The CMS Myth, a blog aimed at exposing the myths and realities behind web content management systems and practices, launched today at the 2007 Gilbane Boston Conference. The blog was created by content management and web strategy experts at ISITE Design. The blog’s mission is to fill a perilous ‘expectation gap’ among CMS adopters, a factor driving many CMS implementation failures. http://www.cmsmyth.com, http://www.isitedesign.com
Month: November 2007 (Page 1 of 3)
Gilbane Group Inc. announced they have seven research studies underway that will be published over the next few months. The research for some of these studies is already complete, and preliminary results will be discussed at this week’s Gilbane Boston conference at the Westin Copley Place Hotel. The 7 studies are: “Survey on the Web Content Management User Experience” – From our Web Content Management Practice, led by Tony White; “Enterprise Collaboration and Social Computing: A Report on Industry Trends & Best Practices” – From our Social Computing and Collaboration Practice, led by Geoffrey Bock; “Digital Magazine & Newspaper Editions: Growth, Trends, and Best Practices” – From our Cross Media Publishing Strategy & Technology Practice led by Steve Paxhia; “Enterprise Search Markets and Applications: Capitalizing on Emerging Demand” – From our Enterprise Search Practice, led by Lynda Moulton; “Enterprise Digital Rights Management: Business Imperatives and Implementation Readiness” – From our Cross Media Publishing Strategy & Technology Practice, study led by Bill Rosenblatt; “Digital Platforms & Technologies for Book Publishers: Implementations Beyond ‘eBook'” – From our Cross Media Publishing Strategy & Technology Practice led by Steve Paxhia; and “Beyond Search: What to do When you’re Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work” – A study authored by Steve Arnold, from our Enterprise Search Practice, led by Lynda Moulton. https://gilbane.com
Mary, Kaija and I are thrilled to have an extraordinary group of presenters for the Globalization Track at Gilbane Boston.
Although they will not discuss how to properly design and implement an international online dating service, our audience will learn a lot about creating, managing, and delivering a truly global customer experience. It is never too late for a trip into Boston, especially if these topics are relevant for you.
GCM-1: Quality at the Source: Creating Global Customer Experience
Tuesday November 27, 1:00-2:30pm
GCM-2: Integrating Content and Translation Processes: Managing Global Customer Experience
Tuesday November 27, 3:00-4:30pm
GCM-3: Understanding the Globalization Standards Landscape
Wednesday November 28, 2:00-3:30 pm
GCM-4: Global Content Management Track Keynote: Making Quality Everyone’s Responsibility – Delivering Global Customer Experience
Thursday November 29, 8:30-10:00 am
My theme leading into the Gilbane Boston Conference this week comes straight from the headlines and New Hampshire political ads that manage to spill over the border into our fair Commonwealth of Massachusetts. If you live outside of the zone of early caucus and primary states, you are probably spared the ad nauseam recitations of all the crises that Rudy Giuliani has met and conquered. In thinking about our collective longing for a true leader in the White House, I began to reflect on all the other places I would like to see leadership. My musings brought me straight to a message I try to impart to clients and professional colleagues struggling with issues of leveraging knowledge and technology.
True leadership is very hard because it requires thinking, projecting and anticipating. It requires abstract thinking about possibilities for making improvements in complex areas. It requires the ability to mentally juggle huge numbers of variables, many of which the true leader knows he/she can’t possibly control but may be able to foresee as possible complications. It requires bucking the status quo.
Anyone can react, and many can react with reasonably appropriate actions, actions that work for the immediate crisis. However, sizing up an enterprise in which things are running in a seemingly routine fashion, and taking the initiative to systematically seek out lurking crises, potential problems, and areas for improvement, and then applying thoughtful and incremental change activities to ensure better outcomes may seem boring – but this is true leadership.
Finally, think about all the ways in which our political leaders seem to thrive on talking about only the monumental crises of the country and world. Think about how our news is driven by immediate crises. We seem to be conditioned to only react to what we are being shown and told. True leaders are seekers, self-educators, investigators, learners and thinkers. Our best leaders are those who get to the core of our political and business enterprises and find a better way for the whole to work more smoothly, with an ultimate goal of bringing positive good to the members of the community. They succeed though personal diligence, finding the will to persevere while immersing themselves in the mundane and routine operations of their domains. They observe and they think about what they observe; they also talk to others and reflect mindfully on what they hear before acting.
As I prepare my opening remarks for several sessions on enterprise search and semantic technologies at the conference over the next three days, I am pondering how I can stimulate the audience to take the time to open their minds to think about what speakers and exhibitors introduce. I want them to think, really think, about what they are hearing. I want them to develop new ideas, new ways of innovating, new ways to make the mundane better and take it back to their enterprises with a purpose – not just with information to be used in the event of a direct work challenge, demand or crisis. I want to lead others to lead from a thoughtfully critical point of view. So, take a look at technologies from the perspective of action toward systemic improvements instead of a reaction to solving only the latest crisis in your enterprise.
