Gilbane Group Blog

Gilbane Group Welcomes New Experts

2010-02-04T16:05:37Z

We're pleased to announce that Gilbane Group has welcomed three new senior analysts and consultants: Vince Emery, Karen Golden, and Sue Willard.

Vince, Karen, and Sue come to us with stellar credentials and the kind of “been-there-done-that” expertise that is a Gilbane competitive advantage as an analyst and consulting firm. Their bios have been posted on our consultants page.

With a background in global branding and multilingual content and web presence, Vince will be a key part of the team covering the intersection of our Content Globalization and Web Content Management Practices. He is based in San Francisco and strengthens Gilbane's Bay Area presence.

Sue’s expertise in multilingual content, localization, and project management brings a new voice to our Content Globalization practice, and her insights into helping companies understand what’s involved in technology implementation will serve Gilbane's user clients very well.

Karen’s background in a variety of structured content applications, content analysis, and web analytics will enable her to contribute across several Gilbane practice areas. Her experience as a buyer and implementer of content technologies will be especially valuable as we develop new programs and services that align with Gilbane's market education mission.

Our newest team members will be posting their first blog entries shortly. Look for them on Twitter, too.

Welcome, Sue, Vince, and Karen!

FINRA Affirms Regulation of User-Generated and Social Content

2010-01-26T17:58:16Z

In a Regulatory Notice released earlier today, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) opined that brokerage firms and their registered representatives must retain records of all communications related to the broker-dealer's business that are made through public blogs and social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

"Every firm that intends to communicate, or permit its associated persons to communicate, through social media sites must first ensure that it can retain records of those communications as required by Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and NASD Rule 3110. SEC and FINRA rules require that for record retention purposes, the content of the communication is determinative and a broker-dealer must retain those electronic communications that relate to its “business as such.”

Brokerage firms will now be required to archive and make discoverable business-specific content produced by their employees. They will also have to establish and maintain procedures that ensure a supervisor has either approved an interactive electronic communication before it is posted, or that a "risk-based" method of post-communication review exists and is exercised.

"While prior principal approval is not required under Rule 2210 for interactive electronic forums, firms must supervise these interactive electronic communications under NASD Rule 3010 in a manner reasonably designed to ensure that they do not violate the content requirements of FINRA’s communications rules.
Firms may adopt supervisory procedures similar to those outlined for electronic correspondence in Regulatory Notice 07-59 (FINRA Guidance Regarding Review and Supervision of Electronic Communications). As set forth in that Notice, firms may employ risk-based principles to determine the extent to which the review of incoming, outgoing and internal electronic communications is necessary for the proper supervision of their business. "

In addition, FINRA's guidance states that all organizations under its purview must establish and communicate social media usage guidelines for their employees, and that those individuals must also receive employer-provided training on those guidelines.

"Firms must adopt policies and procedures reasonably designed to ensure that their associated persons who participate in social media sites for business purposes are appropriately supervised, have the necessary training and background to engage in such activities, and do not present undue risks to investors. Firms must have a general policy prohibiting any associated person from engaging in business communications in a social media site that is not subject to the firm’s supervision. Firms also must require that only those associated persons who have received appropriate training on the firm’s policies and procedures regarding interactive electronic communications may engage in such communications."

FINRA's guidance marks the beginning of a new era for financial services companies and their use of external social media. However, the Financial Services sector is not the only one that will be subject to regulation of communications made via blogs and other types of social software. An IBM Senior Product Manager related last week at Lotusphere that IBM customers in the Healthcare and Utilities industries were also beginning to ask about the management of user-generated and social content.

If your organization is currently required to comply with regulations pertaining to the use of email and instant messaging for business communication, expect to see similar requirements placed on your management of external blog and social media site posts in the near future. At some point, it is likely that these regulations will also be applied to internal communications conducted via enterprise social software.

Is your organization ready for this new era? Gilbane Group's seasoned advisors can help you prepare to manage user-generated and social content. Contact us today to learn how.

4 Predictions [or hopes?] for the WCM Industry in 2010

2010-01-16T03:57:55Z

Given that we're halfway through January, I figure it's high time I get around to writing my predictions for the Web Content Management industry in 2010. Let me correct that: these are my hopes for the WCM industry in 2010. I believe there's enough evidence to support the notion that my desires have a shot at coming to fruition, but I've come to grips with the fact that Nostradamus I am not.

