Three months. Three different prospects. The same problem.

We have site(s) that are part of our Global CMS Platform, but we cannot make changes without working with global. We have been put in the content contributor box but are really content owners and need the associated tools to deliver our messages to our target audience. This centralised model of content management just doesn’t work for us. Can you help?

The is not an uncommon problem. If you invest in something big, you want something bigger. So for large organisations, an enterprise CMS is a strategic piece of kit. However, depending on whether you’re on the inside or outside, your view on whether this is a good and bad thing can differ widely.

View from the Inside

For large organisations it makes perfect sense to standardise on a technology stack and leverage your company’s collective commercial weight to broker the best licensing deal possible with your suppliers/vendors. Imagine, one content management system that can scale to meet the content needs for all your countries and/or business units globally.

Now we’ve bought into the dream, lets establish a central intelligence agency to create the generic designs, templates and components that all the satellite outfits within the organisation can (re)use. No pressure. We come bearing gifts. One platform, multiple players. Everyone’s a winner.

View from the Outside

Funny, I never get calls for help from inside. I always get calls from those on the outside that want to get things done. They get the theory from central but it just isn’t working from them in practice. It’s the usual stuff:

• We would like to change the look and feel on these pages, but the estimate from central means it’ll take them months before we get it.
• All we want is a twitter component, but it requires a template change, and that is going to hurt us financially.
• Our local market is different and we can never get the features we need from central within our timescales.
• Our standards and requirements for things like accessiblity and colours are different to those at central.
• We need to improve performance and search but its all hosted remotely out of central. Can we localise / improve this?

What to do?

These are largely organisational issues and their approach to content management. However, it’s not long before you the words:

We hate the CMS. It’s crap!

Maybe, just maybe, if we can start again things will be different. But will they?

9 / 10 you don’t have a CMS problem!

I totally buy into the theory of centralised technology stacks. Truth be told, I buy part way into the practice. But when you start being pulled into a more and more discussions from disgruntled outsiders, its time to stop, look and listen to them. Something is broken!

There are many ways to do this and politics aside, all of the discussions I’ve had to date have proven that their problems are not intractable. But largely this is a political battle fought by an incumbent system integrator/vendor/business unit at central against numerous guerilla outfits wishing to do more stuff with diminishing budgets in these challenging times.

My advice is to always try and work with central. Small wins. Tactical plays. These tend to demonstrate capability, highlight benefits, but more importantly send the message that you want to play ball. Slowly but surely the strategic wheels will start to turn in your favour. Trust me. I’ve never seen a successful go it alone and/or full on assault on central bring anything of value to the global table that tastes any good.

Delivering and maintaining large web sites is hard. It requires the business team to communicate what they want and for the technology team to deliver what they need. The two groups are known for not getting on. For a web project to succeed, they must eat from the same table, talk the same language and reach consensus. Communication is the key differentiator between success and failure here. It’s essential that when someone in the business says product that a developer not only understands what a product is but can implement it. Now, business and technology folks don’t share the same view of the world (which is a plus). However, not enough effort is invested to align these two views during the project(which is a minus). Think about it. The business is entrusting their most valuable assets, their content, to software developers that may or may not get it! We don’t have to live with great content divide.

What can be done?

I’ve found the best way for the business and technology teams to reach a common understanding of the subject matter is for them to collaborate on a shared view of the business domain. Have meetings, discuss stuff, card sort, write documents, role play, build prototypes, and so on. All important stuff. Keep doing that. But there needs to be something that captures the single source of truth that is a shared and mutually agreed upon representation of the business. The essential communication link between the business and technology team. That something is the content model.

How can we get better?

I’ve already spoken about content modelling and your essential first steps. I won’t go over that again. If you takeaway anything from this post, takeaway this.

Every CMS product implements its own content model that its developers understand. On your web sites, Your developers are translating your requirements into this content model, and rightly or wrongly, filling in the your missing gaps.

Are you happy to hand over your business decisions around your content to them? How do you know if they have got it right? How do you know if its wrong? We all know the cost of fixing problems is prohibitively more expensive downstream. A short conversation upstream could have completely avoided the creation of major problems that tend to arise downstream. Parking the details for now, the content model needs to be started upstream (analysis phase) and extend into downstream (development and testing phases) activities. The content model empowers the business, provides a common vocabulary for your content, and hooks in a number of downstream folks with a vested interest in managing your content going forwards. Maybe then we can start crossing the great content model divide.

Say you’ve been asked to buy a suit for someone you’ve never met. What do you do first?

1. Buy the suit.
2. Meet & Measure them.

For design-led projects, we’re buying that suit first. By damn, one way or another that content will well fit into that design and look good! Of course I’m exaggerating a little here. But if have been in a project where the content is delivered at the end and simply doesn’t fit, you never want to go there again.

Now call me odd, but wouldn’t life be that little bit easier if we sized up the content first and then designed the site to fit it. Measure, then fit. I dream of projects where we all work together to determine what information a site needs upfront, organise it, think of ways to be navigate it and then and only then do we create the designs to satisfy those requirements. What typically happens is something that lies between these to extremes depending on when I get involved.

What is Content First

Content First is a way of thinking. It’s core to you and manifests in the way you approach content-oriented projects. Content first gives you sight beyond sight. It’s not just the aesthetics. It’s about joined up site development that delivers clear and simple messages to its intend audience.

Although I’m a firm believer in Content First, I do appreciate the importance of web design. It’s got to look good and provide great user experience. However, for me, web design is one of many representations of content. Albeit an important one, but only one. There are many other channels, such as email, print, mobile devices, electronic documents, and so on. The aim is to separate and maintain a clear division between content and its target representations. To this end, its is essential to think and act in a Content First manner, something design folks have called Content Driven Design in the past.