The theme for the opening keynote panel: Content Technologies – What’s Current & What’s Coming? at our Boston conference this week is: change – and what it means for content and information management strategies.
Of course there is constant and rapid change in technology, but we are now entering an era of multiple tectonic shifts that will challenge IT and business strategists more than ever. And the changes are not all technological, even if largely caused or influenced by technology. For example, the computer-literate generation entering the workplace, consumer technology changing expectations in the workplace, and a sometimes desperate need to adjust or completely change business models.
Other fundamental changes affecting enterprise information management strategies include the speeding freight trains of mobile computing, cloud computing, enterprise software consolidation, and global e-commerce markets.
We’ll also take a look at some specific technologies and ideas that are often over-hyped or not well-understood. Many of these have an important role to play in enterprise information strategies, and the panel’s goal will be to help you think through what your expectations of them should be. Examples include technologies that go ‘beyond search’, social software networks, user-generated content, tagging, enterprise blogs and wikis, and e-books.
This is a lot to cover in an interactive 90 minutes, but our panel will certainly get you thinking, and provide some perspective for your discussions with other attendees, speakers, and exhibitors. Joining me on the panel are:
- Andrew P. McAfee, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
- David Mendels, Senior Vice President, Enterprise & Developer Solutions Business Unit, Adobe
- Andy MacMillan, Vice President, ECM Product Management, Oracle
- David Boloker, CTO Emerging Internet Technology, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Software Group
… to great fanfare (The Future of Reading no less!) and great derision (a “fugly hot mess”). At least one Wall Street analyst liked it, the stock is rising (up $2.64, or 3.33% at this writing), and CEO Bezos says that the Kindle sold out its existing units in 5.5 hours, though I can’t find how many that actually means.
I mentioned on my own blog a couple of features I found intriguing–the low price point for bestsellers, and the seeming ease of use for downloading new content over a built-in wireless network. Some of the negative comments I have read so far concern Kindle’s capabilities for non-book content such as blogs. As soon as you start to think of interactivity, a single-purpose device starts to look less attractive, a point we made, well, ages ago, when people first got all excited about dedicated eBook readers.
Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: LIOX) announced the formation of the Content Management System (CMS) Alliance Program, an ecosystem of CMS providers and system integrators who are committed to simplifying global content management and publishing. Combining the expertise of all participants, Lionbridge is using Web Services to connect Freeway, Lionbridge’s free, hosted translation management platform, to leading CMS platforms, helping companies greatly improve processes and lower the costs of global content management. In forming the CMS Alliance Program, Lionbridge has established alliances and connections with an initial group of leading CMS providers, including Ektron, CrownPeak, Interwoven, Acumium, and Vasont, with an open invitation for additional systems providers to join the program. In addition, key system integrators, including, Klish Group, Armedia, and iSITE Design, have lent their support in providing a simple Web Services solution for customers to globalize their content. “A major challenge for organizations today is the integration of the people, processes, and technologies within the global content lifecycle,” said Leonor Ciarlone, Globalization Practice Lead Analyst, The Gilbane Group. “Lionbridge’s work with a number of integrators and CMS providers addresses this challenge by focusing on integrated content and translation management as an enabler of automation and decreased time-to-market. Providing a SaaS delivery model with Web services-based connectivity enhances the focus through a centralized, yet flexible approach for real-time collaboration.” In formalizing the CMS Alliance Program, Lionbridge is offering customers a new way of distributing their content on a global scale, with several benefits over more traditional methods including improved workflow for content managers, seamless connection to automate processes, and no need for additional technology purchases (Freeway is a Software as a Service platform delivered free to Lionbridge customers.) http://www.lionbridge.com/cms
Saul Hansell has a tantalizing tidbit in today’s NYTimes, a report that Yahoo! and Google are thinking about making their email systems ‘more social.’ “Web-based email systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends.” Our personal email applications should keep track of who is most important to us, and let us know when those messages arrive.
Saul’s report opens Pandora’s box about the future of Enterprise 2.0. The dirty little secret is that our e-mail in-boxes track our social networks by default — who we communicate with, when and in what order can be as interesting as what in fact we say (or do not say). Our personal address books are more than a random list of names — they’re the ‘black books’ that contain the people with whom we’ve exchanged messages in the past, or want to communicate with in the future.
We intuitively track our business networks through our use of email — the names of folders we use when filing messages, the subjects we attach to messages, and the threads of a back-and-forth discussion are all grist for the social networking mill. Gmail, for example, collects message threads into a single record. This is a handy innovation, which helps to cut down on the message clutter that’s so prevalent in Notes Mail & Outlook.
The real challenge is that messaging inside the enterprise is frozen in time — captured by the two most widely deployed messaging applications, from Microsoft (Outlook/Exchange) and IBM (Lotus Notes). It’s hard to believe that these are legacy platforms.
We need to rethink what else we can do with email inside the enterprise — Lotus Connections goes a long way towards staking out a few essential services. These include an “intelligent” enterprise directory & a tag cloud that relates to communities within the enterprise.
We need to do a lot more with features around privacy, security, organizational boundaries, and context.
