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.

What is a site map? Its a helicopter view of a web site with all the pages arranged in a easy to view and/or accessible manner. The best site maps fit onto a single page. For the more complex sites out there, the ability to drill down into specific areas of the site but keeping to the one page rule provides an alternative site navigation scheme.

In the majority of design-led projects, the site map is presented in graphical form that provides an essential first look at the structure/grouping of pages within a web site. The problem I have with these diagrams is that they are typically presented along with the completed designs. The finished article. However, for me they are the critical starting point for the journey to the centre of the content hierarchy.

Towards a Content Hierarchy

Web site pages are arranged in an hierarchical manner. URLs are just the means to access pages and/or content residing on those pages. The first thing I do when I get a site map is pray that its open to change and then try and express in terms of a content hierarchy. Take a look at the following site map:

Flattening a site map is a great way to start putting the meat on your content hierarchy bones. Reformatting the site map highlights errors and/or glaring omissions in your content model, site pages, content types, and so on. It’s just another means to help build/validate your content model. Believe me when I say that:

A site map is an innocent picture that hides a 1000 discussions.

So take a look at the flattened site map, the beginning of our content hierarchy (sometimes referred to as a content tree):

/content/
/content/contact-us
/content/terms-and-conditions
/content/privacy
/content/business/overview
/content/business/blog/2009/05/content-first
/content/business/blog/2009/04/content-modelling
/content/business/blog/2009/04/content-modelling/comments/1
/content/business/our-understanding
/content/solutions/overview
/content/solutions/delivery
/content/solutions/services
/content/solutions/how-we-work
/content/solutions/projects
/content/solutions/case-studies
/content/solutions/case-studies/2009/the-amazing-chocolate-factory
/content/solutions/case-studies/2008/ground-transportation-system
/content/solutions/testimonials/2009/google-loves-us
/content/voices/blog/2009/05/strategy-article
/content/voices/blog/2009/03/technology-article
/content/voices/team/cleve-gibbon
/content/voices/team/stuart-dean
/content/voices/offices/london
/content/voices/offices/poznan
/content/voices/careers
/content/community/partners
/content/community/events
/content/community/events/2009/06/24/eric-evans-domain-driven-design
/content/community/technology
/content/community/press
/content/community/join-our-community

At the moment this content hierarchy is at the page level but it has already raised a number of questions around missing content and roughly how it will be access across the site. Here are some quick observations I’ve made after doing this:

• Why are the offices under voices?
• How are we going to get hold of articles archives
• Would the site be better served by blog channels (business, voices, all) that provides an aggregated view of blog style posts?
• /content/blog-channel/business
• /content/blog-channel/voices
• /content/blog-channel/all
• How can we view events for in 2009, 2008, May 2009? The urls seem easy to construct using the above naming scheme.
• What does join-our-community do?
• Are they other ways of list items other than by date, e.g. /2009/05?

So what’s the difference between the site map and the content hierarchy. Well, the content hierarchy is the beginning of something more concrete that you can start validating in parallel with your content model. But that is something I’ll leave to a future post.

In Summary

The takeaway point here is that a lot of this work can be done BEFORE the creative works start. This is information architecture and content strategy. I’m not sure where the purists position it, but as a keen practitioner, its an essential piece of work done later rather than sooner. A content hierarchy should serve as input into the creative phase and not the output.

Of course, this is just the beginning. With a sprinkle of content modelling, we start dissecting the page and pulling out the content types and subsequently mapping these onto the available URLs. Although the content hierarchy is not an exact 1-to-1 mapping onto URLs, it does provide a great insight into the URL strategy that will be applied across the web site.

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.

When I start a new project, particularly with a new customer, I pay close attention to how they use the term web site. Customers arrive wanting a web site. They walk out with a digital solution. The web site is the easy bit. The hard part is defining, creating and rolling out a digital solution specifically for them.

So what is a digital solution? For me, its a dynamic map that continually adapts as you journey through a project. A bit like Harry Potter’s Marauders Map. Sometimes it actually feels like we’re using the map to guide our customers through the project pitfalls but without the protection of the invisibility cloak. So to be clear, a digital solution takes a customer from what they want to what they need. And for me, this is the key differentiator between happy and unhappy customers.

