Today I attended the Alfreso road show here in Dallas.  This was a small (about 40 people) half day presentation intended to show off Alfresco and how it has been implemented at a number of larger clients.  Alfresco and their partners did a great job presenting and answering any and all questions. 

The one case study that stood out for me was a community site built for the search engine company Endeca.  The solution put in place was a mix of Alfresco, Liferay Portal, Liferay Forums, Wordpress, Endeca search (how could they use anything else really) and Red Hat directory server.  The interesting thing is that WordPress, Liferay and Alfresco can all be placed into the CMS category, but here they all are working together in one site. 

This case study really represented for me the challenge that will be facing organizations trying to find just one system that will meet all their content publishing needs as the CMS market continues to evolve. 

Here at the CMS Myth we make a point to climb our soapbox and espouse a pragmatic approach to dealing with the content management issue (Here’s a quick hit: CMS is a software tool; content management is a discipline – recognize the difference!)

So it was refreshing at Web Content 2008 in Chicago this week to hear advice, cut from the same Myth cloth, provided in generous portions to the web, content, marketing and tech pros all trying to crack a similar nut.

Among the preachers: Jarrod Gingras, analyst at CMS Watch, whose comments on how to craft an RFP ring true. Among his points: De-prioritize the feature checkbox. Vendors typically provide “no real explanation in a checkbox about what went into meeting that requirement,” he says.

Instead of crafting an exhaustive checklist of features, write the story of how things run today with your website processes. Construct a complete and colorful narrative about who does what, when and how inside your organization to make stuff happen online, in all its ugly glory. What’s the current process to get information published? Who touches it along the way? Why do things get bogged down? Name names. Provide the painful details. Tell the story.

From that approach emerges the picture of what’s not working and what a CMS vendor needs to solve. Instead of a vendor firing a feature list back at you, demand vital details of how they would help you improve things, following along with your narrative. 

Pragmatic advice is always good. To which we would add one more bit for any organization that gets its news, as it were, from the RFP document: Pick up the phone and have a clear conversation with a vendor or service provider about what you’re seeking. Thirty-minutes on the phone will do wonders to clear the fog from a 100 page RFP.

After a half-hour of softball questions to five vendors in the State of WCM session at Gilbane, moderator Tony White decided to use the vendors own logic against them.

Moments before, the vendors had conceeded that one could likely succeed with any one of their products. They contended that planning and requirements had more to do with success than specific product features.

By that logic, Tony asked if indeed it even mattered what CMS product a customer selects in the first place?

It was an absurd and interesting question all in one for a fragmented industry that fails to clearly articulate key product differentiation. It also took the vendors off autopilot for a bit.

Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO of FatWire clearly stated that of course it matters. He then flipped the tables and said in fact it was Fatwire who is careful in which customers it selects. "I can't have unhappy customers," he said.

I would have loved to have seen a follow up for each vendor to give an example of where they are not a good fit for customers (beyond the obvious infrastructure reasons).

Vignette CIO David Graham restated the importance of internal preparation and ensuring a cultural fit. I wish he would have elaborated on what cultural fit means.  I've found in our own consulting that there are a host of intangibles around culture that are hard to quantify, but can make or break an implementation (plotting a future myth post on this).

Tony was able to sneak in another jab in saying customers complained that the "products are different but the messaging is the same." Hard to disagree looking at the 50+ vendors exhibiting all with similar signage.

CrownPeak CEO Jim Howard drew distinction between open source and commercial products. He praised open source on one hand while saying CrownPeak's business has been partly driven by replacing failed open source deployments. "Commercial products thrive on complexity" Jim contends . They cater to customers looking for that shinny object.  

Sitecore USA President Bjarne Hansen said of course vendor selection matters - if not for the infrastructure alone.  Folks running Java likely won't want a .NET CMS and vice versa. Can't disagree there.

The conversation was pretty much dwindling at this point and Tony cut in once again to suggest perhaps it's a moot point since ‘you'll never finish your CMS implementation anyway' - they go on forever.

On that cheery note - it was time for lunch. Good stuff.

It’s the Web 2.0 Era where transparency and ‘non-selling’ rules the day – call it the era of ‘Un-marketing’ – so what’s a marketer to do? For more and more successful companies, killing them with content (good content!) is the answer.

Today at Web Content 2008 here in Chicago, Joe Pulizzi at Junta 42 (prior profession: B2B/trade publishing) provided a call-to-arms to marketers to get on the “content marketing” bandwagon, or risk getting left behind by the competition.

