Like the Soccer World Cup, which thankfully only happens every 4 years, the CMS implementations I’ve been responsible for tend to come round in similar cycles – giving sufficient timeframes to move from phase 1, through the dreaded phase 2 and on to achieving longer term goals.

For me, the success of CMS implementations should not be measured by the initial launch and first phase activities but how well the longer term goals are addressed into the 2nd, 3rd and 4th years – and beyond. This was emphasised recently in an excellent article by CMS Myth-  ‘Your website is not a project’

Whichever way you look at it though, CMS implementations and ongoing web developments can be described as a series of competitive matches and play-offs – not unlike the World Cup tournament – that you are in a continual cycle of preparation and training for.  In fact I’ve already used a football term ‘goals’ in the previous paragraphs, without even thinking.

Having responsibility for eCommerce, setting up goals is something I’m doing regularly – only in Google Analytics rather than on a pitch. The only way we can ‘score goals’ is by having the right team players and tactics in place and having everyone focused on the task of winning.

Competition comes from all angles. In the early group stages, it is just as likely to be internal competition for time, budget and priorities than external factors. During this stage it’s important to test different players and strategies. You need to know when to have substitutes on hand and when to change strategies. Quite often I have a complete B team in training ready to step up to the main challenges, as and when needed.

In the knock-out stages the odds get higher. This is where the investment in the right players and the hours of preparation and training really start to pay off. The defence readies itself for a push forward, the mid-fielders open up space and opportunity and the strikers press home any advantage created to get the ball in the back of the net. In web marketing, my strikers implement the ideas at the sharp end that, when supported by the rest of the team, deliver goals.

Like the World Cup tournament, the further you progress, the tougher the competition gets.  The bottom line is that a rival for customer attention online can knock you out of the game through better performances and it can be tough going clawing your way back up the rankings. There are undoubtedly different leagues of competitors too, and if you are looking to take on a competitor who is used to operating in a higher league then you need the right team to do it.

My ‘dream team’ of players is illustrated below and includes those I have on the pitch all the time to the essential support team of vendors, system implementors and IT. I liken these to the coaching and physiotherapist staff that provide the knowledge, experience and capability to perform but are also there to help should things go wrong.

My dream team of players, coaches and support for winning campaigns

Does this analogy reflect your own approaches and, if so, what players and tactics are you using to score goals and beat the competition?

I’m sure there is plenty of scope for describing ‘own goals’, missed chances, hat-tricks, foul-play, penalties and the like 🙂

…absolutely nothing. Say it again! Say again????

I have a startling and somewhat unnerving confession to make. I haven’t used a company Intranet in any capacity for around 3 years now. The Intranets have been there, in a fashion, but haven’t been remotely useful or worth even thinking about. Why is this unnerving? Well, it’s made me question everything I thought and advocated about Intranets for many years.

The organisations I’ve been working for are all successful and, in many areas, bucking the trends of the recession in their particular markets. In each, email, IM (primarily Skype) and shared drives are the established ways of working. I have found myself becoming adept at navigating shared drives, learning about the organisations from them and pulling out the information I need. On the whole, the people around me are even more adept at doing this. It’s what they know, how they’ve done it for years and what they do every day.

In a time of ever tightening budgets and laser sharp focus on measurable results I have had to examine and continually reassess the Return On Investment any changes to the Intranet is likely to have and is there really any business justification for changing the way things are currently done – If it works, why try to fix it?

It’s a tough call at the moment. During the last 3 years, I have seen and experienced how internal communications, project management, CRM, HR and marketing communications can run more than adequately using the combination of email, IM, shared drives and Office documents. Whereas I have used SharePoint extensively on projects in the past, I’m fast coming to conclusion that a few simple interactive Excel templates in a shared folder can be just as effective.

I used to support the sort of observations you see around vendor, implementor and analyst websites like “An Intranet is an accurate reflection of the inner workings and ‘Corporate DNA’ of a company” but having seen businesses grow and prosper with barely a second thought given to an Intranet, I have to question this fundamentally.