I have a long list of both predictions and desires, but I'm focusing on my top 4 since they are all tied to a single theme, are the most likely to come to fruition, and are all driven by what we at Gilbane believe will be one of the four global, cross-industry Megatrends for 2010: Customer Experience. We believe that customer experience has been and will continue to be a significant basis for competitive advantage for all companies, as it defines their relationships with their customers. Experiences are personal, and thus, they must be tailored to the individual. Companies, now more than ever, need to identify (and prioritize!) their customer segments in order to individualize their experiences, and they must consider both stated and latent customer feedback as essential metrics. ALL interactions with customers then, whether in-person or via the web, must be 1) grounded in an understanding of the customer, and 2) empowered to adapt based on recent feedback. This valuation of customer experience is [finally] starting to raise the bar for the WCM industry...gone are the days when we can get away with merely providing a means of doing more with less. CIOs and CMOs alike are now recalling those long-promised ROI calculations which included increased sales, and they are holding the WCM vendors accountable. If they're not doing so already, I sure hope they start because the technology has finally caught up to the hype. So, with that said, here goes...

Hope #1: Audience Engagement Frameworks [The almost forgotten promise of WCM]

If you haven't heard of an Audience Engagement Framework, it's because I just coined the phrase last week. Hopefully it's at least partly self-explanatory. AEFs, in my opinion, are the future of marketing on the web. They will enable WCM to realize its full potential. AEFs include traditional WCM combined with web analytics, marketing automation, audience segmentation and dynamic content delivery. Analysts and thought leaders have been discussing the notion of Persuasive Content for a while -- the idea that content is tailored to suit the consumer / visitor. The only bit I would add to this is that in order to be persuasive, one must also be perceptive. Perceptive Content, another phrase I'm laying claim to, is that which is informed by visitor behavior via analytics (preferably in real-time), search, user-generated content, etc. AEFs includes both the perceptive and persuasive aspects of content, and a handful of innovative vendors have already released varying degrees of the framework in their products. I fully expect this trend to continue in 2010. And, while some vendors will implement it more wholistically than others, at least we're not talking about WYSIWYG editors being the biggest leap forward anymore. Or, at least, I'm not.

Hope #2: Search [Tightly integrated and much improved]

In 2009, we saw a mutual interest between the Search and WCM industries as Autonomy purchased Interwoven, Squiz bought Funnelback, and a number of WCM vendors such as Drupal and eZ Systems took major steps to integrate advanced search engines into their products. Many of the newly integrated products include features such as faceted search, auto-complete/suggest, content spotlighting, relevance ranking, and more. As I see it, this was more than just an attempt to improve the usability of their resulting websites in response to an ever-increasing shift towards search as the primary form of navigation. I believe, er, I hope, this trend is an intentional step towards improving a site's perceptive capabilities. Our ability to understand our audience's desires will most certainly be enhanced by attending to their searches, and our ability to manipulate the search results based on the visitor's (and her associated segment's) interaction with the website should only improve her [customer] experience which I've deemed so imperative above. If my guess is right, today's notion of search within a website will get a serious upgrade in the year(s) to come.

Hope #3: User-Generated Content [WCM gets even more social!]

User-Generated Content such as micro-blogs, social networking, tagging, commenting, etc. is everywhere. Many WCM Vendors have offered various UGC features in their products for a while now, but most have not implemented ways for companies to capitalize on the resulting content. As the industry continues to brainstorm ways to monetize the "social" trend, a handful of vendors such as Alterian and Sitecore have begun leveraging this content to improve audience engagement, thus again following suit with my theme from Hope #1. It won't take long for others to follow.

Hope #4: Globalization [Multi-lingual gets localized in the mainstream]

In the days of old, multi-lingual content capabilities were only promised by specialized vendors. However, as more and more companies are concerned with improving the experiences of their international customer base, a number of mainstream WCM vendors have begun to include these features in their products. With a few exceptions, the capabilities of most are relatively immature at this point, but 2010 should see an improved understanding of localization by mainstream vendors. The continued enhancement of such features should help to avoid what my colleagues have termed the Language Afterthought Syndrome, and the engaged conversation will be allowed to thrive worldwide.

Well, that's it. I'd love to know your thoughts. We'll be discussing many concepts related to the Audience Engagement Framework in the Customers & Engagement track at the upcoming Gilbane Conference in San Francisco, so mark your calendars for May 18-20! I also intend to write more on the subject and am just getting underway with some related research, so please stay tuned!

Follow me on Twitter: @sliewehr

Conference topics for Gilbane San Francisco - Updated

2010-01-12T14:31:06Z

Though we are still catching our breath from the Boston conference and the holidays, it is time to get moving on our annual San Francisco conference, which the 3rd week of May this year. The conference site is http://gilbanesf.com, ~~is still mostly populated with 2009 information, but will be updated this week with a new site design and current information~~. Content from the 2009 event is at http://gilbanesf.com/09/ ~~will be moved to a subdirectory and continue to be available.~~

~~In the meantime,~~ The description below ~~is taken from the draft site and~~ will give you a good idea of the topics we'll be covering. If you are interested in submitting a speaking proposal, remember that the deadline for submissions is January 18. See http://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html.

