#futureWCM - some thoughts from China - part 4

Just to add some context to the next post…

For the first few years of this decade I was immersed in an Enterprise Content Management project for a global products company. For the last couple of years of this decade I have also been immersed in web/enterprise content management for global products companies.

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Therefore, as we come to the end of another decade and the first of the 21^st century my thoughts are turning to the progress that’s been made over the last ten years and if I was writing this blog in 2020 (as from its title you may guess I intend to) what would I be saying about the next ten years of progress?

Ten years ago, the company I was working for was spending in the region of $25 million to consolidate its many external and internal websites onto one consistent platform and empower the subject matter experts around the organisation to create and manage content for themselves. There were great ambitions to be able to deliver highly personalised content and use the web as a dynamic multi-channel publishing tool that would create PDF documents on the fly based on the web visitors specified preferences.

The consolidation worked well and came at a crucial time as technology markets started to collapse and the dotcom boom turned to bust. The ambitious and complex personalisation efforts were abandoned completely and as far as I can see today were never resurrected.

Fast forward to the end of the decade, the global projects I have been working on are a fraction of the budget (around $1-2 million) but have been achieving the same types of results in terms of website consolidation and functionality. However, I am experiencing some of the same issues I did 10 years ago that call into question how far we’ve actually come in that time.

When you are responsible for managing websites, global or otherwise, the degree to which you can empower others around the organisation to create and manage content is the top concern because all other aspects of web management and marketing are ultimately dependent on this. Consider for a moment all of the debate and hype currently being generated around ‘social media’. The best way for a product manufacturer to achieve positive sentiment on the social web is to focus on producing products and associated services that deliver on their promise of performance and reliability and will be talked about for those reasons and not any negative aspects. Getting the information management right both inside and outside the organisation is crucial to this.

So, ten years on, is this getting any easier? Well, yes and no. In general the tools have become more non-technically focused and generation shifts mean that the younger employees are more web savvy. However, I still think that the deep dependence on Microsoft’s largely disconnected desktop environment that is so ingrained in many organisations is hindering rather than helping progress in content management. Too often, the web is still seen as an activity that ‘someone else does’, that it is too technically complex for everyday business folks to get involved with and that responsibilities for it come in addition to people’s day jobs. Web Content Management in particular sits in too much of a separate domain which still leads to considerable duplication of content and effort.

Over the next ten years I’d really like to see organisations really focusing on breaking their Microsoft Office dependence and beginning more of their content creation and management processes online rather than having to go through lengthy re-purposing exercises to make that content useful on the web. There is undoubtedly a place for ‘social web’ style publishing processes within organisations once the downsides of such approaches have been fully exposed on the wider web but these will entail major IT and cultural change programmes that will typically take years not months to push through 

The CMS providers who successfully address the concerns of the IT department for secure, reliable, robust and supportable solutions with the non-technical ease of use exhibited by the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are poised to win and deep down I’m really hoping this isn’t Microsoft SharePoint, simply because I think SharePoint continues to be a counterproductive information management approach that is designed to safeguard Microsoft’s desktop application monopoly.

In 15 years of content management projects from enterprise to medium to small companies I can’t remember ever initiating or participating in a content related workflow. Now that it’s become commonplace to publish anything and everything to the web through social media tools it seems unlikely that I ever will.

However, thinking ahead, this is an area that could well turn on its head during the next 10 years as we climb the slope of enlightenment. The more I get under the covers of social media, the more I think that organisations need to play a very cautious game here. This may well be contrary to the hyped-up view of greater transparency and openness that’s currently pervasive but then after so many years of hype exposure I’m more inclined to turn against the herd view these days.

A Global Web Managers Wish List…

• The cost-effective globalisation capabilities of EPiServer (with a touch more object orientation and shared content support but maintaining the traditional site tree mental model)
• The image management and manipulation capabilities of Flickr, expanded to support the video capacity and capability of YouTube
• Non-technical creation and management of rich media illustrated by 10CMS
• Article creation and management with the simplicity of Wordpress and document capabilities of Google Docs
• A microsite creation capability with the simplicity of Wordpress but within the globalised framework of EPiServer
• Module/application development and integration with the breadth of Joomla and simplicity of Facebook
• Collaborative site building with the breadth of SharePoint but the simplicity of Google Apps and WCM connectivity of Alterian
• Community site building breadth of Drupal with simplicity of Community Server
• A content repository that works with the speed and accuracy of Gmail that could auto-categorise and make related content recommendations on the fly
• Google Analytics expanded to incorporate social media monitoring - as I want to keep all analytics in context
• An internal relationship building and knowledge sharing capability illustrated by Twitter