Monthly Archives: March 2009

Jobs for the girls…

I spotted an interesting comment on the blog of Alterian today. This is the company who bought the CMS company who bought the CMS company I worked for over a number of years.

It’s written by Bob Barker, who I’ve never met, but seems to be gaining some momentum on Alterian’s blog that looks like it has the potential to become a useful and interesting resource. The post is called ‘Is marketing just for girls?‘ and calls for marketing representation (which is often female dominated) to be elevated to board level so that crucial decisions (in this case marketing technology) are made effectively to counter the challenges of recession.

boardroom-legsThis reminds me of articles I’ve read in recent years about the importance of having women at board level for the health and success of organisations anyway. Apparently, statistics show that organisations with heavily male dominated management teams are far more likely to fail than those with strong female representation. This has become all too apparent with the massive and fundamental failure of our financial organisations worldwide – an industry notorious for its ‘old boys networks’ and male domination.

There are also some parallels here to the telecoms industry boom and bust during the late 90s which was again a very male dominated industry. The industry was rife with ‘irrational exhuberance’ and company balance sheets were being inflated often through fraudulent and questionable accountancy practices. I worked in the industry during the fallout years that followed and it was a period when women executives rose to board level very rapidly and were instrumental in sorting out the mess and rescuing some of these big organisations from high profile bankruptcy.

All this makes me grateful I have two daughters as I believe their prospects in the workplace will be somewhat better than mens during this coming decade. However, the prospect of ever growing legions of men losing a sense of purpose in their lives has the potential for massive social disruption so I hope that women are prepared to take pity on us for the sake of stability and not push things too far the other way.

I also have a piece of advice for Bob and that is to encourage his own management team to promote a woman or two to their board as it currently looks very unhealthily male dominated, as indeed was the board of the company it acquired. Personally, I think for a company who’s lifeblood is selling to marketing departments that are female dominated it would make a lot of sense to really understand ‘what women want’.

Sweden in the snow…

sweden_in_snowI’ve spent a very pleasant couple of days this week in Sweden attending the EPiServer annual partner and customer event held in and around Stockholm.

Firstly, it was interesting to visit a place so used to operating in sub-zero temperatures and constant snowfall. Unlike the south of the UK, for instance, that grinds to a standstill after a couple of inches of the white stuff lands. The views of Stockholm in the snow were quite magical in places and the myriad of islands, set in frozen seas with their bridges and tunnels made for a very interesting and engaging city experience.

As for the conference itself, I was very impressed with the latest developments of the EPiServer Content Management System and much of what I saw and heard validated the decision to use it for the project I am running in my professional life.

Web Content Management in one form or another has featured strongly in my career over the last 15 or so years – from the utter frustration of helping build and maintain a corporate site in html way back in 1994, to specifying and managing bespoke CMS developments between 1997-2000, helping deploy a global enterprise CMS initiative between 2000-2003, working for CMS/hosted services vendors between 2003 and 2008 and now project managing a global CMS and eCommerce deployment for a consumer products business.

I guess this gives me quite a rounded perspective on the CMS industry, an area that continues to grow and develop and will likely be reasonably recession proof as organisations shift more of their focus online.

The highlight of the conference for me was a keynote by the Forrester Group’s Tim Walters entitled “The end of web content management and other welcome developments”. This title seems to imply the opposite of what I’ve just said in the previous paragraph but was really a pragmatic assessment of how web content management has moved on with the advent of the social web and indeed tools like WordPress here that I am using for this blog.

In fact, you may notice in the archives that this blog started as an idea back in 2006 but didn’t progress from being just that until recently. It is very interesting to see how WordPress itself has developed considerably in that time and reminds of an article I wrote a couple of years back now (which is still being used here) where I observed, amongst other things, how the difference between blogging tools and CMS capabilities was becoming more and more minimal.

Likewise, the EPiServer conference illustrated just how far some of the mid-market CMS providers have come in that time in integrating meaningful social media developments into their systems.

Besides the insight into new developments, the conference  was also a great opportunity to chat with others who have experienced the evolution of WCM since the mid and late 90s and it was encouraging to find very similar conclusions being made on who the movers and shakers are in this industry right now. More on this in future posts.