The Challenge

There are number of challenges that make it harder to work in a Content First manner. These are not show stoppers. You just need to be aware of the constraints and wiggle a little to give yourself some room to manoeuvre.

Design is an iterative and horizontal endeavour. It’s done when its done. Typically the business engage with a creative agency. The creative agency produces some designs. When the designs are complete, the downstream activities start. The following are things that tend to happen in these scenarios:

• The Lorem Ipsum Time Bomb – Real copy is never added to the design. Real copy is added once the system has been built. The real copy does not fit the designs.
• Sample Navigation – Assumptions around the size, amount, fragmentation, relationship and kinds of content made are design time are wrong. Navigation works in part but not as first intended.
• Simple Design, Complex Delivery – Some creative ideas are fantastic but are not feasible for the target delivery channel. Worst case is that these ideas are core to the design, resulting in a doomed implementation.

Some ‘Content First’ Recommendations

• If you are being asked to manage somebody else’s content, take the necessary steps to find what that content is. Do some content modelling.
• Do not wait for the creative agencies to complete their designs. Start building out the site and let the authors and your customers touch the system early. It will influence the designs at a time when changes are not as costly to apply.
• Get the authors writing content as soon as possible. Whatever it takes, create a means for them to enter content and facilitate the discussions around it before the designs have been completed.
• Never sign off on designs that have never been road tested with actual content. Don’t buy the suit unless you’ve tried it on!
• The content folks and creative team need to work much more closely together. Have many, many joint reviews. Staged handovers. Transparent working.
• Decide early on where the priorities lie. Is it a killer site launch? Site aesthetics are top of the agenda? Is the site a marketing vehicle? Or a combination of these?

At Cognifide, we have been thinking more and more about Content First and adapting our delivery to be more align to Content Driven Development, something I’ll leave for a later post. But as promised, the next post in the content modelling series will be all about the content model.

If content has value, then take the necessary steps to manage it:

• Understand it.
• Define it.
• Measure it.
• Manage it.

Content modelling is a journey where those on the project strive to get consensus on ‘the what’ of information. The deliverable is a content model. However, the real value is in doing content modelling. Get a better understanding of what information you have and need, inspect and adapt it, define it in business terms and measure it in a way that your organisation can seek to continually improvement their business processes. Only then are you in a position to attempt to manage it.

There are many tools and techniques for doing this and yet content modelling still remains largely a downstream activity used by developers to implement the technical solution. Tech guys know the value of modelling for driving technical processes. Unfortunately, the lack of upstream content modelling is the norm for the majority of content-oriented projects. Clearly content modelling needs to start earlier with those people that see, own and want to derive the optimal value from their online content. These people are not the downstream teams such as developers, testers and system administrators. These folks are the content owners. Content modelling should start with and be continually driven by them. They should have a clear understanding on their content. And it is our job to actively help them to define, measure and manage it going forwards.

What’s Missing

I’ve found that there is not enough people and/or discussions around content modelling. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places but I continue to draw blanks in my google searches to elicit the simplest of examples around content modelling for content owners. To that end, I’ve decided to do it myself. I would of course appreciate any feedback, tips, hints, references to relevant material on the subject matter.

Take a look at the following web page:

To start with, think of pouring all the words, images, links, etc. on the page into a big bowl. We now have a big bowl of unstructured information. This is where the majority of the web sites are today. From a content management perspective there are completely unstructured. So lets add a bit of structure and see where that takes us. Lets do a little bit of content modelling.

Enter Content Types

Imagine taking that big bowl unstructured information, kneading it into a nice light dough and rolling it out on a clean surface. On the British Library web page above I see a list of news articles. Each news article has a date and a one line summary. A news article is a content type that has two fields Date and Summary. A content type describes a family of content items that have all the same fields. I like to think of a content type as a cookie cutter that you use to find the content items. Content types are used to define structured information, where fields such as Date and Summary, denote structure. All the remaining dough is the unstructured information that we need to gather together and roll out again, and maybe start cutting out some more content items and/or find other content types.

A key part of content modelling is finding content types. There are many ways to do this, so to name a few:

• An analysis of your competitor sites. What cookie cutters are your competitors using?
• Information brought to the table by the content owners/users.
• A review of the existing web site.
• Role playing / site walkthroughs.
• Content workshops / end user interviews.

As a content modeller, the end game is not about creating as many cookie cutters as possible and chopping up the dough so that there is absolutely nothing left to roll out. You need some unstructured information. Instead, you need to strike a balance between the unstructured/structured that effectively boils down to what information is of value to you now and what information is not.

Potentially Useful Content

In the South West of England the locals are very much into Potentially Useful Material, or PUM for short. One man’s PUM is another man’s junk. So, you get a new bathroom, and instead of throwing out the bath, it becomes PUM because someday, just maybe, you might need it. If I had a nickel for every time during a content modelling session I heard a someone say, “lets capture that information because it might be useful in the future”, I’d be rich man. My stock response to that is:

Show me the value today and I’ll gladly manage it tomorrow.

Nine times out of ten, these potentially useful content types (PUCs) are dropped. Be vigilant. Be ruthless. Eliminate waste. Focus on value. Do not pollute the content model with maybes and PUCs. We are already drowning in unstructured information, lets not add to it with PUCs.

Next Time

So we agree that content modelling is a good thing. We like content types and believe that they are a good way to describe a family of content items that share the same fields. But how to we capture these content types and present them in a useful and useable way that can be continually communicated to all interested parties? Well, that’s a content model.

In my next post on content modelling, I’m going to go into a bit more detail on how to represent structured information through pictures using a content model.