Many thanks to the London Communications and Engagement Group last night for their kind invitation to present and discuss the area of Content Technologies. The Prezi is embedded below should others be interested in joining the conversation.
Promotion and credit given to CMS Watch (a service of the Real Story Group) and Kristina Halvorson for their great work on the Technology Vendor Map 2010 and Content Strategy for the Web
Talk and beer
Or rather, what’s the point of analyst organisations? This is really a question that’s been raised for me by the debate about Forrester clamping down on its analysts producing and promoting personal blogs.
Reading this excellent article about Forrester’s action underlines the dilemma for many organisations thrown up by Social Media – who becomes the ‘authentic’ voice or voices of your organisation? Is the genie out of the bottle as far as this is concerned and by trying to pull the reigns back now will organisations face criticism in the way Forrester has about being heavy-handed and effectively limiting its analysts from establishing their own personal brands.
As this pyramid from SageCircle emphasises, Analyst Relations can be quite a personal thing and it’s not so much the analyst organisation itself who you are building the relationship with but often an individual who has specific experience and knowledge of your market sector and operations. The individualism of analysts has been brought into sharp focus by Twitter. Firstly it makes analysts, and the organisations they represent, more accessible but also more transparent. In the cut and thrust of everyday debate, you get to see fallibility more easily but likewise, knowledge and expertise shine through too.
I think what we’re seeing with the Forrester move and recent consolidation in the CMS analyst space is an exposed vulnerability of analyst organisations which have, in many respects, built their operations on inherently poor knowledge flows, communications and, primarily ‘conversations’ between organisations and individuals. To a typical analyst organisation, knowledge is power and wealth, that it benefits from being a gatekeeper to. Twitter has been blowing this apart over the last year or so by enabling like-minded and/or commonly interested people to get together online and offline far more easily and effectively to exchange knowledge and information. With technology continuing to break down boundaries and facilitate conversation perhaps it’s more the case that ‘we’re all analysts now’?
Although the rolling passage of time makes a changing year somewhat irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, the turn of a decade is a useful milestone for reflection and looking forward. My biggest learning points from the last 10 years are…
Animals. There is no better illustration of this than the herd behaviour it has facilitated on a global level, which has been a repeated pattern of the last decade – from the dotcom boom and bust to the financial bubbles to Twitter. The latter is an appropriate name for something that induces ‘flocking’ or ‘swarming’. You can almost visualise this happening as a leading influencer changes direction or swoops down on something new.
So – is this a good or bad thing? I guess it depends whether, on balance, it has done more harm than good. It’s driven growth, that’s for sure – but has it been the right sort of growth? There would appear to be an even greater gap between rich and poor and it is becoming ever clearer that we have raped and pillaged our planet more in the last ten years than at any time before. The consequences of that could well be catastrophic if you believe the growing consensus of scientific opinion.
Well about one thing anyway. His soundbite from The Road Ahead about people “overestimating what will happen in the next two years but underestimating what will happen in the next 10” keeps playing out. Slightly ironic I guess that the biggest example from the last decade is the mobile market. When I worked on projects at the beginning of the decade to visualise the types of services 3G technology would bring to phone users I must admit that none of them looked much like a Microsoft approach. However, I had an underlying sense that the proprietary monolith would come to dominate the mobile world, as it had the desktop.
The big lesson here is that applying thinking and approaches from one environment to a fundamentally different one – is deeply flawed. Fresh thinking is needed. And Apple demonstrated that so well with the iPhone. Design a device and applications specifically for the context in which they are used rather than trying to get a phone to behave like a desktop PC. Lessons from my time at NTL in the 90s suggest exactly the same is applicable to the web and interactivity ‘on TV’ – in a communal, lean back environment, the context and approach must be relevant and compelling. Also lessons from spending half of the last decade in IT/software development roles also suggest that continuing to apply desktop thinking to an inter-connected always-on online world is also ultimately flawed.
Well, not about everything – but certainly in ‘his’ decision to commit the UK to an ill-conceived war and extremely badly planned peace in Iraq. Although I’ve highlighted the dangers of herd behaviour in the first point, there are times when ‘the wisdom of crowds’ is right – the challenge of course is to read the situation correctly. The largest demonstration ever on the streets of London and in other capitals around the world suggested that the majority of people felt uncomfortable with the reasons for going to war – even if they didn’t physically take to the streets. I’m sure that I and many others are having our own thoughts back in 2003 confirmed as the latest enquiries expose the degree to which we were misled. It is particularly galling to remember our prime minister telling us that we didn’t see what he saw in terms of intelligence reports and therefore he had to make the decision on our behalf. There was a collective sense, more than anything I have experienced in my life, that this was wrong – I feel we had an innate understanding that we were being lied to but were ultimately powerless to stop the political machinery taking us to war. This matters deeply and it’s made me question everything I ever understood about ‘democracy’. If social media had been more prominent in the early part of the decade I’m wondering if things would still have happened in the way they did and if many hundred of thousands of innocent lives could have been saved?