What's going to be big in the 'tens'?

The developments that shaped the last two decades in technology and beyond – namely the arrival of the web in the 90s and the rise of Google in the ‘noughties’ – began life in the previous decades. The upcoming celebration of the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners Lee’s proposal for the web (13th March 1989) illustrates the existence of the idea before the immense impact it had in the following decade and, likewise, Google’s incorporation as a company in late 1998 before its introduction of Adwords in 2000 and subsequent massive growth.

So, as we head towards the end of this decade is the technology and/or organisation that will define the ‘tens’ (or whatever else they may become known as) already in its infancy ready to burst forward or is it something that is already in wide use that takes on greater significance.

My first bet is very much on ‘the mobile web’ as really starting to define the next decade.

In contrast to the growth of the web and Google, this one has been a relatively long time in coming and there are still some barriers in place to ubiquitous adoption. But the pieces are now slotting into place – from relatively seamless mobile access via 3G and wifi to inspiring mobile devices like the iphone.

mobile_web_growth2

As I know well from my time at NTL Broadcast and Lucent, the infrastructure to build out networks capable of delivering the mobile web as an engaging experience was never going to happen overnight and it wasn’t anything as comparatively simple as finding faster ways to push data along the copper cables that the majority of our homes had anyway.

The network operators have had staggering costs to recoup – not least from the enormous licencing cost for 3rd Generation networks – so none of them was going to rush to offer low or no cost mobile web access.

Likewise, unless you are used to paying high monthly contract charges to mobile operators, I would suggest that consumers themselves aren’t going to rush to pay a lot extra to access web content on the go unless it is obviously compelling and useful and until recently the limitations of devices themselves have been a big barrier to adoption.

I was interested the other day for instance to read some of the reaction to Google’s recently launched UK Streetview. There were respondents on one blog describing how they were using it on mobile phones to help them navigate places unfamiliar to them and it was clear that being able to see landmarks and surroundings from eye level perspective as opposed to a 10,000 foot view is a compelling experience.

But up until the arrival of a truly responsive and navigatable mobile interface like the iphone, coupled with high speed mobile data access I can’t have imagined mobile phone users making such comments.

Right now, I’m personally not prepared to pay more than 30p per day to access the mobile web. This is the PAYG Sim based deal I am getting from Virgin Media/Mobile on an sim-free 3G phone (translates to £9/month for 750MB). This is a low cost way and controllable way to access many types of sites and content but as soon as you venture into any higher bandwidth service – flickr, youtube, internet radio etc then the daily cap of 25 MB is swallowed up rapidly and you can very quickly find you’re paying a whole monthly contract equivalent for less than an hour’s online entertainment. I know that other network providers are offering higher data limits on rolling monthly contracts but I personally don’t want to either pay for something that I don’t then use or get into a scenario of cancelling and restarting contracts.

It was low or no cost unlimited web access that saw the wired web become a ubiquitous resource and demonstrated to people how useful the web could be – even at dial-up speeds. We were hooked and the operators were subsequently able to recoup the losses on this with the arrival of broadband and our willingness to pay more for a better web experience. Virgin Media knows this as it had massive experience in opening up wired web access under the NTL brand but I’m not sure the main mobile network operators are really learning lessons from history here and are still trying to earn revenue from misguided ‘walled gardens of content’ and access charges that are actually holding them back now from potentially much bigger future revenue opportunities.

I think this will change quickly now and the age of the true mobile web and all the innovation it will bring will be upon us at last.

Millennials in The Lab…

Those born between 1980 and 2000 now tend to be described as Millennials following a survey in which thousands of them chose this in preference to terms such as Generation Y.

kids_textingMy eldest daughter falls into this category and it is both interesting and daunting to see her embrace communication and web technologies. She is already extremely computer literate and not fazed by the processes of creating and communicating web based content via social networks.

In my professional life I am seeing clear generational divides. The Millennials take to the content management system and processes I have been introducing into the organisation like ducks to water and want to do more and more. The Generation Xer’s are a different matter and find the idea of being empowered to publish content on the web as a daunting prospect and struggle to adapt to the technology without plenty of hand holding.

