Recently by Frank Gilbane

When I last wrote about us becoming part of Outsell, Inc. I mentioned that in addition to continuing to provide our existing services, we would be adding additional products. Last week we announced our first new Outsell/Gilbane product to executive subscribers to our syndicated services.

Our new product, Outsell’s Technology Leadership Council (TLC), is an invitation-only environment for CTOs, CIOs, VPs of IT, and VPs of product development in information and publishing companies. The TLC provides a confidential, peer-to-peer environment for sharing ideas, best practices, strategies, development methods, and other topics of specific interest to senior information product technology management.

While the TLC is a new product, it is modeled after the very successful Outsell Leadership Councils for CEOs, COOs, Managing Directors, or Presidents. There are two off-the-grid meetings a year and year-round networking and communication of research and ideas with fellow council members and the council chairs. The TLC is chaired by me, Marc Strohlein, Outsell’s Chief Agility Officer, and Bill Trippe, VP & Lead Analyst, Outsell’s Gilbane Group. The TLC's first meeting will be in Boston this October.

To find out more about the Technology Leadership Council, download the brochure and email me at frank@gilbane.com.

It will still be a couple of more months before you see much change, but we are planning a major update to gilbane.com. We know, it is a bit overdue, cobbler's children and all that, but if you had a Web site since 1997 and been using dozens of different tools to create and manage many thousands of pages in almost every version of HTML, and with a mix of CSS / no CSS, etc., you might procrastinate a bit too. Now that we are part of Outsell Inc., we also need to rationalize the two sites. outsellinc.com is also a large site, but fortunately, it was completely updated a couple of years ago with modern tools. We will be refreshing both sites and will be rolling out some incremental updates during the process. Right now we have a team architecting the end result and would love to hear from any of you who have suggestions about either of our sites. Comments are off because of the volume of comment spam, so send an email with suggestions to webmaster@gilbane.com, and thanks!

Given the popularity of the presentations / topics at our recent San Francisco conference we are organizing the Boston conference around the same theme (Customers, Collaboration, Content) and tracks (Customers & Engagement, Colleagues & Collaboration, Content Technology, Content Publishing).

You can find out more about what we covered in SF from the GilbaneSF-Tweetstream, from Sue Anne's post below, from the videos before and during the conference, and elsewhere.

See detailed instructions for submitting proposals, and send speaking proposals to speaking@gilbane.com. No sales or marketing presentations please.

The deadline for proposals is June 14, 2010.

It is not always the obvious experts who have the best solutions to problems. Since it is clear the gulf oil disaster is resistant to the most obvious solutions, crowdsourcing the problem seems like a no-brainer. The cost of a small team to sift through all the ideas to pick out any with current or future promise would be negligible. See Anthea's post and call for action.

Update: BTW, neither Outsell, nor Innocentive have any financial or commercial gain associated with this piece. It is not fee-for-hire, advertising, nor is Innocentive a client. We simply want to help and believe the voice of the information industry must be heard as part of finding solutions that can work.

We've been providing regular updates on Gilbane San Francisco 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 session with: Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group & Daniel W. Rasmus, Strategist, Author, Listening to the Future
• Industry Analyst Debate: What’s Real, What’s Hype, and What’s Coming with: Forrester, Gilbane, IDC, The Real Story Group (CMS Watch)
• Technology showcase with 34 content management technology vendors
• Sponsor Reception, Wednesday May 19
• Access to Product Labs on Wednesday and Thursday

Conference options:

• Four different conference packages
• Four in-depth pre-conference workshops
• CM Pros (Content Management Professionals) Summit
• Thirty-one conference sessions with the industry's best, and most fun, speakers
• Register

Follow the conference Twitter stream. The main hashtag is #gilbanesf. You can join (dm @gilbanesf) or follow the list of twitterers at Gilbane San Francisco.

Hope to see you there.

Or collaboration, enterprise social software, search, analytics, market trends, customer engagement strategies, intranet architectures, multi-channel publishing ..., or a prediction one of us has previously made that was prescient or presumptuous.

To learn more about the analysts on the panel including links to their blogs and Twitter accounts click on their name below. 

K2. Industry Analyst Keynote Debate: Industry Analyst Debate - What's Real, What's Hype, and What's Coming - May 19th 4:00pm - 5pm, Westin Market St, San Francisco

We invite industry analysts from different firms to speak at all our events to make sure our conference attendees hear differing opinions from a wide variety of expert sources. A second, third, or fourth opinion will ensure you don't make ill-informed decisions about critical content and information technologies or strategies. This session will be a lively, interactive debate guaranteed to be both informative and fun.

Panelists:
Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC
Tony Byrne, Founder, The Real Story Group & CMS Watch 
Scott Liewehr, Senior Consultant, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group 

How to submit questions:

• If they are short enough, DM @gilbanesf or tag a tweet with #gilbanesf
• Comment on this post
• Email me

http://gilbanesf.com

At the industry analyst session at Gilbane Boston last December, one of the points of discussion was how well spending on web content management systems had held up during the depths of the recession compared to other parts of IT budgets. Everyone on the panel agreed, and Forrester and IDC both mentioned research showing a healthy market for WCM and expected growth (if someone remembers the numbers please comment). This was a surprise to much of the audience, but obviously not to the vendors (well, at least to those reaping the benefit).

