The full program will be published in a week or so, but the schedule is available now at http://gilbaneconference.com/2014/Schedule.
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We’ll be posting the complete program for this years’ Gilbane Conference over the next 2-3 weeks on the main conference website. The afternoon workshops are below.
Workshop D. Adaptive Content Modeling for Omnichannel UX
Speaker: Noz Urbina, Consultant and Founder, Urbina Consulting
Thursday, December, 4: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Your users need you to come to this session, even if they don’t know it. Multi-channel, or “COPE (create once, publish everywhere)”, content is a bit of a holy grail. Our trade is discussing content being freed from the browser, available for reuse, and accessible in apps, kiosks, responsive mobile deliverables, eBooks and syndication services to our partners – even in wearable technologies. All this should improve the experience of users, and benefit the organizations that serve them. Adaptive content is content that is nimble enough to realize all these ambitions. But making our content adaptive means addressing a topic that sends many running for the fire exit or nearest window: semantic modeling of structured content. This session will connect the dots between adaptive content, responsive design, multi-channel delivery and user experiences to show you why you want and even need to have semantic content structures. It will then go through a non-terrifying introduction to getting started with modeling your own content in a future-proof way. Learning objectives:
- The knowledge that their content is already more structured than they realize.
- A solid sense of what semantic, structured content actually is and its relationship to adaptive content, multichannel, and UX.
This workshop is designed for either intermediate or expert attendees. Bring your laptop and go home with samples and templates.
Workshop E. CMS Implementations: The View from the Implementor’s Side
Speaker: Deane Barker, Director of Business Development, Blend Interactive
Thursday, December, 4: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Ever wanted to know how CMS integration shops approach projects, and how you can better work with them or use their techniques in your own organization? In this workshop, Deane Barker will explain the ins and outs of CMS project work from the perspective of a veteran integrator, with the goal of helping you understand how best to find an integrator, work with your chosen integrator, or manage your project and team. Learn about how integrators:
- Evaluate RFPs
- Develop proposals
- Scope projects
- Schedule work
- Manage client expectations
- Plan implementations
- Select software
- Execute and manage development
- Support existing implementations
Workshop F. What’s it Worth? Assessing the ROI of your Content
Speaker: Lindy Roux, VP, Content Marketing and Strategy, Rauxa
Thursday, December, 4: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
No matter how well researched and deliberate your content strategy is, the proof lies in the pudding and the most successful content professionals continually evaluate the effectiveness of their content and adapt their strategies to improve the return. Too often, content is evaluated or audited only when a major digital shift is in play (a move to a new CMS, a new marketing automation tool, a new campaign launch.) In order to be truly successful, that evaluation should be ongoing, providing the opportunity to learn from past content marketing successes and failures. Lindy Roux will demonstrate an approach to content evaluation across multiple channels, based on qualitative and quantitative assessments, which has been used to help organizations understand the true ROI of a piece of content. The session will end with a practical exercise in content evaluation where participants will try their hand at developing assessment criteria and then applying these to real content. Participants in the session will learn:
- How to establish content goals that are measurable and realistic
- A way to evaluate content against these goals
- How to establish a regular review workflow and process
- An approach to optimization across all channels
- The appropriate team structure for ongoing content performance
We’ll be posting the complete program for this years’ Gilbane Conference over the next 4-5 weeks on the main conference website. The first three of the six planned workshops are below.
Workshop A. Insiders Guide to Building Digital Marketing Technology Toolkit
Speaker: Theresa Regli, Principal Analyst and Managing Partner, Real Story Group
Thursday, December, 4: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Marketing practitioners multitask just about every minute of every day. There are ongoing email, web, mobile, and marketing strategies to organize, plan and execute. Each of these areas used to include a range of technologies that was purchased and implemented separately such as web content management, campaign management, analytics, digital asset management, and others. Now, there are new suites of tools that can manage all of these processes. But how do you select the right one that will help you to accomplish your marketing objectives?
Specifically, the session will provide a methodology for mapping business needs to technology alternatives, as well as a road map for evaluating digital marketing technology vendors. We will provide critical and hard-hitting reviews of the available digital marketing technologies. Don’t be surprised after-the-fact. Find out the real strengths and weaknesses of these tools before you purchase them.
Key Takeaways:
- Digital marketing trends and emerging architectures
- Hints and tips on selecting a digital marketing product for your organization
- Overcoming the daunting prospect of selection – how to narrow down your list of vendors to evaluate.
- A critical, high-level overview of digital marketing solution providers
Workshop B. Foundations for Best-Fit WCM Service Provider Selections
Speaker: Cathy McKnight, Partner and Principal Analyst, Digital Clarity Group
Thursday, December, 4: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Evaluating and selecting technology and service partners is intimidating. And without proper guidance, it’s easy to take the wrong path. This workshop focuses on selection readiness. It is designed to point your organization in the right direction before you even start the journey to new solutions for web content and experience management. You will learn how to create a plan of action for getting your organization ready for a successful selection program – one that results in real business benefits as the direct result of implementing the right solutions with the right technology and service partners. We explore the fundamentals of selection preparation, covering four key areas of readiness:
- Articulating the business case,
- Identifying the stakeholder landscape,
- Managing requirements gatherings, and
- Developing realistic budgets.