The marketing recipe of the past was: create brand awareness, use mass media, interrupt your customer, repeat. Not anymore.

OK, so what is content marketing?

It may be easier to tell you what it isn’t. It’s NOT sending more product messages into the market. It’s not hitting customers over the head with how great your product or service is. It IS communicating directly with fresh, relevant content that creates a conversation and provides value to your customers --- information that will help them do their jobs or live their lives better, or content that informs them of what’s happening in their industry.

Says Pulizzi, “You are a media company whether you know it or not. Think like a publisher. You are all publishers.”

This content can take all sorts of forms:
• Blog
• White Papers
• eBooks
• Case studies
• Content microsites
• Digital magazines
• Community forums
• Podcasts
• Video portals
But really, who’s doing it right on the web?

www.WillitBlend.com: Blendtec (yes, they make blenders) built this site to humorously answer the question “Will it blend?” – they throw all kinds of items into the hopper (say, an iPhone), flip the switch, and put the video up on their site. The content is compelling enough to drive up sales 500% in 18 months.

www.HomeMadeSimple.com: It may look like a ‘home’ site (kitchen, décor, living, etc) but it’s run by consumer products giant P&G. Great content has attracted more than a million opt-in subscribers – a community that P&G has turned into a primary customer research channel.

www.MillerWelds.com: B2B welding supplier Miller owns the welding publishing channel and the largest online community of welders thanks to this self-developed website.

Gilbane San Franscisco if off and running and the CMS Myth will be there to cover the action. I'm speaking tomorrow morning on CMS Success Strategies. Until then, i'll be taking in the sessions, navigating the vendor hall and loading up on the free energy bars (nice touch!). Have any questions you want me to pose to a specific vendor or consultant? Let me know - there is a gaggle of em here including many of their top dogs.

Call it the CMS Myth Road Trip to welcome summer and spread the gospel of CMS strategy while we’re at it.

During the week of June 16, two ‘MythBusters’ from this blog will take the Myth cross-country to large gatherings of corporate content managers, e-marketing professionals, site managers, and others.

For some, CMS is a dirty word; for others, it’s a saving grace. Regardless of which side of the equation you’re on, you can catch Jeff Cram on the WCM Strategies for Success panel at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management in San Francisco (Thursday, June 19, 8:30 am). Jeff’s focus: how to avoid CMS debacles.

The day before, on June 18 at 10:15 am at the (sold-out!) Web Content 2008 Conference at the UBS Center in Chicago, I’ll speak to web pros on the core themes of this blog in a session called The CMS Myth: Why Web Content Management Projects Fail and What You Can Do About It.

We haven’t yet divined why the organizers of Chicago’s Web Content 2008 decided to overlap with Gilbane San Francisco. But it goes without saying: if you’re planning to hit either of these events, let us know.

Fellow CMS MythBuster Jeff Cram and I recently spoke to the Boston KM Forum, an energetic group of about 50 corporate knowledge managers from around New England. These are the folks in the trenches who make corporate content and data easily accessible for business advantage.

Our topic: How the Enterprise Communications division of Siemens AG has embraced a global knowledge management (KM) portal delivering content, collaboration and community to thousands of Siemens employees worldwide. Oh, and how a mid-market CMS (Sitecore) sits at the center of it all. ISITE Design architected, designed and developed the portal, called BeFirst (“Be first in the market….”). We also employed the Google Search Appliance and some .NET programming.

The portal has caught fire inside Siemens by elevating the traditional search/find/retrieve model to a flexible, innovative platform to connect peers globally, create ad hoc communities; publish blogs; rate document usefulness (the best ones bubble up to the surface); support tagging, taxonomy, faceted search and more. (Read a great recap of our presentation right here.)

While we were there, it dawned on us: what were a couple of CMS-minded guys doing talking to a room full of experts in the quasi-academic discipline of knowledge management? These people live, eat and breathe strategies for indexing, tagging, archiving and searching knowledge assets inside law firms and biotech companies.

This environment wasn’t always a natural fit for CMS, which used to play more at the fringes of KM, outside the inner circle of purpose-built applications that organize and categorize corporate knowledge. Not too long ago CMS, for lack of a better phrase, knew its place in the world.

Flash forward to 2008, and there are legitimate reasons to discuss CMS and KM in the same sentence. Enterprise desires for flexible, accessible, social-networking driven intranets and portals have been met by the evolving capabilities of traditional CMS systems. Knowing a market opportunity when they see one, vendors scramble to add Web 2.0 (i.e. people-centric) features to their offerings (a smart strategy now that upstart widget makers and web 2.0 enablers are nibbling at their heels).