 As the web became part of job role early in my career I guess I am closer to the Millennials in terms of experiences with the web than with a typical Generation Xer – however I’m sure my daughter would disagree.

When I was taking a surf down memory lane recently I came across the Alcatel-Lucent Lab. This is an interesting resource that researches a range of technology topics with a broad cross section of younger Millennials.

Some recent research that caught my eye was a study into the iPhone user experience amongst teenagers. Unsurprisingly it shows that there is a lot right about the user interface but also that the on-screen keyboard makes texting difficult as it provides no touch indication of input. As the article observes, and as I have witnessed in the past with my nephew, many teenagers can text without looking at the screen just by their familiarisation with a keypad layout and the number of clicks to the required letter. These are skills obviously learnt in many a boring lesson or lecture 🙂

Fighting the past…

As a hardened web veteran I tend to take the view that nothing is new. For example, all the core elements of today’s massively popular social networks were seen in the first generations of business collaboration solutions back in the mid to late 90s.

Having struggled at that time to get people actively interested and empowered to create and manage web content with early content management systems, I was impressed with the speed with which collaborative solutions such as eRoom (acquired by Documentum – now owned by EMC) and IBM Quickplace (now IBM Lotus Quickr) gained user adoption.

It was all about making online communication easy, productive and useful for non-technical people.

Solutions like eRoom found their way into organisations during the 90s dotcom boom as point solutions for helping to manage communication around projects. Because users had positive experiences with these solutions their usage spread quite rapidly from the ground up and by the time the IT managers got wind of them they were too established to stop or ignore.

sharepoint_areasThis was a great business model that Microsoft latched onto subsequently with SharePoint and although its first offering in 2001 was criticised for poor usability, the 2003 release of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2.0 and Portal Server, where WSS was bundled in free with Windows Server, created just the effect Microsoft was looking for and SharePoint adoption spread rapidly within many organisations.

I liked the 2003 version of SharePoint for all the reasons I liked the products that were its inspiration. As a non-technical ‘power user’ it empowered me to capture information concerning projects, put some context around it and communicate that around the business in a way that encouraged and enabled feedback and engagement.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and WSS 3.0 improved on the usability issues of the second version, added in wiki and blog capabilities and, in essence provided the toolkit to create business orientated ‘social networks’ within organisations.

So, why then, having been a long term advocate of business collaboration and also the SharePoint offering in recent years did I find myself underwhelmed and quite disappointed with SharePoint when I revisted it again recently?

A couple of days ago I signed up for the new Microsoft BPOS European trial and set about creating a sample intranet site that showcased the key capabilities available in the SharePoint solution, from document management, image libraries and team workspaces to more complex functionality using the core ‘list/form building’ capabilities. (There is a great summary of BPOS pros and cons by a former colleague of mine here)

It was during this experience that the reason Microsoft invested in Facebook became all too apparent – besides any potential for being the next big online advertising platform, Facebook  is just so much easier and pleasurable to use for doing what are essentially the same processes of building a collaborative environment as SharePoint. Added to this is morphing of social network environments into what some commentators are describing as ‘the new e-mail’.

Once again I think this illustrates the continuing challenge Microsoft has in moving on from its heritage as primarily a desktop pc software provider.

The iPhone demonstrates quite starkly how wrong Windows Mobile is and likewise, the myriad of web native solutions spawned under the moniker of ‘web 2.0’ show just how awkward and cumbersome some of the most established software solutions are when the playing field is levelled to what can be done in a web browser alone.

Having spent some time in a software development role I have some insight into the challenges presented by trying to evolve a solution into something more current and relevant. For example, changing a product that was designed primarily for managing one website in one language or allowing content to be published without workflow or a deployment process are not straightforward or quick to do if those requirements were never conceived when the product was first designed.

Multiply that by the size and complexity of the Microsoft organisation and it is no surprise that its solutions sometimes feel restrained, tired and dated compared to those not weighed down by such baggage and designed with the current platform in mind as opposed to older device and network access.