May 30 2009, 02:01 AM

Does your CMS fit?

Posted by Jeff

This article was originally published as part of our ISITE Insight newsletter (delivered every full moon). Since it's especially relevant to our CMS Myth readers, we'd love to hear what you think.   

Searching for the perfect web content management system can be a long and bewildering journey. One littered with hundreds of vendors, aggressive sales tactics, confusing terminology and a smorgasbord of features you may never use.

Traditional thinking in the CMS selection process includes jotting down a list of desired features, watching a generic demo and evaluating vendors based on who ‘checks the most boxes’ and gives the best end-of-quarter pricing. This process is fundamentally flawed and all too often results in poor technology selections and dismal implementations.

We believe there is a better approach. One that takes a holistic look at how CMS fits into the organization and aligns technology to key business processes and marketing strategies.

Our fundamental belief is that there are not good or bad content management systems – simply ones that are a better or worse fit for each organization. We’ve developed six fit factors to consider when evaluating web content management systems.

Technical Fit

While the underlying technology should not be the first consideration, the technical fit is very important. After all, the CMS needs to fit into your existing web infrastructure, align with internal developer skill sets and scale to meet the future needs of the organization.

It becomes increasingly important within enterprise organizations that have standardized platforms and application frameworks. We’ve yet to meet a developer without strong opinions about software applications. However, it’s important that the technical fit is evaluated based on the long term needs of the organization, not the preferences of a single developer.

Cultural Fit

Talking about culture and CMS together sounds like squishy science to many involved in a technology selection process. Looking inward to assess cultural fit factors like staff skills, their adaptability and old-fashioned agreeability, can make or break the ultimate success of the implementation.

Finding publishing tools that have a familiar paradigm for internal users can help with adoption. In one case a global organization felt more comfortable with a European vendor because the product had a more familiar orientation for its international users. Sometimes a CMS just “feels right” and that’s a critical fit factor to keep in mind.

Process Fit

At the end of the day, a CMS needs to support business critical scenarios within the organization. Different site types have different processes. A large ad-supported content site has different needs than a document-rich Intranet.

Key processes may include sharing content across multiple sites, building complex forms for marketing campaigns or rapidly provisioning new microsites for sales. Organizations should painstakingly document these processes and insist vendors include them in the demos and proof of concepts.

Feature Fit

CMS evaluations all too often start and stop with the feature lists. While features are important, they should be evaluated in the larger context of the six fit factors. It’s important to isolate the feature-driven requirements for your organization that will differentiate the vendors.

Be wary of the vendor that promises to do everything within the CMS. Some of the more attractive features are often bolted onto the core product and don’t represent best of breed functionality. Keep in mind a CMS is only one piece of your web infrastructure. The evaluation process can run amuck when organizations insist on features that are not core to content management technology.

Marketing Fit

The marketing fit may be the most overlooked factor as strategic ownership of the web has swung from IT to the marketing department. For many organizations, the CMS has to support complex marketing requirements to bolster search engine optimization, landing pages, forms and multivariate testing.

CMS vendors are scrambling to sell into marketing, but many products are still far too IT-driven and ill suited to support a complex marketing organization. As with the feature fit, it’s essential to identify what your CMS will handle and where you will look to external tools. Features like analytics and e-mail marketing for example are almost always better left to an external application.

Vendor Fit

Selecting a CMS goes far beyond buying a piece of software. It’s a partnership with an organization that will be helping to drive your web infrastructure for years to come. Go beyond calling client references to look at the long term viability of the organization, product roadmap, market momentum and partner landscape. Insist on seeing the product roadmap to confirm it aligns with your future goals. Look at the training and support offerings and make sure that this is an organization you can see yourself with for at least five years.

Finding Your Match

While there is a lot to consider, finding the right CMS is one of the more important technology decisions and organization will make. A CMS is no longer a piece of software to run a website. It’s a publishing platform to run your business. Looking at the six fit factors will help you make a more informed decision and take into account the needs of the entire organization.

What other fit factors have you used to help guide your CMS selection? Leave a comment and share your story.

May 05 2009, 07:00 PM

Speaker Quotes from a CMS Conference

Posted by George

Last week I spoke at the Content Management Strategies/DITA North America Conference 2009, but I also took the time to attend as many sessions as I could.   In the sessions I attended I gathered some great quotes from the other speakers that really hit home and wanted to share them.

 On CMS Selection: 

• "It seems the more you pay the less you get"
• "Admission of failure can be one of the best indicators that a vendor is willing to work with you" - about getting vendors to provide references for failed implementations
• "Divorce from a partner is often harder than the domestic variety" - About parting ways from your CMS vendor.