Sticking to the theme of the CMS Myth, we should note that the Siemens BeFirst portal, for all of the technology behind it, would not have achieved business success without organizational buy-in – without staff in dozens of offices embracing the new paradigm for accessing knowledge assets and connecting with each other to achieve greater success.

The lesson for content technology buyers is that CMS vendors should have a growing story to tell as they evolve and expand their capabilities, resulting in new options and new opportunities. CMS vendors have largely moved past traditional CM into document management and now social networking apps. Beyond that, integrated marketing suites; measurement and analytics tools; robust search and other tools give CMS an added relevance. All of which gives you the opportunity to inject CMS into new and unexpected places… and say things like, “Hello, knowledge management.”

Delivering great web experiences has always been the end goal of implementing a web content management system. CMS vendors, however, have historically only gotten you part of the way there.

As vendors look to differentiate and provide more value, they are scurrying to deliver more ‘out of the box’ tools to deliver content and better overall user experiences. It’s important for the savvy web professional implementing content management to separate the features of content management from content delivery when approaching a vendor selection and implementation.  Let’s clearly distinguish the two camps.

• Content Management features are the meat and potatoes of CMS and what customers have traditionally evaluated vendors upon. This includes features such as content repository, library services, workflow, WYSIWYG editors, meta data, image management, site replication, taxonomy, URL aliasing, user security and overall technical architecture. 
• Content Delivery includes everything you do with that content on your website to deliver great user experiences.  This typically includes features such as dynamic templates, scheduled content, site search and multilingual controls. 

The Next Generation of Content Delivery

Buckle your seatbelts, because the world of content delivery is moving forward at light speed.  Much of the product innovation and customer demand is driven from the increase in online marketing and the pressure to deliver more results through the web channel.  Here are several types of content delivery features that can now be commonly included with a CMS platform.

• Multivariate Testing:  Testing tools enable marketers to create dynamic landing pages and automatically test different combinations of content and images. This helps drive toward closed-loop optimization and the ability to rapidly determine the content that will drive the best results.  The level of sophistication among CMS vendors can vary greatly – from simple landing page management to integrated testing suites.
• Social Media & Community:  It’s no surprise that CMS vendors have jumped into the social media scene with two feet.  Tools like forums, wikis, rss, tagging, blogs and user generated content are finding their way into CMS feature lists.  Some vendors have even shifted gears to position their entire offering as a ‘community platform.’ On the flip side, pure-play community platforms are emerging and backing into traditional CMS.
• Behavioral and Content Targeting:   We all remember the rise and fall of personalization.  Those expensive portals of the past have been replaced by leaner and meaner technology that profiles users based on attributes such as onsite behavior, search keywords, referring site and geography.  Content can then be targeted and sites can (in theory) get smarter the more they learn about users and their behavior. Still in its infancy, content targeting is a true differentiator for the CMS platform that can get it right (or acquire the right technology).
• Rich Media & AJAX:  We’ve definitely moved beyond static pages and content management vendors are getting more adept at providing video management and delivery tools and out of the box AJAX-driven widgets. 
• Packaged Applications:  In some cases, we’re also seeing content management vendors start to package up some common applications such as calendars, membership application, intranet tools and more.  This is more common with vendors that are developing products around verticals.  

Best of Breed vs. Integrated

With CMS feature sets expanding and the lines blurring between different platforms, acquiring content delivery tools bundled with CMS is both an opportunity and a risk for organizations. 

The right tools can greatly reduce development costs and speed up time to market. However, just because a CMS vendor has a specific feature does not mean it is best of breed or right for your organization.  In fact, more often than not, we’ve found these new features are usually far from enterprise class and are quick add-ons to support a new customer demand or market shift.  They can often leave you with an inflexible and inferior tool that can’t scale to meet your needs.

In some cases the benefit of an integrated tool set may trump having the best possible technology.  In other situations, finding an open CMS that can easily integrate with off the shelf tools is a much better fit. The savvy CMS decision maker will look behind the marketing hype and take a holistic look at their web operations and user experience needs to determine how all the pieces need to fit together.

Leave a comment and let us know how are you dealing with content delivery and what you expect from your CMS.

Today we welcome a guest MythBuster. Heather Hanson, interactive project manager and our colleague at ISITE Design, offers sage advice on balancing “fast, good, and cheap” in a CMS initiative. Heather knows of what she writes: a project roster rich in CMS has gained her official (and unofficial) product-certified status on a number of platforms -- and some well-earned street cred.

