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.

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.