Oh, and the Twitter handle is http://twitter.com/gilbanesf and the hashtag we'll be using is #gilbanesf.

Gilbane San Francisco 2010
Web, content, and collaboration technology have reached a new level of maturity. This is true in terms of technology, but more importantly, it is true in terms of what businesses expect to be able to do with these tools. Web and enterprise content management permeate every aspect of an organization. Public facing internet sites are the front door to an organizations' products and services, and where customers, partners and investors engage with the corporate brand and develop perceptions. Internal websites, whether in the form of intranets, blogs, wikis, or portals, provide knowledge workers increasingly efficient ways to collaborate and share knowledge. Customer and internal-facing applications share requirements that call for a number of enterprise content, publishing and infrastructure technologies, such as multi-lingual, social media, search, and integration software.

Gilbane San Francisco is organized into four tracks so that whether you are responsible for marketing, IT, a business unit, or an internal function, you will be able to easily navigate among the conference sessions. If you are responsible for customer-facing business activities start with the Customers & Engagement track, and then add appropriate sessions from the Content Technology & Content Publishing tracks. If your role is focused on internal collaboration, knowledge sharing or support activities, start with the Colleagues & Collaboration track, and supplement it with sessions from the technology & publishing tracks.

Track 1: Customers & Engagement
Corporate websites are now the most important public face of an organization, and the best way to grow, and communicate with, a broader customer base. Successful sales and marketing now requires Web sites that can reach a global audience, a mobile audience, and an audience familiar with social media and used to richer media. Websites also need to be findable, accessible, engaging, real-time & responsive, and have accurate and timely information that is synchronized with other channels. This is a tall order, but it is what your customers expect, and what companies are building.

Attendees:
For anyone responsible for marketing, business, or technical aspects of public facing websites, including, sales & marketing, digital marketing, brand managers, business units with P&L, Web strategists, IT, Web managers, business managers, digital media, e-commerce managers, content managers and strategists.

Topics:
Web content management, analytics, web design and UI, social media, rich media, global reach, multilingual practices, personalization, information architecture, designing for mobile, e-commerce, search engine optimization.

Track 2: Colleagues & Collaboration
Well-designed internal websites for collaboration on projects or operational activities, whether in the form of intranets, portals, blogs, or wikis are critical for supporting modern corporate missions. Social software has reignited interest in enhancing employee collaboration and knowledge sharing, and the right use of social software, alone or combined with an intranet or portal, is a competitive requirement. Employees already use it, and expect it, and can be much more productive with it. While some business use-cases are obvious, companies are a long way from having enough experience to know how best to integrate and deploy different types of social software to best support business requirements.

Attendees:
For anyone responsible for internal websites, portals, collaboration & knowledge sharing activities, including, knowledge managers, product managers, project managers, IT, and content managers.

Topics:
Collaborative authoring, intranets, knowledge management, search, wikis, micro-blogging and blogging, managing social and user-generated content, integrating social software into enterprise applications, SharePoint, portals, social software platforms, enterprise 2.0 strategies.

Track 3: Content Technology
There are many different technologies involved in building web and enterprise content applications. Some of them are simple and some complex, some are open source and some are commercial, some are available via license, some as a service, some are ready for prime time, some aren’t, and some might be ready, but are controversial.

Attendees:
For those who are either responsible for technology decisions, or those who need to keep up-to-speed with the latest technology for enterprise content applications of all types, including, central IT, departmental IT, strategists, and managers who need to know what's possible and what's coming.

Topics:
Multi-lingual technologies and applications, XML, standards, integration, content migration, mobile, search, open source, SaaS, semantic technologies, social software, SharePoint, XBRL, and relevant consumer technologies.

Track 4: Content Publishing
Multi-channel publishing has been a goal of many organizations for years, but it is now more important than ever - and not that much easier. In addition to more traditional print and web channels, smartphones, e-book readers, other mobile devices, and even “in-product” displays need to be considered. In addition to more channels, there are more media types to manage. Dynamic publishing is a key business requirement for both single and multi-channel delivery.

Attendees:
For those responsible for content creation, management, and multi-channel/multi-lingual publishing, IT and others that need to learn about publishing technology because of new multi-channel demands, including corporate or commercial publishers, content managers, digital asset managers, documentation managers, and information architects.