Now people have been creating, redeveloping, re-skinning web sites for over 20 years. Once you find the right people, they can do that until the cows come home. Building web sites is known technical challenge. But executing somebody else’s (business) vision, well that’s a people thing. It requires a clear strategy, with input from multi sources, to increase its likelihood for success. So let’s take the building of web sites out of the picture, the execution, and step upstream into the strategy, and see what happens there.

The Dynamic Strategy

Take a look at the picture opposite. Whenever a project kicks off, there is a vision. You’re told,
“we’re currently at A and want to get to B“. Simple. Only where they really need to be is at C. But they don’t know that yet.

In the majority of cases A and B are not very well defined. That’s okay, a bit of work and that can be sorted out. However, whilst you’re doing this, you really ought to be looking for C. In doing so, both the vision and strategy need to be adapt accordingly to uncover the digital solution. Remember the Marauders Map. Both the map itself (vision) and the journey (strategy) are changing as we learn more about our where we are and what we need.

But what happens today…

A digital solution typically starts with a customer vision. Next, a number of third parties are engaged to help build out a strategy. I get involved, sadly always too late, to execute on the strategy to deliver the vision. It’s a bit like ground hog day, walking into war zone and trying to make sense of the situation. It starts with the hundred questions. It’s no wonder I’m known by many customers as the ‘The Question Man’:

• What is your content strategy?
• Who is responsible for the creative?
• Do you have content life-cycle?
• What is your SEO policy, accessibility requirements?
• Is this multi-site, multi-lingual?
• Just how many agencies have you got involved in this?
• Do you have results of the usability study?
• Have you chosen a content management system?
• Will we be migrating existing content?
• Do your authors need to start entering content before the system is ready?
• What is your URL strategy?
• Do you have a retention policy?
• Who’s responsible the HTML production?
• Can I see some templates/pages with actual content please?
• and the list goes on…

Fortunately, I don’t just come with questions. I bring answers and/or a means to tease them out. After all, what value is someone that just asks questions! That said, on a good day, the execution phase is re-aligned based upon the answers provided. Sometimes this is major, other times its not. On a bad day, you have to make do. That is something I’ll pick up on different post.

What would be nice?

• If the vision, strategy and execution phase were not waterfall in their approach.
• That the vision was communicated clearly to ALL parties.
• For everyone to recognise that the strategy is an ongoing endeavour and not a dead document.
• For IT to be involved in the strategy, but not influencing it.
• For content strategists, to own and drive the content strategy. This should be a no brainer but its not!
• For digital solutions to be more content led, than design led.
• For the industry to be aware of what a good and bad content strategy feels like.

Wrap Up

I’m not saying web sites are not important. They are. It’s how people interact with you online. However, building them does not require dark magic. Yet the effort required to roll them out still does. This should not be the case today. We need to step up and get our heads out of the execution phase and start demanding access to better defined strategies that are founded upon clearly communicated visions. Lets give the ‘why’ to the people that actually build the web sites. Lets work together on that digital solution. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll meet your needs.

Additional Reading

• Web Strategy Best Practices
• The Discipline of Content Strategy
• Content needs a new home

Things have moved on (a little) since then but I would like to share some of things I learnt back then, and mix that in with what I still see today. If you have any thoughts in and around this area, I would love to hear them. Be sure to let me know from which vantage point you’re coming from when commenting though…

10 years ago…

Developers on IAs

Information Architects, formerly known as Experience Architects where regarded as fundamentally lazy by developers. I clearly remember a developer summing up what they thought of IAs:

God damned time munchers. All they do is talk and draw. The stuff they deliver is simple, incomplete, but above all something my grandmother could knock up on the way to collecting her pension. They take forever to create, and I use the term ‘create’ in the loosest sense, stuff that leaves precious little for us to do the real work and deliver the web site. What a joke!

Then there was the money. IAs were billed out at higher rates than developers. Everyone knew this. This left developers feeling devalued in the eyes of their customers. This only served to fuel their resentment of IAs.

This was not productive.

IAs on Developers

There was an air of arrogance and self-importance that flowed through the IA camp. Developers didn’t get websites. That was the mantra. They built them to order and it is us, the IAs, that were responsible for bringing order from the chaos. We know what the customer wants. A senior IA told me back then:

People, well developers, don’t understand what we do. That’s okay. I don’t expect them to. But I do expect a certain level of professionalism from them. It’s like working with kids. I don’t have time for this.