By Heather Hanson
Guest MythBuster &
Project Manager, ISITE Design

You’ve probably heard this saying:

“Fast, Good and Cheap. Choose Two”

Almost every project manager I’ve run across has a version of this slogan on a poster, paperweight or, in the case of one particularly hardcore technorati, a tattoo.

As widely referenced as the expression may be, it’s worth examining in the context of content management deployments.

The truth is that CMS-driven websites have a low likelihood of long term success, if the time isn’t taken to thoroughly research the user needs, marketing goals and internal staff capabilities before determining a final schedule (and for that matter, budget).

And believe me, as a project manager, schedules and budgets are two things I hold near and dear to my heart.

So you’ve gone through many discovery sessions (at ISITE Design, we call this the “blueprint phase”) and thoroughly documented how your goals tie to your website initiatives.

Now your marketing department is asking to see the results from all the meetings you’ve put them through. You know exactly what features you’ll need to make your website sing and what internal resources will be needed to support the website once it’s up and running.

The pressure mounts to set that launch date and you ambitiously promise your team that the new site will be ready to rock in one month, before consulting the development team or agency that will produce said website.

Stop right there; remember the slogan.

You’ve spent the time to research, which puts you ahead of the poor souls who jump straight into development, but you forgot about the “good” and “cheap” parts.

Now, are you ready to tell the powers that be that the website will be exponentially more expensive than original estimates?  In order to make that schedule, your interactive agency will need to staff round-the-clock developers and designers, plus project managers and strategy personnel to keep the project within scope and marketing vision. And don’t forget to keep the team’s mugs full of extra strength espresso. Chances for an implosion are high in this situation.

Or, would you rather let the bosses know that they’ll get their site on time and on budget, but instead of that fully-interactive, web 3.0 compliant, CMS-driven website they thought they’d see, they will have a lite version with a limited feature set.

Neither option is particularly appealing given the expectations set up front.

Go back to step one and take those discovery results to your development team. Tell them you want a realistic quote on the time and budget it will take to make your ideas actualized. 

Your development team should be willing to work with you to honestly assess what can and can’t be done in the time and budget you have. In fact, they’ll probably even be happy to help you create supporting material to present to your budget-holders.

Finally, go back to your team. Talk to them about what you’ve determined they’ll be able to get based on their time/budget/feature needs, take a deep breath and get set to win that Webby.

Getting back to our phrase (fast, cheap or good – pick two). The moral of the story is to not put yourself in that situation in the middle of the project. Setting right expectations up front and scoping a project with all of your stakeholders can have you making fewer compromises along the way.

Of course, there are still the pitfalls to contend with like scope changes, content-entry purgatory and training your internal staff to use your new CMS, but those topics can wait for a future blog entry.

Carpenters, of all people, have a great saying, one that everyone responsible for a CMS project should tattoo on their forearm, or at least write on their office wall in big red letters:  “Measure twice, cut once.” It’s just four simple words, but oh-so-rich in wisdom and rife with pragmatism.

Precision matters to carpenters. So their little saying about measuring and cutting clicks inside their brain every time they’re about to rip into a new sheet of plywood or saw a 2x4. It reminds them: you have one shot at getting it right, or it’ll cost you time and money.

And, just like it’s impossible to fix a botched cut (well, unless you can afford an endless supply of plywood, or if right angles don’t matter in the house you’re building) it’s similarly hard to straighten out a CMS initiative whose first few “cuts” are ill-measured or hastily accomplished.

Every web project manager has had one misadventure to know: long days/sleepless nights, plus an added tariff of missing your timeline, killing your budget, shedding your internal credibility and executive support --- and for some, shedding your job.

We continue to advocate that, to do CMS right, you need at the very least a vision, a plan, and a well-defined process  --remember, measure twice, cut once -- to deliver a successful CMS outcome. Early steps of a project may seem mundane or easy to bypass for efficiency’s sake – say, astutely defining visitor personas, or properly defining content taxonomy.  But keep in mind: these are your 2x4’s and plywood, so saw them at your peril.

The promise of web content management is to enable the ongoing maintenance and optimization of a website. The worlds of marketing optimization and CMS are quickly colliding backed by vendor consolidation, integrated product suites, and more sophisticated end user adoption.

I recently wrote an article on the risks of optimization called Juicing the Brand. I thought the following excerpt was especially relevant to content administrators who rely on a CMS for ongoing optimization efforts.