Topics:
Multi-channel publishing, multi-lingual publishing, e-books, tablets, mobile, digital rights, digital asset management, documentation, structured content, XML, dynamic publishing, and publishing business models.

Publishing Perspective 2010

2010-01-04T20:47:26Z

By Ted Treanor, Senior Publishing Consultant

Publishing predictions for 2010 abound. As a digital publishing pioneer and visionary, Ted Treanor has been well positioned ahead of the curve, with a unique vantage point to see what's in store for the industry. At this tipping point, publishing convergence of print and digital has collided with mainstream. Let us know what you think of these predictions.

Let’s see if 13 predictions will be lucky for publishing.

New eReading devices will proliferate. The market is responding like the California gold rush. Not only will there be new companies launching in 2010, but big electronics firms will have their products. CES will be a haven for digital reading, which will astound everyone.
Pricing experimentation will take center stage.
Digital sales channels both retail and distribution will grow rapidly.
The ePub standard (IDPF.org) will strengthen as an international industry standard. ePub will compete with PDF for the top format for commercial content.
The big surprise this year will be the number of large recognized companies that will strategically target the digital publishing eReading and content space. At least one major communications infrastructure company (possibly wireless) will stake a claim through a publishing partnership. Other prime segments will be computer manufacturers and printer manufactures.
Trade associations will scramble to stay relevant in their attempt to lead members through this time of convergence of print and digital.
Content workflow using XML technologies will become standard for single source production to multiple print and digital editions.
Publishers will attempt to build direct relationships with their reader customers…not very successfully in 2010.
Technology and services companies will further enable authors for self-publishing and in their sales goals. At least one big name author will experiment in self-publishing in 2010.
eCatalogs will become a standard tool in selling content to booksellers, librarians, etc..
Digital galleys will gain in popularity.
E-content will be grafted into print in innovative ways.
New ebook data reports and ebook directories will become ‘must-have’ resources. Gilbane Group has a series of three publishing transformation reports planned in 2010.

Follow me on Twitter @ ePubDr

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Deadline Approaching for CM Pros Board of Directors Nominations

2009-12-30T15:17:04Z

Nominations for the CM Pros Board of Directors close in one week. The deadline to submit nominations is January 6, 2010. More information about the Election Timeline is available on the website.

To nominate yourself or someone else who you believe would make a great candidate, please see How to Nominate on the CM Pros website and email the Elections Oversight Committee at elections@cmprofessionals.org by Wednesday, January 6, 2010.

The board is seeking enthusiastic candidates to run for three seats, bringing the board to five members. To qualify as a candidate, you must be a member "in good standing" of CM Pros. This is an opportunity for anyone who is passionate about content management in its many forms to contribute to the continued growth of the organization.

The CM Pros Board of Directors is both strategic and tactical. Each position may require a time commitment of up to 5–10 hours per week, including attendance at a weekly conference call meeting.

In the words of one past board member:
"Serving on the board was a great experience for me. I had the opportunity to work closely with leaders in the content management field and build lasting relationships. Plus being treasurer helped me develop finance skills that I later used to start my own company." Seth Gottlieb, Founder of Content Here, CM Pros Board of Directors 2006

CM Pros Election Oversight Committee
Linda Burman, Chair
Andrew Wilcox
Paul Trotter

Email: elections@cmprofessionals.org
Web: http://www.cmprofessionals.org

Observations from Gilbane Boston 2009

2009-12-08T20:10:17Z

The 2009 version of the Gilbane Boston conference was held last week. It was the second one I have attended and my first as a track coordinator (I designed the Collaboration and Social Software track and made it happen.) The event was well attended (c. 1100 people) and the number of sponsors and exhibitors was up significantly from last year's Boston conference. Many of the sessions I attended offered valuable insights from speakers and audience members. All in all, I would label the conference a success.

The Collaboration and Social Software track sessions were designed to minimize formal presentation time and encourage open discussion between panelists and audience members instead. Each session focused on either a common collaboration challenge (collaborative content authoring, content sharing, fostering discussions, managing innovation) or on a specific technology offering (Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Google Wave.) The sessions that dealt with specific technologies produced more active discussion than those that probed general collaboration issues. I am not sure why that was the case, but the SharePoint and Wave sessions spawned the level of interactivity that I had hoped for in all the panels. The audience seemed a bit reticent to join in the others. Perhaps it took them a while to warm up (the SharePoint and Wave sessions were at the end of the track.)