Fact. The IAs were closer to the customer. Fact. IAs understood the challenges facing customers. Fact. This was NOT communicated downstream. Developers were seen as people lower down the food chain. As a result, IA deliverables were treated with skepticism and often dismissed out of hand.

This was not productive.

Present Day…

This still goes on. But IAs are now common place. I value, depend and actively seek out IA. It’s not optional. However, developers need to understand more about IA and IA need to actively reach out to developers. They have a lot in common.

It’s funny that sometimes when I meet new IAs and/or read about IA, they still feel the need to justify their existence. When you spend an eternity bringing order out of chaos, where the deliverables are simple, and nobody appreciates/values the effort expended in getting there, it’s tough. However, this has been something developers have been dealing with for decades. The complexity required to model software systems that a customer values is a thankless task. For IAs, developers are downstream in the process. They have not participated and/or understand the reasoning behind key information-based decisions, and as a result are the ones that don’t appreciate their work.

Content Strategy

I’m becoming more and more addicted to content strategy. The only way for IAs, developers and designers can move towards having a mutual respect and/or work more effectively together is to bring them closer together. A content strategy does just that. Unfortunately, I see very few customers with a content strategy. Also, most customers bring in the technology solution at the end, when all the key decisions have been made. The challenge is to educate customers and upstream disciplines, such as IA and creative to bring key project stakeholders to the party early. When that happens, customers get better value for money, and less waste spent on re-work.

Now I agree with the folks back at CMS Myth when they say:

“CMS is a technology, while content management is a discipline.”

And the discipline starts with creating a content strategy that is aligned with a pre-defined vision. What do you want (vision) and how can you get there (strategy). The CMS is just one of a number of parts for executing on the continually evolving strategy. Now I’m not best positioned to talk about what is content strategy and by what measures we can sort the good from the bad. However, as somoeone responsible for executing on a strategy, no strategy means crap delivery. It is shocking just how many companies are prepared to jump head first into execution with little regard for strategy and with their vision impaired.

So, I am forced to move upstream to assist, validate and verify (web,mobile) content strategies. But content strategy is a complex, multi-facetted, multidisciplinary, space. This is hardly surprising given that both vendors and content strategists alike believe everything is content. And as we’ve all probably experienced, when everything is content, everybody and the kitchen just have to get involved.

The Content Life Cycle

Putting to one side everything is content, let’s just try and understand what’s it’s like being content. I wish I could post up a flowchart for the life cycle of content. Sorry, no such luck. Your content and how you intend to use it dictate that. However, every piece of content does have a life cycle. It is created, used and eventually destroyed (if you plan for it to be destroyed that is). Content can have multiple owners that change throughout its life. Understanding how ownership is transferred is key, yet seldom done. Stepping through in meticulous detail the transformations content undergoes during its life and the roles it plays in producing new content and/or consuming existing content is a project “nice have”. However, this modelling of content is critical in the same way that the modelling objects/components are to application design, and the modelling of proteins/cells are to biochemistry.

For example, Julie starts work on a text document, that is formatted by Colin into a word document, and branded by Derek before Sarah presents it as part of her keynote proposal to the Board of Directors on Monday morning. After that meeting that document has both legal and regulatory requirements and should be managed going forward as a record in the organisation’s record management system. That is a simple content flow with multiple owners. Another example is where a high resolution image now needs to be classified, indexed, versioned, secured, stored, possibly reformatted or canonicalized. The image is no longer just content, but a visible, valuable and managed company digital asset.

But things are getting harder

Now with introduction of social and semantic web, just how do you build that into your web content strategy?

Well, what’s clear to me is that without a content strategy, delivering content management projects is so much harder. Even with a strategy, you can be sure that there are going to be gaps and inconsistencies. That’s not a big deal. But with a strategy, we have a means and process by which to bring about change. Because, when all is said and done, once you know what needs to be delivered, delivering it is easy. The vast majority of project waste is (re)delivering the unknown, the unclear, and the undefined. By taking the first steps towards creating a content strategy, companies can drastically eliminate project waste by removing the un from undefined, unclear and unknnown from content management projects. That doesn’t mean that they will not continue to be challenging. But at least we are taking steps to making things better than what we have today.