' culture is counter-intuitive to social web so proprietary WCM innovation will continue to lag OS/social software". The mature, proprietary WCM industry has been defined by what organisations are prepared to pay for. The social web holds many risks - some genuine, some perceived - so once again there is only so far the majority of organisations are prepared to shift from their established ways of doing things. It's frequently commented that the more transparent, collaborative and crowd-sourced mechanisms exhibited by 'web 2.0' approaches challenge the 'top-down', 'command and control' mechanisms used for many years in many organisations. I've certainly seen examples where this is true but also examples where fad, fashion and the irrational exuberance the web world is prone to outweighs simple common sense.

To be honest though, I find I'm regularly reminding myself and those around me that for all the discussions about brand engagement in an online world being increasingly defined by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, every online survey I've conducted in the last few years has reinforced that in terms of what web users want from manufacturer's websites - 'product information',  'where to buy' and 'how to use' remain the core content management requirements that I simply must not lose sight of.  And how this can be managed efficiently, effectively and engagingly in over 20 languages across 50 countries is core to the future growth goals of the organisation.

4. Continued disconnect between business need and technical implementation

The phrase "if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem" springs to mind here. Business people continue to struggle to articulate what it is they want the technology to achieve in their organisations and technical people continue to struggle to understand how business goals could and should influence implementation. I've spent time developing user stories and trying to drive developments from business user personas and perspectives in an agile environment - and it's not easy! There probably aren't enough people out there in typical organisations ready and willing to take the extra effort required to work both sides of the equation - so disconnects between what the business wants and what the technicians implement will doubtless continue. Generational shifts, with those who grew up with the web now entering the workplace, could make a difference here in raising the overall level of technical literacy and understanding but clearly this needs to be tempered with the wisdom and common sense of business people who have spent many years understanding what makes their organisations' tick and how to compete in demanding marketplaces. Generational shifts are also influencing the outlook and function of IT departments and this could help further in breaking down what can sometimes be a major disconnect between business need and implementation.

Right now though, the reality remains that with all requirements considered, it is a mature, proprietary WCM and the collective knowledge and skill of the implementors we use that is still the best fit to address our core objectives and, although there are frustrations, the potential time and cost required to change the current ways of doing things far outweigh the system and process improvements likely to be gained by such a change. In terms of 'fixing' what we have I think a service,  MOT and tune-up are well overdue but we are a few years away from considering a full engine re-build, or indeed, a change of car.