Here are some other, high level observations from the entire Gilbane Boston 2009 conference:

Twitter: Last year (and at Gilbane San Francisco in June 2009) attendees were buzzing about Twitter, wondering what it was and how it could be used in a corporate setting. This year the word "Twitter" was hardly uttered at all, by presenters or attendees. Most audience members seemed to be fixated on their laptop or smartphone during the conference sessions, but the related tweet stream flow was light compared to other events I've attended this quarter. The online participation level of folks interested in content management seems to mirror their carbon form patterns. Most are content to listen and watch, while only a few ask questions or make comments. That is true across all audiences, of course, but it seemed especially pronounced at Gilbane Boston.

SharePoint 2010: This topic replaced Twitter as the ubiquitous term at Gilbane Boston. If I had a dollar for every time I heard "SharePoint" at the conference, I would be able to buy a significant stake in Microsoft! Every company I consulted with during the event was seeking to make SharePoint either their primary content management and collaboration platform, or a more important element in their technology mix. Expectations for what will be possible with SharePoint 2010 are very high. If Microsoft can deliver on their vision, they will gain tremendous share in the market; if not, SharePoint may well have seen its zenith. Everything that I have heard and seen suggests the former will occur.

Google Wave: This fledgling technology also generated substantial buzz at Gilbane Boston. The session on Wave was very well attended, especially considering that it was the next-to-last breakout of the conference. An informal poll of the session audience indicated that nearly half have established a Wave account. However, when asked if they used Wave regularly, only about 20% of the registered users responded affirmatively;. Actual participation in the Wave that I created for attendees to take notes and discuss the Collaboration track online underscored the poll results. Most session attendees said they see the potential to collaborate differently, and more effectively and efficiently, in Wave, but cited many obstacles that were preventing them from doing so at this time. Audience members agree that the Wave user experience has a long way to go; functionality is missing and the user interface and features that are there are not easy to use. Most attendees thought Wave's current shortcomings would be improved or eliminated entirely as they product matures. However, many also noted that collaboration norms within their organization would have to change before Wave is heavily adopted.

Open Source: This was the hot topic of the conference. Everyone was discussing open source content management and collaboration software. An informal poll of the audience at the opening keynote panel suggested that about 40% were using open source content management software. Many of the other attendees wanted to learn more about open source alternatives to the proprietary software they have been using. Clients that I met with asked questions about feature availability, ease of use, cost benefits, and financial viability of providers of open source content management and collaboration software. It was clear that open source is now considered a viable, and perhaps desirable, option by most organizations purchasing enterprise software.

My big take-away from Gilbane Boston 2009 is that we are experiencing an inflection point in the markets for enterprise content management and collaboration software. Monolithic, rigid, proprietary solutions are falling out of favor and interest in more lightweight, flexible, social, open source offerings is rapidly growing. I expect that this trend will continue to manifest itself at Gilbane San Francisco in June 2010, and beyond.

Trade (eBook) Wars: Tiger Versus Grizzly Bear

2009-11-25T15:20:39Z

The Gilbane Publishing Practice is diving deep into the transformation of publishing as more and more publishers realize that the digital domain can not be ignored. Not that there aren’t plenty of publishers—especially in STM and other professional publishing efforts—already very active in digital publishing. Still, trade publishing, for example, is seeing the very real opportunities in eBook markets, and we’re wrestling with what makes for best practices for them.

Not that anyone's strategy makes for a “one-size-fits-all” approach. There are some trade publishers that have started in on or already have well-established single repository XML-based content management systems, the benefits of which are tremendous not just for eBooks, but for content re-use, custom publishing, localization and translation, and even to varying extents, integration with other line of publishing business systems. In trade publishing, however, there are plenty of publishers that have diverse collections of editorial and production platforms—often the result of the long history of mergers and acquisitions in this industry—and the level of integration within these editorial and production systems is ad hoc, at best, never mind effective tie-ins with marketing or sales systems, or royalties, or rights, etc. You know who you are.

So, what is the trade publisher supposed to do? While the ideal solution might be to create content chunks rich with meta-data that feed workflows across not just departments like production, but in and out of all of the other business systems as needed, there is a lot of time and money that goes into such a set up. For trade publishers with publishing systems that work—and maybe it doesn’t really matter if it’s taken a lot of gum and baling wire—what really is needed to add eBooks to the mix?

Companies like Aptara and even newer comer Tizra, along with well-established composition and conversion services, will tell you that if you can output in PDF, they can make eBook for you. And depending on the vendor, the eBook production may be very inexpensive, or have very sophisticated features, or be ready to market and sell, or some combination. SaaS is becoming more common for such processes, so investment, too, is relatively painless. Let’s think of this class of eBook production as “tigers.” This class of solutions offers impressively quick solutions and a good range of capabilities across a growing number of vendors, and represent a strong competitive argument.

