Last week I chaired the popular track on web content management at our Philadelphia conference. It was great to make connections with many new practitioners and as always happens, meeting in person brought about some interesting conversation. After a few days to digest the many lessons learned, I would like to share them, while they are still fresh in my memory.
Following in the footsteps of New York Times technology columnist David Pogue’s entertaining keynote on disruptive technologies, the track was kicked off by Jim Murphy from AMR Research with an analyst’s perspective on the marketplace. His talk focused on 4 new WCM requirements:
- Strategic: The web becomes a vital artery to the organisation
- Pervasive: The web is more than the web…and it’s more than your website
- Engaging: The web is for everyone and by everyone:
- Responsive: The web is a hub for shaping, sensing, and responding to customer demand
Early on Jim stated that vendors need to do more to meet these requirements. He also had a good quote on marketplace consolidation: “It does seems like the marketplace is consolidating, but how? Interwoven went to a search vendor, Tridion to a globalization vendor, MediaSurface to a marketing vendor, RedDot to an ECM vendor and Stellent to an everything vendor”. For less critical buyers this might be some sort of consolidation, but the number of vendors is still very high.
The WCM track also had 3 interesting case studies from some seasoned practitioners at Abercrombie & Fitch, Association of National Advertisers and Hanley Wood. Here’s some of the advice I extracted, which apply to WCM projects around the world:
- Perceptions become reality. If your colleagues perceptions of the project are wrong from the beginning you could easily find the existing divide between IT and business deepening even further
- Define the glossary for important terms early on. Don’t expect clear understanding and agreement on the confusing industry lingo. If you skip this step, it tends to cause confusion and frustration
- The list of potential vendors that meet your requirements probably counts around 30. You need to test and carefully examine your options to narrow the list further, but move quickly so you can get started with the project. Personally I don’t think you need to test more than 2 – 3 systems, but many don’t test-drive at all and that’s risky.
- You can prevent many implementation issues by taking the time to follow the best practices that the vendor recommends.
After the case studies, I did my talk on inconvenient truths based on my 10 years in the industry. The track concluded without slides in a session where three very experienced CMS consultants (David Hobbs, Seth Gottlieb and Travis Wissink) shared their combined experiences and fielded questions from the floor. There was mostly agreement on the key issues and some helpful advice on complex issues such as caching, integration, implementations and how you select the right vendor.
How do you get WCM right? Well, many challenges remain and I’ll be following them closely.
I hope to meet you on the WCM track at our 5th European conference in Aarhus in November. What’s the main WCM challenges that we should address?
