Irina Guseva: Random Thoughts on CMS, WCM, ECM and Other Acronyms

One of the final sessions at Gilbane SF yesterday was around content standards: CMIS, JSR-170 and JSR-283.

Many realize there are several challenges with CMIS in particular and efficiently working with content from disparate content repositories in general.

The session aimed at shedding light on some of these challenges and possible solutions in the standards space.

Too Much Content in Too Many Content Repositories

Chances are, if you’re in the enterprise content management space and you have an ECM system, this still doesn’t solve all your ECM problems. There are also document management and digital asset management systems, for example, you need to be able to “talk to.” Users of one ECM system often need to access and store documents in an entirely different content repository.

Scattered data repositories only add to the challenge. The majority of companies have an assortment of repositories, be it ERP, PLM, PDM, BI, KM, WCM, or DM systems. The problems we run into with multiple repositories are compliance, eDiscovery and business intelligence.

Add to that the fact that 80% of data is unstructured, and the enterprise world looks very gloom. Search gets harder as data sets grow. It takes longer to index. Thus, it takes longer to search.

ECM: CMIS or JSR-170/283?

Naresh Devnani, managing director at Lean Management Group, gave us a peek into real-life scenarios and impressions of implementing a standard’s wrapper, from the times when he was working for Vignette PS.

Devnani talked about implementing a JSR- 170 (the standard that was led by Day Software) level 1 functionality for an RDBMS-based web content management system.

Speaking of lessons learned, Devnani mentioned:

• Lack of ease in implementing a contained 1-n parent-child relationship
• Inefficient reference model in certain cases
• Node types not useful for WCM object wrapper
• No multidimensional view of repositories
• Big ramp-up

One of the examples at the session was quite shocking, actually. According to Devnani, some customers think of interoperability in terms of a content migration and moving things around from one repository to another. But there are still high hopes for CMIS.

Full story on CMSWire: Gilbane SF: Content Integration Standards — CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-283

One of the most anticipated sessions here at Gilbane SF was the Keynote Industry Analyst Panel moderated by Frank Gilbane. Unsurprisingly, the panel revolved largely around all things social media.

As Gilbane pointed out, it is the second time in a row when this panel is “focused on social media. That fact itself is a very import thing to consider.”

This time around, the following analysts gathered on the panel:

• Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester
• Hadley Reynolds, IDC
• Larry Hawes, Gilbane Group
• Lisa Welchman, WelchmanPierpoint

LW: I agree that we should be user-centered. The challenge has been is that we can’t do it.

One of the biggest things that people are ignoring is the revolution in product development that grows from paying attention to quality.

What are your quality controls like? Are you measuring for quality?

JO: The biggest finding in a recent Forrester research indicates that every page on the web will soon be socially ranked and rated. Google Chrome will get some social features. You can’t stop it.

The social movement is happening, and you better damn well embrace it, have a strategy and do it right.

JO: The reason we see so much fear when it comes to social media in the enterprise is due to the lack of strategy. Technology is only 20%, while strategy (roles, process, governance, measurement) is the other 80% of the objective.

LW: The number one disengage with social media in the enterprise is lack of engagement and guidance at the executive level.

LH: Social media is about the innovation process. Dell.com’s Idea Zone, for example, is used to attract ideas on how to improve products. Dell uses this social aspect to supercharge their innovation process and improve the flow of ideas.

LW: ’Cuz I gotta say web governance at some point today… You really can’t control real-time collaboration.

Full story on CMSWire: Gilbane SF: Keynote Analyst Panel Highlights

The second opening keynote at Gilbane SF was presented by Tricia Bush, group manager at SharePoint, who looked a bit into the crystal ball and focused her speech on the future of doing business on the internet and the promise of web content management.

We all need to bring content back “as a first class citizen into the organization.” As organizations, you have to refocus and make people and users more important, while embracing governance.

One of the questions posed by Bush has probably crossed the minds of many of you at some point: “Why are we in this situation where we haven’t delivered on what web content management and doing business on the internet is supposed to be?”

The Promise of Web and WCM

• Remove IT burden of publishing content
• Create brand loyalty and emotional connection with audience
• Dynamically drive the content lifecycle from creation and publishing to archiving and disposition
• Scale and integrate

But what happened to this promise? Systems, processes and cultures were not ready. WCM is a hodge-podge of do-it-yourself systems. And this is not going to work. Processes are still very manual, and multilingual content is making the situation yet more challenging. Many things still need to be touched manually.

We are introverted in cultures and that spawns stagnancy. Many things are still in the hands of IT. We are not having a dialog with customers, we’re having a Shakespearean monologue.

Reach, Retention, Revenue

According to Bush, 80 % of sites out there are classic brochureware. Microsoft, of course, loves this. Many of the sites out there can be purely informational without a goal to drive revenue, but just aiming to reach the customers. Others are trying to retain customers from a loyalty perspective, as it is much cheaper to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones.

Revenue generation is usually achieved through e-commerce or selling content.

What does the future look like for some of these models? Dynamic content for internet and intranet sites can be pulled together to present one picture and one place to go to for all information you need.

Bush concluded with her version of what Bill Gates said many moons ago referring to content as king: “It’s all about content.” Relevant, timely, refreshed content is what matters.

Full story on CMSWire: Gilbane SF: The Web Platform of The Future

This year’s Gilbane SF started with a day of pre-conference workshops. In one of them — Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management — Lisa Welchman, founding partner of WelchmanPierpoint, discussed the challenges faced by today’s web teams.

“Web managers tend to have the world wide web on their shoulders,” said Welchman, emphasizing the enormity of complexities that go into web operations management. If web operations management is not done right, one of the outcomes is poor web experience, resulting in lost revenue. But there are ways to make your web operations efficient and successful.

Trends We See in Web Management

Executive management is disengaged from web. Lack of senior leadership and direction from the C suite is what makes the job of web managers hard to do.

The organization should own its web. Organizations need to have clear, strategic decision-making authority over web.

Many organizations often don’t know (and have no clue how to measure) whether their web presence is effective.

Web Operations Management (WOM)

According to Welchman, WOM consists of the following components:

• Web strategy
• Web measurement
• Web execution
• Web governance

Full story on CMSWire: Gilbane SF: Fundamentals of Web Operations Management

The upcoming Gilbane Boston 2008 Conference gives me thrills. The program is as exciting as ever, lots of interesting speakers, CM Pros summit in conjunction, workshops, sessions… Ahhh, heaven!

This year’s conference will focus on exploring the intersection between social media and content management. With social media and social networking forecasted by Gartner to be some of the hottest strategic trends for 2009, this all only makes sense.

Full article on CMSWire: Where Content Management Meets Social Media

Wrote about ERM today, pretty fascinating.

Turns out, not only the industry’s growth is tremendous, since it first saw the light as an industry about five years ago; more and more companies adopt ERM and their main motivator is fear of leaking sensitive information outside the enterprise firewalls.

Well, that doesn’t really surprise me. But Gilbane’s study is pretty interesting. 

More on CMSWire, at http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/main-motivator-for-erm-use-is-fear-of-leaking-secrets-003178.php