If an organisation is practised at sharing and communicating information through long established methods and has evolved those as new capabilities, such as Skype, have come along are they really going to gain much more by spending a lot of time and effort on their old Intranets?

I’m fast coming to the view, that if you are ‘knowledge worker’ and have been communicating and sharing information for years – either online or offline, you simply adapt to the toolsets available. You apply the same underlying principles of simplicity, usefulness, context and lifecycle in a hyperlinked way but don’t necessarily need content to be sitting in a web browser under the banner of ‘Company Intranet’.

I’d be interested to hear how many people really believe their Intranet is so business critical that they couldn’t succeed without it? What am I missing here? Are there really killer Intranet apps that couldn’t be achieved in other ways?

With election fever hitting the UK this last week it seemed timely to examine the role politics plays in the content management challenges many of us face daily.

Certainly my experiences over the last 15 years or so have shown it to be a very ‘politically’ charged activity.

If you look at the definition of ‘politics’ it’s easy to see why.

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. It consists of “social relations involving authority or power” and refers to the regulation of a political unit, and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy.

Content management, in one form or another, touches many aspects of an organisation’s operation, crosses lines of authority and power frequently and thereby demands the regular formulation and application of policies.

Over the last decade politics has had a profound effect on content management at a macro level. In the UK, the spending of tax payers money by the Labour Party on IT and web related projects across central and local government played a key role in helping mid-market CMS venders gain traction, revenue and momentum. Policy and legislation regarding website accessibility, compliance and Freedom of Information has given plenty of opportunity for vendors to innovate and differentiate. I know for sure that my taxes and those of others certainly helped keep me gainfully employed by a CMS vendor for a good few years of the last decade.

But just as high levels of Government spending have helped to shape the CMS software market, the likely, necessary and overdue severe spending cuts that are heading our way fast will also have a profound effect. Those vendors and service providers for whom the Public Sector is a key revenue stream had better get new market strategies in place soon as they’re going to have to work harder to chase much smaller budgets.

Beyond the macro social and economic environment, content management and associated web related projects are often a microcosm of the type of drama that has just been playing out on the UK political scene. At one point or another, you’re going to encounter different factions that represent different thought worlds – be that on an individual, departmental, business unit, regional or country level.

Something I’ve noticed on the last few projects is how accurate the Google Analytics dashboard representation of an organisation’s web audience is in helping to predict the distribution of power and authority when it comes to gaining buy-in and co-operation to content management initiatives.

The screenshot below represented a global 3 way split between the Americas, Europe and Asia I’ve experienced on a project.  Also, in common with country politics, it represented different ideologies. The Americas supporting a J2EE approach, Europe a .NET one and Asia an Open Source one.  So how did we make progress?

Well, it was a bit like the situation we have right now with a hung parliament in the UK. You had a big power block on the left who had been running the global web initiative for several years and another big power block on the right who, along with the main countries in Europe, were getting frustrated at the lack of progress and calling for major change. Ultimately, it was the voting block made up of all the main European countries that helped swing the agreement on a route forward but even though consensus was gained originally and considerable progress made, it became a real battle to keep the focus on the developments that made sense for the company as a whole as opposed to those of one particular country above all else.

The warning bells really started sounding when the reasons the big power blocks on left and right kept raising for not doing things that would benefit the global initiative became more and more insular and illogical. As the progress of the project challenged established power and authority increasingly the politics became all the more apparent and whereas previously it had helped propel the project forward, it now started to stifle it.

As this excellent document from J Boye points out on web strategy, it’s important to understand the type of organisation structure and culture you are dealing with because if it is historically chaotic or highly devolved in its decision making getting agreement on essential process and policy across the varying factions may be virtually impossible to achieve.

The politics of information/content management is as relevant today as it was when this wise book was published in 1995 . This blog post about ‘mind-killing politics’ explores some of the downsides of this. Hung parliament scenarios in web projects waste time and resources – decisive leadership works far better. I’ll be watching with interest to see if there are lessons to be learned for web projects from what happens in the weeks and months in UK politics since our eventful election day last Thursday.