Optimization May be Undermining Your Brand

There is nothing wrong with optimizing a website with a focus on the bottom line. The problem is most continuous improvement programs are trying to achieve a series of short term lifts. And these lifts are usually measured by very real and quantifiable metrics such as revenue and leads. As the optimization process unfolds, the actions taken to achieve these lifts usually takes the following forms.

• Increasing the visibility (size and location) of key calls to action
• Removing all unnecessary content that gets in the way of a sale or lead
• Adding more direct calls to action in brand and community oriented content

As each step has incremental success in driving immediate and tangible results, the tactical aspect of optimization can overtake the strategic direction of the site and brand. The employees responsible for the optimization are rewarded for the results. It becomes unpopular and difficult for internal stakeholders to advocate for strategic investments in user experience and brand initiatives. Anything that could potentially undermine the top line results is a risk. The longer this trend continues, the more difficult it is to turn it around.

Read the full Juicing The Brand article

I was in a meeting last week where someone remarked that he thought web development has become too specialized. Meaning  that us agency types may be over complicating projects by having ultra-specialized roles that create awkward handoffs, increase project costs and result in less efficient processes.

I’m the first to agree with limiting the number of cooks in the kitchen, yet it’s hard to ignore the fact that building websites today does require more specialized skills (and processes that can effectively integrate them). In fact, when it comes to CMS implementations, I’ve found that many projects go off track when the wrong people do the wrong tasks (i.e. Developer doing information architecture).

This prompted the question of ‘how many people does it take to screw in a content management system?’ A cynical myth buster may say ‘you don’t screw them in, they screw you’ – but we’re staying positive here.

Project teams will certainly vary based on project size and complexity. However, we’ve found the following roles are critical for success:

The Core Project Team
Almost all CMS implementations will need these roles.

• Project Manager: Essential to keeping the project on track, on budget, coordinating all the people and setting the right expectations every step of the way.
• Information Architect: Perhaps the most critical role in determining the website’s structure, navigation and taxonomy. Don’t start a project without one.
• Copywriter/Editor: Even the most distributed organizations need an editor to ensure a consistent voice, strategy and approach to content across the entire site.
• Front End Developer: Handles the CSS, XHML and all front end display templates, modules and widgets.  Typically a different role and skill set than an application developer.
• Web Designer: Even if you’re not redesigning the site, a web designer is key to ensuring the site brand, UI and styles get translated effectively into the new CMS.
• Developer: Responsible for the core CMS integration, custom application development and the messy technical stuff nobody else knows how to do. Prior expertise with your flavor of CMS is critical.
• Quality Assurance Engineer: Tests, tests and then tests some more. The key is having this role separate from the core development team.
• Business Users: You can’t forget the end users that need to be involved with this process from start to finish. They need education, hands-on mentoring, kind words and perhaps alcohol to get them through the process. Remember, this is new to them and not likely in their job description.
  

The Extended Project Team
Larger and more strategic implementations likely need these roles as well.

• Business Analyst: Sifting through complex organizational workflow and business processes requires careful thinking and an experienced analyst.
• Content Specialist: Responsible for handling the important tasks around how content gets classified and migrated. Works hand in hand with the Information Architects.
• Search Engine Specialist: Getting SEO right out the gate is a business critical task. An SEO expert will ensure the CMS implementation is in alignment with the SEO strategy.
• Database Administrator: As the technical complexity increases, so does the need for roles like a database expert.
• Analytics Expert: Organizations committed to measurement will need an analytics guru working alongside the development team.
• Web Strategist: A high-level strategic thinker can help guide the overall web strategy and tie it to the overall business goals. This person can also help determine how and when to implement new tactics such as social media, rss, podcasts and video.
• Flash Developer: Sites that have rich content delivery will require some expert attention from a Flash developer and/or designer.

So, add them up, and that’s a lot of folks. It’s important to realize these are roles and not necessarily unique people. However, it’s harder and harder to find those ‘Swiss Army knife’ folks that can bring best of breed thinking to each of these areas given the depth of subject matter expertise required. 

The most critical part is to understand what your project needs to succeed. Then audit your current team and prioritize how you invest in resources. The good news is there are plenty of external agencies, consultants and contractors who can augment your existing team. 

Do you agree with the above roles? Did I miss any? Bonus points for any funny punch lines to “How many people does it take to screw in a CMS.”

Although it’s not quite an epidemic (yet), we’re encountering examples of a problematic trend that fits squarely into CMS Myth. We suspect it’s only going to grow, so fair warning.