If we can harness herd behaviour effectively in the next 5 years to help fix some of the damage we have done to our environment and promote more sustainable ways of living – then the web driven booms and busts of the Noughties will provide some consolation. But, and it’s a big but, we need to be convinced that those influencing the herd or causing the flock to change direction have thought about what they are doing and the effect such mass changed behaviour will have in the longer term.
If we can be brave enough to slow down, take a step back and look at things differently then the next decade could be full of exciting innovations that really would have the potential to change the world for the better. The challenge here is having the courage and vision to turn away from the herd and head for new pastures. I encountered the Blue Ocean Strategy a while back which, although it really is a post-justification reasoning, it does illustrate the thinking that has created some of the iconic gadgets of the last decade such as the Wii and iPhone. Perhaps a more appropriate title for this approach in the next decade would be Clean Ocean Strategy given the damage we are doing to the remaining Blue Ocean. In this, we would be looking to create new opportunities that didn’t add to the plastic, chemical and CO2 pollution that is turning our seas to an acid bath but also captured people’s imagination in the way that communications and entertainment have done in more recent years.
If we can use the technology to empower those who are repressed and discriminated against to gain a voice and learn for themselves that there are alternative ways to think and live, fundamentalism in all nations can be shown for what it is – a destructive, pseudo reality. For instance, if women had been in a stronger position in places such Afghanistan and Iraq, and likewise in the leading administrations of the Western world earlier this decade I doubt these complicated, entrenched and drawn-out wars would ever have started. Social media in its broadest sense offers the opportunities to make things more transparent expose hypocrisy and lies and amplify wisdom. Conversely, it could be manipulated unhealthily to amplify destructive forces and promote damaging herd behaviour. We have it in our power though to use it for good, rather than evil.
Let hopes rather than fears prevail in the next ten years
2020 here we come…
I remember first attending the Information Management/Online Information Show, or a variation of it, at London’s Olympia back in the 90s. I haven’t attended for a few years but enjoyed my visit last week for some very selfish reasons. For a start, it was very quiet – a welcome surprise for a deafie like me – and lack of footfall in the aisles meant I had some useful conversations and demos with a number of interesting exhibitors. The seminar theatres were quite small so I was thankful for good acoustics and being able to chat with some of the presenters easily.
I have a soft-spot for this show and I like the way it attempts to bring together age-old disciplines of information management with the latest online buzz – usually with some intelligent and well reasoned views of the latter. I’m sure there are some wise and seasoned information practitioners who look on with despair at the hype cycles that have passed by over the last 10 years or so and soldier on regardless until some common sense returns to the proceedings.
Unsurprisingly, social media was on the agenda in a number of the seminar theatres. I very much enjoyed a ‘pitfalls’ presentation by Sam Marshall from Clearbox Consulting a guy who has clearly ‘been there and done it’ in his roles with Unilever. You can see Sam’s presentations here and his list of very useful and common sense ‘pitfalls’ are…
1. Be ready to give up control
2. The price of entry is nearly zero for everyone
3. Be ready to follow up
4. If there’s a backlash, join the conversation
5. Keep looking out for a groundswell
6. Don’t feel you have to own the community
7. Be authentic
8. Match the approach to the channel
9. Don’t use social media to duck legislation
10. Tidy up
His examples from Dove illustrated very well that people hate hypocrisy and ‘social media’ is a great way of the people letting hypocritical companies know. The examples are also great lessons for brand managers in that very worthy comments about the downsides of the beauty industry look highly hypocritical from a massive FMCG organisation who benefits greatly from such an industry and who also has some responsibilities for heavy damage to the environment.
I also enjoyed Theresa Regli’s common sense keynote presentation about ‘Findability in the Web 2.0 World’ and her tour along the Red line of CMS Watch’s Content Technology Vendor Map 2010
With its focus on knowledge management from a librarian’s perspective and the challenges of legal, technical and medical publishing, IMS has a solidity about it. I’ve noticed many vendors in the Online Information side of things coming and going over the last 10 years (probably in direct correlation to the hype cycle) so it remains a useful barometer of the broader information management space and will probably be a lot busier next year when the social media hype dies down 😉
November began with a virtual attendance at JBoye 09 and some remote involvement in the #fixwcm debate started at the event and continued online by Jon Marks. Crossing from West to East last week for a visit to China gave ample opportunity to think about #futurewcm and the upcoming debates on this being triggered by the Gilbane event in Boston.
So, in my blog round-up for November, I’m going to summarise some WCM client side views for this discussion and debate and hope that this provides a catalyst for other client views as these debates have a tendency to be dominated by vendors, analysts and commentators.