On CMS Implementation and adaption: 

• "Projects often fail on the basis of training conducted to far before the product roll out"
• "Set your expectations low for creating a taxonomy"
• "ECM, I don't know what that means!" - From audience during Q&A
• "Middle Management if often trouble" - Talking about organizational resistance to a new CMS.
• "As long as you are using Word, I can't help you"

On selling a CMS vision to your organization: 

• "Understand your executives view of ROI"
• "The entire organization should own the content, we just need to work out the custody agreements"
• "Executives don't care about reuse, they care about the value of reuse"

Apr 30 2009, 12:46 PM

May 6 Webcast: How the City of New Orleans planned its CMS strategy

Posted by Jeff

We're excited to be part of an upcoming webinar on Wednesday May 6 with Nathan Williams, the Interactive Director for the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation.

You'll want to block off the hour next week If you're wondering how to plan your next CMS project (or just hear a great story from the City of New Orleans).

New Orleans’ tourism officials are working overtime to bring tourists and conventions back to the city post-Katrina. A key to the city’s resurgence is a robust, visitor-centric online strategy driven by a new web content management system. Nathan and team went through an exhaustive search for the right CMS and did extensive user experience planning to bring the new site together.

While they are in the middle of the technical development, he's been gracious enough to share his story to help others going through the CMS selection and planning process.  I'll be joining him on the webcast as will Tony White, the lead analyst for the Gilbane Group's CMS practice.

The only thing that would improve this webcast is insiting that we hold it onsite in New Orleans (we tried)Don't miss you chance to hear Nathan's story and experiences.

Apr 14 2009, 11:59 AM

Get your CMS vendor off their script!

Posted by George

In the last month I have talked to a lot of people at the beginning of a CMS selection process.  For the most part these are relatively informal discussions to provide high level guidance and some help about next steps.  I typically get these calls after the first round of product demos and people are frankly a bit unclear on how to get to the next level in their selection process.  The thing I have been 'hearing between the lines' as I talk to people is that these very scripted dog and pony shows CMS vendors can conduct only end up confusing the potential customer more than help them towards a final selection.  What they often get is a solid hour or so of product greatest hits and shiny toys with only a passing reference to anything that is relevant to the customer's actual needs.  The other big factor here is that most of the time vendors know who they are up against and instead of selling to the customer needs they often end up selling against the other product(s) or spend time trying to up sell to the next level of the product or sell in-house services.

What I have been advocating to help keep everyone focused is that internally the customer comes up with three critical requirements that the CMS implementation must nail, and then provide these to the CMS vendor one week in advance of them coming back to present a second time.  This time they should present on those three items using only real world examples. The point here is to get them off script about the exhaustive feature list, ease of use, the promise that the CMS can become anything you dream and get down to how the CMS can address the real world challenges customers face.  The added benefit of using existing customer examples is you can ask potentially uncomfortable questions about how hard it was, how much customization was involved, how hard is it to manage for end users and most importantly did it meet customer expectations.

This is only one suggestion of how to get CMS vendors off script, but what I hope is that this gets you thinking about how to focus your selection process and product demos on the things that really matter to the success of your implementation.  Truth be told most customer use only about 20% of the total feature set a CMS offers anyway.  Your job is to make sure that the 20% you do use works really well for you. 

I am also very interested to hear any stories about how you got a CMS vendor off script, so please comment.  I also highly recommend you  check out this recent post by Seth Gottlieb called Death to the Features Matrix.  It has some great advice on how to shake up a selection process as well.

Mar 15 2009, 09:10 PM

Why Metadata Matters

Posted by Jeff

Metadata may not be terribly exciting, but it’s a business-critical part of making your organization work on the web.  Sadly very few organizations invest in it, let alone understand it.

The way you organize, store and categorize information matters.  It matters a lot.

After all, most organizations (and websites) are in the information services business. It’s all about finding ways to more effectively create, share, repurpose and distribute content.  Your ability to accomplish these goals depends entirely on the way content is organized and classified.

Attending SXSW Interactive this weekend, I was pleasantly pleased to see the Kicking Ass with Controlled Metadata session.  It fell in stark contrast to the typical SXSW topics heavy on user generated content, design and social media.

Most interesting to me was hearing Pandora CTO Tom Conrad talk about their approach to classifying the 600,000+ songs in the Pandora library.  He explained that Pandora employees a team of 45 trained musicians that painstakingly listen to each song and catalog it with more than 400 attributes.

These all get loaded into a database and are used to provide more relevant recommendations to listeners.  It’s a lot of work and terribly expensive, yet Pandora rightly justifies it as a necessary cost of doing business.

This classification system is a huge part of Pandora’s competitive advantage. It’s the secret sauce that drives the business and provides a high barrier to entry for would be competitors.

This is an important point to understand. The right approach to metadata can drive a sustainable competitive advantage.

Web content management projects are a natural time to reassess your approach to organizing and classifying content. To do this effectively, you need to think about content independent from the website structure, templates and creative.

It’s important to document how each of these content items will be modeled including their relationship between other content types. These are not lower-level activities to be done after you figure out the big picture thinking. They are fundamental to your overall user experience strategy.

It’s time for metadata to get the respect and attention it deserves.