Expanding Web Content Management
(I put "governance" in quotes, because it has taken on a connotation having to do with legal risk management, etc., that may not be quite what it means in the generic, lowercase sense of the word, which is more in line with what we’re talking about.)
I suggested to Larry that if everyone’s an author under a WCM, isn’t that like giving everyone a flame-thrower? "Half the marketplace is afraid of the Web, because they think someone might do something wrong. But the other half is aggressively taking advantage of Web publishing," said Larry, "because when the end-users act in a mature and responsible manner, you’re able to outpace your competition, be more flexible and take on new innovations in ways you never could before."
I remarked that, to a lot of companies, that much release of control would be scary as hell. "We get asked about that a lot," he agreed. "As a technology company, we do try to stretch the envelope. But look at Wikipedia. You might think that there’s great danger in letting just about anybody change content, make adjustments... that malicious groups could do some damage. But the wisdom of the crowd keeps those documents extremely accurate, without much formal governance. Still, the ease of use—anybody can publish to the Web—makes ‘governance,’ for the lack of a better word, the most important issue facing Web publishing right now."
The Why, Not the How
The subject turned to business objectives. We now know you CAN deploy a system in your company that allows anyone with the proper credentials to change, update and add to the corporate website. Now the question is: why? What’s the business justification for even considering a WCM?
"At the end of the day, WCM is just a tool that you use to accomplish something," Larry answered. "The question is: what are you trying to accomplish? We think it’s creating an exceptional Web experience. With an exceptional Web experience, you increase your ability to attract new customers and retain those customers. You then increase your ability to cross-sell new things. If you continue to make your Web presence vibrant and new, it will become a trusted resource. And if they’re coming to you, you know they’re not going to your competition."
I asked Larry if customer acquisition and retention were the only reasons to invest in WCM. Isn’t there also an efficiency argument to be made? Fewer people doing more work, etc. You know, the old "top line vs. bottom line" gambit. I struck a chord with Larry on that one.
"Funny you should ask that, because I talk about this in my keynotes all the time. People ARE also investing in WCM based on a return on investment argument. If you can retire old systems, save some money and get an ROI within a year, people will invest in that. But proportionally, most of the projects we’re seeing are based on top-line improvement. You can save costs all you want—that’s great. But if you’re losing customers while you’re doing that, because you’re not keeping other people from attracting them away, you’re not serving your business well. So companies see the value in buying better WCM right now."
And they’re adding functionality that contributes to the value of the overall system. Larry explained: WCM controls the content you’re delivering to the Web. Now the next step is to add applications, or content feeds or create forms to process loans... "This integration has always been part of the portal business, but adding portlets in combination with WCM is where the home-run is now," he declared. "People are enriching the Web experience by bringing these portal functions into it."
I asked Larry the stock question: "Pretend I’m a company with NO Web presence at all right now. Where should I start? Should I put together a team for 1. evaluation, 2. implementation, then 3. adoption over time? Are these different combinations of people? Or is there an immortal WCM team throughout that lifecycle?
"There’s a morphing of people and skills as you go through those phases. You mentioned ‘evaluation, implementation and adoption.’ I would have put a couple bullets before that: business objective, and then business scope, meaning how am I doing this short-term and what do I plan to do long term. Only then should you start the evaluation, etc., process. During evaluation, you get line-of-business people who have to buy-in. During implementation, you have a different group; there’s not too many line-of-business leaders who understand information architecture—and they probably don’t want to. Then to support adoption, you need ease-of-use and to create successful smaller deployments that they can see and be comfortable with wanting to replicate," Larry said.
There are value/benefit arguments for both sides. Larry just thinks there’s a better one when they merge. "Portals were originally developed to allow you to do online banking, look at your medical records, things like that... lots of security, deep levels of authentication. Web content management was originally developed to put your catalog online, make your products dance around the screen and get a transaction with a credit card. But those were two very different ways of constructing a website. What’s happening now is that the two design constructs are merging into one structure.
"If you want to create a recipe website, go get an open-source WCM. If you want to create online banking or medical records, go get a portal. But if you want to have a universal platform that prepares you for the next decade and gives you the agility and flexibility to respond to whatever will happen in the market, then you go with the combined WCM and portal single navigation metaphor," he said.
"Here’s one of the greatest dangers to watch out for, and I would include this under ‘best practices’: Because WCMs are so easy to deploy, a group will put one in and start using it to generate content. Then later, if you want to add applications, or dashboards or anything, you can lose that investment because you have to start over and re-architect the structure for moving forward. So it’s very important to have a strategy first, and then a roadmap as to how you want to accomplish that strategy.
"You need a plan first. Quick and dirty is exactly that sometimes."
* (BTW: In case you’re wondering, we use a capital "W" when we say "Web," because it’s short for World Wide Web, which is a proper noun. We use a lowercase "w" for "website," because it’s sort of a slang term. That may not be the best style choice, but that’s what we do.)