In my first post of the month that coincided with the #fixwcm debate I looked at the CMS Watch definition of Web Content Management and in some further thoughts traveled even further back to how the father of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee described his original invention and how he describes its transition into something greater – the Giant Global Graph (GGG).
So, ten years from now, will Web Content Management still be “A system that lets you apply management principles to content.” ? and to what extent will WCM have evolved so that it can be distilled down into the simplistic description of the GGG – ‘content plus pointers plus relationships plus descriptions’?
It appears one of the biggest barriers to the development of the Semantic Web is the degree to which information can be deliberately manipulated. Could ‘social network’ frameworks such as Twitter provide a human driven semantic process that machines can actually make sense of? Or will the same issues of deceit and manipulation render such information as increasingly unreliable?
As my #futureWCM post here emphasised, we’ve got the costs of WCM down considerably during this decade. A sub $50K mid market proprietary solution will pretty much do what an upper tier one did 10 years ago and Free/Open Source solutions will do as much if not a lot more of what the mid market solutions offered in the early to mid noughties.
However, the average organisation still struggles to make content management integral to its employee’s roles and CMS providers across all tiers are still struggling to make the content management process as intuitive and user-friendly as it needs to be. I’ve started a wish list at the end of my previous post for capabilities I’d love to have at my fingertips in my current role.
My personal belief is that CMS developers across all tiers and types tend to be focused far too much on the next big thing rather than understanding how the basic elements in the system need continual focus and development to make sure tasks can be achieved in as productive a way as possible. Let’s make the next ten years the ‘age of user experience’ and revolutionise the processes of creating and managing content online with some fresh thinking rather than too much herd behaviour.
From my ramblings over the last month, you’ll probably have gathered that I feel Microsoft has hindered the progress of information management during the last decade through its efforts to protect its desktop dominance. Although I have been a big user and, at times, advocate of SharePoint the heritage of that product will always pull it back to the past rather than looking to the future. It is my personal belief that information management as a whole will benefit from Google making further progress into the average medium to large organisation.
Beyond the big software ideology battles that will doubtless continue to influence WCM development considerably over the next ten years, I think we will see new regional influence. The US led the way in the 90s, Europe has dominated the 00s and I believe that the East will come to dominate the 10s. Why? because in the same way the US has never really understood Europe, neither Europe or the US really understand the East.
As I’ve mentioned in posts during this month, alarm bells are ringing for me on ‘Social Media’. It’s another bubble for sure as I’m hearing the same levels of irrational comments and exuberance I’ve experienced many times now over the last 15 years or so.
Personally, I think organisations would do well to not get unhealthily distracted by the hype and really focus on what it is they do well. After-all, if the products and services they provide live up to their promise, they will be talked about with positive sentiment and the brand advocates will naturally do their part to drown out the negatives. Conversely, if social media becomes one big game of manipulation, trust will be undermined to such an extent that nobody will take any notice anyway and return to the long-standing beacons of trustworthy information – more than often the historical media properties whose people have been trained well to sniff out the truth. Citizen journalism is here to stay, as is ‘the cult of the amateur’ – the last few years of this decade have shown the benefits of this, but also the downsides and I am looking forward to a return to common sense during the next decade that brings some balance to some of the more ridiculous social media hype around today and lets us recognise reality from pseudo-reality.
Ten years from now I’d like to see Microsoft Office (as we know it today) consigned to history and for people to be having nostalgic conversations about the days when they used to spend most of their working days creating Word documents or PowerPoint presentations and describing how ridiculous it was compared to how they work today. I’d like to imagine us all working in ubiquitous ‘context aware’ and ‘adaptive’ tools that help create and manage content assets in universally standardised ways and for that to become a basic commodity that nobody really feels the need to talk about anymore. In 2020 I’d like us all to be ‘web’ masters and not for web publishing to still be seen as a technical domain divorced from the rest of the operation.
I absolutely don’t want to be feeling that we are locked into a particular vendor or implementor or that in order to benefit from new ways of managing information for the web that we are going to need to start almost from the beginning again. I’d like to be sure that when we say we are making iterative improvements we are actually improving rather than just approaching the same issues from a different direction or adding a superficial veneer of improvement but not fixing the basics.
In an ideal world I’d love for us to be able to ‘engage’ with our web users on a ‘one-to-one’ basis. Firstly though, they’ve got to really want to do that in the first place. Secondly we need to be so good at managing the information flow throughout our organisation that we can engage with an individual customer in a meaningful and useful way, beyond how it’s always been done. Right now I don’t think the average organisation is remotely close to achieving this. Maybe the next ten years will finally make ‘one-to-one’ web ‘engagement’ a reality – but only if it really makes sense in the real world.
Beyond 2020 Visions ... 