XML-based repository digital asset and content management platforms, with their ability to embed rich metadata that may even enable actionable content to other publishing systems—including sales and distribution—stand as a class we can think of a “grizzly bears.” There is no doubt that this class of digital publishing solutions is a competitive strategy choice itself. One example is Wave Corporation, another is Mark Logic. Some solutions work better with publishing business-specific platforms (e.g., Klopotek, Firebrand, MEI).

Of course it may not be an either/or question. Recent news from codeMantra, about partnering with Mark Logic, points to the combining of the tiger and the grizzly. A “tizzly,” anyone?

Keep an eye open for our efforts to answer such questions, and if you are a vendor in this space, please be sure to contact Bill Trippe or Ralph Marto about participating in our multi-client reports. To read more about our Gilbane Publishing Practice consulting services, click here.

What's Happening at Gilbane Boston

2009-11-20T14:10:23Z

We've been providing regular updates on Gilbane Boston over on our dedicated announcements and press release blog, as well as on Twitter, but since not everybody subscribes to either of those, here is a quick summary for both conference attendees and technology exhibit visitors, with links.

Open to all:

Opening Keynote Panel – A Conversation About Content, Collaboration & Customers with Mass.gov, the Smithsonian, and Philips
Industry Analyst Debate: What’s Real, What’s Hype, and What’s Coming with: 451 Group, Burton Group, Forrester, Gilbane, and IDC
Special Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Experience classroom - Hands-on with SharePoint 2010 content management
Technology showcase with 48 content management technology vendors
Sponsor Reception, Wednesday December 2
Access to Product Labs on Wednesday and Thursday

Conference options:

Follow the conference Twitter stream. The main hashtag is #gilbaneboston, but others will emerge from the attendees as #futurewcm has. You can join (dm @gilbaneboston) or follow the list of twitterers at Gilbane Boston.

There is also a list of Google "Wavers" at the conference to follow.

Hope to see you there.

Are Publishers to Become Printers Again?

2009-11-19T22:13:53Z

Look into almost any publisher’s history, and if it has a good number of decades behind it, chances are very good that you’ll see that the publisher was its own printer. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is but one example: it’s origin stems from the merger of publisher Ticknor & Fields and Riverside Press, an old Cambridge-based printer founded by Henry Oscar Houghton.

Today, of course, a lot of publishers typically use big printers such as Quebecor, RR Donnelley, or others. With the digital content streams getting under control among publishers of many stripes, together with the growing capability of production printing hardware and software, print on demand (POD) is already mainstream option. Witness Lightening Source.

A recently received press releaseannounced the planned acquisition of Océ, which provides high volume production printing platforms, by Canon, known for its consumer items like cameras and ink jet printers, but also for office equipment such as copiers and printers.

It turns out the Océ’s production printers are behind a good portion of the big POD services, and these machines are able to provide cost-effect alternatives to regular printing in many cases. As publishers seek to extract value out of backlists and custom books by digitizing the content and managing workflow, POD can enable them to produce runs too small for regular printing. But right-sized and right-cost POD can offer attractive margins when the digital content has been managed right.

It makes me wonder if publishers will take the POD in-house, given the relatively modest POD platform expenses, so that the publisher can capture a greater part of the margin on small press runs. Who knows? Maybe the separation of publishing and printing will turn out to have been a temporary anomaly.

With Kindle et al., it can be easy to get stuck on eBooks as the output, but with the right technologies addressed by the digital stream, what shouldn’t be overlooked is POD. PDQ, QED.

eBook Strategy Offering Now Available

2009-11-06T14:17:01Z

As we have mentioned before, we have been very interested in leveraging the knowledge base we developed from our successful digital publishing study, Digital Platforms and Technologies for Publishers: Implementations Beyond "eBook."

With that in mind, we have moved forward and developed a strategic consulting offering, "Implementing Digital Publishing."

Consultation Description

Publishers face a wide range of strategic and tactical decisions when looking to start or build their digital publishing programs, and while publishers have taken many paths to success with digital product development, marketing, sales, and distribution, the organizational underpinnings of the most successful efforts have the common characteristics of technology spending consistent with business needs and opportunities.

The Gilbane Group’s Content Strategies service is offering a three phase consultation that is aimed at both management and operations personnel in educational, professional, trade, association, STM, and specialty publishing. The goal of the consulting is to assess the publisher’s current systems involved in digital publishing—planning, editorial and production, rights and royalties, manufacturing, promotion and marketing, sales and licensing, and distribution and fulfillment—and to provide decision-making support and guidance. The consulting targets and sets the course for achieving effective and efficient digital publishing business models.