We term it ‘drive-by CMS implementations.’ It’s a trend in which third-party web agencies and tech shops doing CMS projects, well… leave a trail of smoke and mayhem in the rear-view mirror. Too many agencies—through neglect, lack of expertise, shoddy development practices and other factors– botch the project, sometimes aggressively so. Others fail to offer a long-term strategic vision for their client, which inevitably leads to bigger issues.

The injuries inflicted by CMS drive-bys are many. We’ve seen search engine rankings drop off the face of Google; the complete content of a website stuffed into a single back-end folder; authoring environments that simply don’t work; sites whose dynamic home page barely loads; and many, many more examples.

There are many reasons for this situation. A big one is: CMS projects can be difficult. It’s not hard for a CMS project to jump the tracks, even for the most competent developers and agencies out there.

But a more critical factor that's been flying under the radar: We see a land-grab underway among agencies, big and small, that want to ride CMS momentum to big-ticket web consulting gigs. And no wonder, as hundreds of right-sized/right-priced and “easy to use” CMS systems (mid-market, low-tier, and open source) are enticing all sorts of organizations to invest in CMS. For integrators/agencies, there’s a relatively low barrier to entry to put themselves out there as a CMS consultant. 

The net-net? Anecdotally, we see integrators/agencies jumping in feet first because the initial CMS learning curve appears relatively easy. Nothing wrong with that. But many times they aren’t realizing there’s a much more challenging, long-term strategic learning curve to master to enable them (and their clients) really get CMS right. The implementation itself, or course, is very important; it’s also just the beginning of a successful' CMS project.

The situation won't get better anytime soon. As the barrier to adopting and integrating a CMS gets lower and lower (price points, ease of development, point-and-click features) and thousands of companies look for a CMS, the problem only worsens. Hence the big problem: You don’t know you have a problem until you’re done!

Been a victim of a drive-by? Let us know your story; we'd love to share your story ... and we'll change the names to protect the guilty.

With the primary elections officially upon us, candidates are making promises that they will be expected to keep if elected. 

In the same spirit, web content management projects are full of promises. More so than a lot of web initiatives in fact.

We talk a lot about the expectation gap between vendors that beat the drum of ‘out of the box,’ and ‘easy’ compared to the reality on the ground of a complex implementation. But it’s time to take a closer look at what promises we’re making internally inside the organizations before deploying a CMS. Some common promises include:

• Enable anyone to easily publish content
• Save time and money
• Create better experiences
• Remove dependency on IT staff

Are you keeping those promises to the organization? Probably not.

In most cases, a CMS actually adds cost and complexity and takes more effort to maintain and run. Often times enabling more users to edit content means creating a less flexible system for the power users and developers who spend the majority of the time maintaining the site.

In my experience, the CMS is often to set up to fail from the get go by the way that success is promised.

What if you change the promise? What if the project lead says:

“Our new approach to content management is a paradigm shift for the organization and is going to be a difficult transition. It will require significantly more resources and added cost for training, new staff and new technology.  However, if we can make an organizational commitment, the payoff and long term return on investment is tremendous…”

Changes the picture a bit doesn’t it?

Sure it may stop a few CMS projects before they get started. But that’s not a bad thing for an organization that doesn’t have the stomach to see it succeed.

What it will do is help you start to better define success before you start and set proper expectations. After all, it’s better to be the hero at the end of the project than the beginning.
 

Those who know me often get stuck listening to me wax poetic on the value of web analytics. It’s no secret the Mythbusters are bullish on using analytics to improve the user experience and CMS deployment.  But with all the talk about metrics, it’s encouraging to hear actual examples of how organizations are using analytics to affect positive change.
 
We co-presented at the Boston Gilbane Content Management show with Joe Santini from Siemens Enterprise Communications.  We shared the story of how we collectively built a new sales and marketing portal for Siemens to help them share millions of resources with a global sales force.
 
It’s a fascinating case study, but I got really hopped up hearing how Joe was using content analytics to make important decisions.  For example: 

• Siemens invests heavily in sales and marketing kits, a collection of 8-12 resources aligned around a specific product or market.  Using web analytics, they are noticing that only 4-5 of these resources per kit are actually used.  They are starting to use this information to more strategically invest in creating content for the organization.
• The site is localized in seven languages with plans to add more.  As you can imagine, this is very expensive to setup and maintain. Again using analytics, they can see exactly which countries are using which languages. Some countries overwhelmingly use the English option which doesn’t warrant the investment to continue with the local versions.