Why has/is web content management growing? The one word answer is 'marketing' - not vendor marketing, although they are mostly in tune with, and encouraging, the more aggressive pro-activeness of enterprise marketers. And why are marketing executives now better at demanding, and getting,  budgets for WCM? There are a number of reasons, including the paradoxical "to save money" (system costs have come down, large system service contracts costs have not, and SaaS solutions and open source solutions are growing). Most importantly however, is that most organizations have finally figured out that 'marketing' means 'multi-channel, digital, and interactive/social marketing'. This is fundamental. The companies who took advantage of the recession to invest in learning what this means, experimenting with tools, customer interactions, and system integrations, have gotten a bit of a head start, but nobody can ignore this - this is not a 'nice to have'.

Why is the focus on 'web content management' and not something else? All product categories are fluid, and eventually there will be a category, buzzword/phrase TBD, for multi-channel content management that includes tools for social, mobile, tablet, channels etc. But for the foreseeable future, the corporate website(s) will be the hub, however it is accessed.

Well, all I really meant to do in this post was point to the special guide to marketing-focused sessions at Gilbane San Francisco in May, but now you know why. These sessions will also be useful for those in IT (along with our technology track) who support marketing initiatives.

I am very happy to announce the addition of Ian Truscott to our team as a Gilbane Group Senior Analyst based in London. We have had customers in Europe for many years and have wanted to expand our business with a local presence, so Ian is an especially welcome addition. Ian's focus will be on Web Content Management, which remains our largest area of consulting, and has become even more important with the increasing influence and activity of enterprise marketing in web content strategies and purchases.
 
Ian comes to us from Alterian, where he was VP, WCM Product Strategy. Alterian sells a platform that combines web content management, marketing campaign management and social media monitoring tools.
 
A little more on Ian from his summary on LinkedIn:
"... fifteen years of enterprise software experience, ten of which working with web content management. This experience has come as a CTO, in product marketing, product development, sales and consulting - from starting my career as a computer operator and UNIX administrator. A strong web content management pedigree, having focused on web technologies for the last ten years, working with some of the major vendors and pioneers in this area. During this time I have taken various products to market, engaging with a broad range of organisations (including McDonalds, Diageo, AstraZeneca, WWE and Glaxo) and large central government departments while living and working in the USA and UK. "  
 
You can reach Ian at: ian@gilbane.com, or: +44 (0) 203 137 9600. Ian is an active Twitterer at @iantruscott. You can also meet Ian if you will be at our conference in San Francisco in May. You might even find Ian together with our Senior Analyst Scott Liewehr in the hotel pub amid a gaggle of other CMS industry insiders.
 
Welcome Ian!

(Disclosure: Alterian has been a Gilbane client, and in keeping with our strict vendor neutral policy and our ethics policy regarding clients, Alterian was fully supportive of Ian joining us, and Ian has sold all his shares in the company.)

Congratulations to recently elected officers, and to new CM Pros board members Saravanan Rajan, Brett Zucker and Ian Truscott!

Content Management is often loosely defined but covers a virtual ecosystem of vendors and practitioners. The 2010 CM Pros board extends a call to the community of practitioners to further define product niches and areas of specialist expertise. The goal is to guide the market and the people that look to CM Pros.

Board-appointed officers for the coming year are:

• Scott Liewehr, President (Senior WCM Consultant at Gilbane Group and Principal at onesta)
• Saravanan Rajan, Vice President (Chief Technology Officer for CoSI Consulting)
• Ayse Kok, Secretary (PhD Student, ICT Consultant, and Researcher)
• Brett Zucker, Treasurer (Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at Bridgeline Software)
• Ian Truscott, Director (Product Strategist, Alterian)

Look for action from this board as they gear up for a full season of activities that will engage the Content Management community. Be sure to join CM Pros at their Spring Summit at The Gilbane Conference (http://gilbanesf.com), May 18 in San Francisco.

About CM Professionals
Founded in 2004, CM Pros provides information, expertise, and support to global content management practitioners and related professionals and the organizations they serve. Through peer-to-peer knowledge exchange, educational events, and advocacy of respected practices, the association fosters a better understanding of this critically important discipline.

Join CM Pros on the Web at www.cmprofessionals.org.

We have a lot going on here at Gilbane Group these days. Here's a quick summary of recent activity:

First, a few current complimentary resources you may not be aware of:

For marketing, language, and content professionals evaluating the role of automated translation in their global business communications:

Take our online survey on Machine Translation Attitudes and Adoption. You don’t need to be a user of machine translation to participate. Less than ten minutes – we promise! Participants will receive the aggregated survey results and the executive summary of the analysis. Take the survey now.

For content professionals and IT managers dealing with large-scale content applications:

A new Gilbane Beacon publication on overcoming technical barriers to effective, efficient processing of high volumes of data and content in disparate formats. The paper describes new approaches to leveraging open data – whether for open government, open publishing, or open enterprise.

Download Enabling the Promise of Open Government: Addressing Large-Scale Integration, Storage, and Access of Complex Information by Dale Waldt

For web content managers and publishers struggling to manage social content:

A new Gilbane white paper examines the Drupal social publishing platform, developed and maintained as an open source project. The discussion illustrates how a variety of organizations – commercial, non-profit, and government – are deploying social publishing to build presence on the web and manage interactive experiences that foster communities of contributors.

Download Social Publishing with Drupal: Building Social Businesses on the Web with a Framework for Content and Community by Geoffrey Bock

For commercial publishers needing to stay on top of technologies and trends in digital publishing:

Note our recently announced research partnership with the Book Industry Study Group.

For anyone involved in interactive marketing, IT, or content, web, or collaboration applications:

Check out our annual San Francisco conference coming up May 18-20 at the Westin Market Street hotel, where you can meet many of the team in addition to learning about the latest strategies for using the web and social software for connecting with customers.

See our latest info on the conference in our new video series on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Gilbane.Group

Keep up-to-date with all our new publications and activities at http://gilbane.com or on Twitter.