Stakeholders

Depending on the size and scope of the publishing company, as well as the particular consultation phases sought, the stakeholders addressed in these consultations may include Publisher, VP and Editorial Director, VP of Production Services, VP of Digital Publishing, VP of Marketing, VP of Royalties, VP of Manufacturing, VP of Rights, VP of Business Development., VP of Digital Licensing, VP of Sales, VP of IT and CIO or CTO.

The Educational and Directional phase of the consultation (Phase One), which may be purchased as a standalone service or in conjunction with Phase Two and Phase Three, provides the publisher with a high-level assessment of the publisher’s current state of digital publishing capability across the multiple publishing systems. This phase concludes with a report and briefing that defines the publisher’s current state of digital publishing and provides recommendations for improving digital publishing capabilities.

The Analysis, Planning, and Recommendations phase of the consultation (Phase Two) moves the publisher from a general assessment of the conditions and challenges it faces in moving toward a more effective digital publishing business by providing an in-depth plan that a publisher can use to undertake its transformation into a more effective and efficient publisher for digital success. This phase concludes with 18-month action plans and on-site presentations and discussions of findings and recommendations with appropriate stakeholders.

The Implementation Support phase of the consultation (Phase Three) is designed to provide structured support as the publisher follows through on recommendations from Phase Two. Services within the Phase Three purview can include implementation progress reports, regular client visits, retainer and query programs, RFP assistance, prospective vendor research, and bid and implementation document review.

For a full data sheet describing the offering or for other information, you can email me or contact Ralph Marto via email or phone, 617.497.9443 ext 117.

SharePoint 2010 - The Big Story

2009-11-05T15:47:34Z

I spent a couple of days at the SharePoint conference two weeks ago with about 8000 others. Many attendees were customers, but the majority seemed to be Microsoft partners. It would be difficult to overstate the enthusiasm of the attendees. The partners especially, since they make their living off SharePoint. There has been a lot of useful reporting and commentary on the conference and what was announced as part of SharePoint 2010, which you can find on the web, #spc09 is also still active on Twitter, and videos of the keynotes are still available at: http://www.mssharepointconference.com.

As the conference program and commentary illustrate, SharePoint 2010 is a major release in terms of functionality. But the messaging surrounding the release provides some important insights into Microsoft's strategy. Those of you who were at Gilbane San Francisco last June got an early taste of Microsoft's plans to push beyond the firewall with SharePoint - and that is the big story. It is big because it is a way for Microsoft to accelerate an already rapidly growing SharePoint business. It is big for a large number of enterprises (as well as the SharePoint developer/partner ecosystem) because it is a way for them to leverage some of their existing investment in SharePoint for building competitively critical internet applications - leverage in expertise, financial investment, and data.

The numbers are telling. According to an IDC report Microsoft Office and SharePoint Traction: An Updated Look at Customer Adoption and Future Plans, IDC # 220237, October 2009, of "262 American corporate IT users, just 8% of respondents said they were using SharePoint for their Web sites, compared to 36% using it for internal portals and 51% using it for collaborative team sites." (the report isn't free, but ComputerWorld published some of the numbers).

Can Microsoft increase the use of SharePoint for Web sites from 8% to 36% or 51% or more? Whether they can or not, it is too big an opportunity for them to ignore, and you can expect the market for web applications like content management to look a little different as a result. Of course SharePoint won't be the right solution for every web application, but Microsoft needs scale, not feature or market niche dominance.

There are more pieces to this, especially integration with Office 2010, which will have a major impact on the scale of penetration. We'll look at that issue in another post.

You can see why SharePoint is a major topic at Gilbane Boston this year. Join us next month to continue the discussion and learn more.

How CMOs Are Planning for Social Media

2009-10-29T10:38:41Z

Updated November 24

While preparing for today's webcast on digital marketing and lessons learned from the publishing indusry, we discovered the August 2009 CMO survey conducted by professor Christine Moorman at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, with support from the American Marketing Association. Moorman's results include insights into expectations about the role of social media in digital marketing.

The 511 top marketing executives of US companies interviewed in late July expect to increase spending on social media efforts by more than 300% over the next five years, moving budget allocations from 3.5% to 13.7%.

Top investments are pegged for social networking (65%), video and photosharing (52%), and blogging (50%).

The five most frequently projected uses for social media applications are brand building, customer acquisition, new product introductions, customer retention, and market research.

Read the CMO survey press release for details on the research and links to full results. Register for today's webinar on digital marketing and lessons learned from publishers.

Update: The webinar recording is available here.

The Customer-Vendor Conversation: A key to success in WCM

2009-10-28T18:43:14Z

Having gotten my feet [soaking] wet with briefings from Web Content Management vendors, I've come to a realization: the Customer-Vendor feedback loop is one of the strongest keys to long-term success for all parties. A blinding flash of the obvious? I don't think so. Let me explain...

I have seen, and written, a lot of RFPs seeking "the perfect" WCM product. The natural tendency in these "quests for the holy grail" is for the tool-seeker to list as many WCM features as one might possibly use [...maybe...at some point in the future... if only...] and for the vendors to respond, in turn, by listing all of their capabilities and feature sets. As one might imagine, this scenario typically results in responses which provide the decision-maker minimal product differentiation information. Why? Because like it or not, most WCM products offer similar feature sets, and if they don't offer a particular feature today, one can be sure it's "on the roadmap". [I'll spend more time in a future post describing how one can craft an RFP to elicit valuable responses which actually help one decide which product(s) align most closely with needs of the author.] But today's capabilities are tomorrow's old news, so how can one be sure they're selecting a vendor whose product will meet tomorrow's needs? Take a look at the vendor's track record and approach to collaborating with customers to expand and hone its offering.

As I delve into some of the top-rated [by users] WCM vendors, I see a consistent "customer-is-key" theme being played out in the form of both formal and informal feedback channels. These "conversations" with customers can be either synchronous or asynchronous, direct or indirect, two-way or multi-way...or all of the above. The point is that successful vendors [pro]actively engage their customers, and then respond in a meaningful manner to enhance their offering in a way that ensures that the product's "roadmap" is *always* aligned with the needs of both current and future customers.

In a recent briefing with a vendor [who I feel has a great approach to managing this feedback loop], the last slide in their presentation listed four of their key differentiators...but all of them were technology-related and failed to mention my aforementioned favorite. Why not? Is it because they aren't proud of this factor? Absolutely not...they are very proud of it and have worked hard to create such a valuable dialog with their customers. My sense is they left it out because this subject is not yet a key criteria in the minds of decision-makers.

We are failing to ask the right questions. Why wouldn't customer service and engagement be the key in such a huge purchase decision? It should. Innovation is essential, but I believe it is critical that we, the customers, ensure we have a place at the table to refine the direction of such innovation. After all, innovation without purpose or utility is useless.

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The Impending Enterprise 2.0 Software Market Consolidation

2009-10-28T15:06:28Z

Talk about a trip down memory lane... Another excellent blog post yesterday by my friend and fellow Babson College alum, Sameer Patel, snapped me back a few years and gave me that spine tingling sense of deja vu.

Sameer wrote about how the market for Enterprise 2.0 software may evolve much the same way the enterprise portal software market did nearly a decade ago. I remember the consolidation of the portal market very well, having actively shaped and tracked it daily as an analyst and consultant. I would be thrilled if the E2.0 software market followed a similar, but somewhat different direction that the portal market took. Allow me to explain.

When the portal market consolidated in 2002-2003, some cash-starved vendors simply went out of business. However, many others were acquired for their technology, which was then integrated into other enterprise software offerings. Portal code became the UI layer of many enterprise software applications and was also used as a data and information aggregation and personalization method in those applications.

I believe that much of the functionality we see in Enterprise 2.0 software today will eventually be integrated into other enterprise applications. In fact, I would not be surprised to see that beginning to happen in 2010, as the effects of the recession continue to gnaw at the business climate, making it more difficult for many vendors of stand-alone E2.0 software tools and applications to survive, much less grow.

I hope that the difference between the historical integration of portal technology and the coming integration of E2.0 functionality is one of method. Portal functionality was embedded directly into the code of existing enterprise applications. Enterprise 2.0 functionality should be integrated into other applications as services. Service-based functionality offers the advantage of writing once and using many times. For example, creating service-based enterprise micro-messaging functionality (e.g. Yammer, Socialcast, Socialtext Signals, etc.) would allow it to be integrated into multiple, existing enterprise applications, rather than being confined to an Enterprise 2.0 software application or suite.

The primary goals of writing and deploying social software functionality as services are: 1) to allow enterprise software users to interact with one another without leaving the context in which they are already working, and 2) to preserve the organization's investment in existing enterprise applications. The first is important from a user productivity and satisfaction standpoint, the second because of its financial benefit.

When the Enterprise 2.0 software market does consolidate, the remaining vendors will be there because they were able to create and sell:

a platform that could be extended by developers creating custom solutions for large organizations,
a suite that provided a robust, fixed set of functionality that met the common needs of many customers, or
a single piece or multiple types of service-based functionality that could be integrated into either other enterprise application vendors' offerings or deploying organizations' existing applications and new mashups

What do you think? Will history repeat itself or will the list of Enterprise 2.0 software vendors that survived the impending, inevitable market consolidation consist primarily of those that embraced the service-based functionality model?