We provide a step-by-step overview of an efficient, results-driven selection program, and we show you how to build a messaging and communications plan that will help you shape internal conversations about it. With this approach, you can set expectations, educate reluctant stakeholders, and get your company thinking about change management, which is often an afterthought but shouldn’t be. The selection process is all about aligning business goals with the “best-fit” solution for your organization’s needs. And finding that fit is about way more than just matching features to requirements. Armed with the outcomes of this workshop, you will be ready to move forward with confidence.
Workshop C. Successful Social Intranets
Speaker: Rebecca Rodgers, Senior Consultant, Step Two Designs
Thursday, December, 4: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Modern intranets are steadily becoming more “social” and “collaborative”, but this can mean many things. Some recent intranets put social at the heart of everything (including the homepage), while others supplement existing sites with simpler features, such as commenting. While this is still a rapidly evolving space, intranet teams in the real world need to make concrete decisions with confidence.
This interactive workshop will cover four key steps for social intranets:
- Explore the opportunities. Looking at social intranet examples around the globe, we will explore the reasons, benefits and business cases for social.
- Understand your organisational landscape. Every organisation is different, and this has a big impact on the what, where, when and how of social intranets.
- Choose what to launch. Where to start, what to launch and for who: there are multiple options to choose from, depending on your strategy and organisational context.
- Make social a success. There are a growing list of best practices to draw on, relating to design, launch, adoption and governance.
This inspirational and practical workshop will mix plenty of screenshots and examples with discussions and workshop activities. While not every question will be answered, participants will walk away with a greater sense of confidence and knowledge about social intranets.
Thank you all for the Gilbane Conference speaker proposals. We received a record number again this year. We are now busy evaluating, organizing, and mapping proposals to the topic areas our audience needs to hear the most about.
If you have submitted a proposal you can expect to hear from us over the next 6-7 weeks. With over 300 submissions we’ll have to make some difficult choices and we will be contacting many of you for further discussion.
Miss the deadline?
For all of you who missed the deadline to submit proposals for this year’s conference, our policy is that we always accept proposals – in fact we accept them all year long if you use our submission form – however, proposals received after the deadline for each conference miss the first review by the program committee and some of the early decisions. If we have two good proposals on the same topic the on-time proposal gets preference. Also, decisions are largely made on a rolling basis once the deadline passes, so if you have missed the deadline it is still a good idea to submit as soon as possible.
If there is a particular topic we need more proposals for we will post about it on this blog, so stay tuned.
The future of tablets isn’t what analysts thought a year ago, or even last fall.
The market for PCs continues to decline (but at a slowing rate: IDC, Gartner), yet tablet growth is also slowing forcing many analysts to scale back their forecasts. Smartphone growth is slowing as well.
There is a lot of discussion, mainly from an investor point of view about why: saturation, price points, supplier market share, etc., that are relevant for both business and consumer markets. Recently the focus has been on iPads because of Apple’s earnings call but the trend is not limited to Apple.
Why aren’t tablets taking more share away from PCs?
Given the phenomenal growth of tablets the last few years, their computing power, and the large overlap of general use cases shared with PCs (email, browsing) it did seem that tablets were on track replace PCs in large numbers. But the use case overlap was not large enough to support the forecasts. Tablets are tweeners, fighting for space between the superior communications of smartphones and greater productivity of PCs. Being in the middle is not normally a desirable spot for a product, but tablets excel at information and entertainment consumption and this middle is a pretty big and happy place to be.
What do we use PCs for? For years we have been using PCs for some combination of productivity, information / entertainment consumption, and communication. PCs were largely designed and most useful for productivity, whether business or personal, and that’s why we bought them. As PCs evolved and became capable and appealing for information/entertainment consumption and communication we bought more of them. And at some point whatever motivated us to buy a PC, our actual use of them flipped – we now spend a higher percentage of time using our PCs for information / entertainment consumption and communication than we do for productivity. And of course this is the domain of tablets and why they have taken as much of the PC market as they have.
But tablets are simply not as good as PCs for a large number of productivity applications. Until they are this will act as a governor on tablet growth and allow for a shrinking but still large market for PCs.
In The iPad Is a Tease Jean-Louis Gassée points out that:
So far, Apple’s bet has been to keep the iPad simple, rigidly so perhaps, rather than creating a neither-nor product: No longer charmingly simple, but not powerful enough for real productivity tasks. But if the iPad wants to cannibalize more of the PC market, it will have to remove a few walls.
I would say Gassée’s post is from the point of view of a user who would like to replace his PC with an iPad but can’t, that this is a larger cohort than enterprise users or even power users, and that this is the best way to think about the productivity penalty portion of slowing iPad sales.
What would make a significant dent in the iPad’s productivity penalty? Microsoft Office support alone is necessary but not sufficient. A better solution for text entry than accessory keyboards, smooth and rapid app switching, and easy file access would each make a big difference. See below for links to other thoughts.
There is also a maddening and ironic side effect of using iPads for industry applications where they are productivity enhancers. For example, I used to be able to choose between an iPad (mostly research and entertainment) and a laptop (mostly work) for most trips, but a couple of my current projects include working with apps that only run on the iPad. I can’t be productive without having both an iPad and a laptop. Even in the office I often need both within reach. Unfortunately this situation is likely to get worse as more iOS, (and Android!) productivity apps appear.
Watch out for smartphones
Benedict Evans suggested another avenue for inquiry in a tweet:
.@asymco @gassee posit: slow iPad sales are worse news for the PC market: implies phones can take the greater share of PC use cases
— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) April 21, 2014
I don’t know Benedict, but I picture him smiling devilishly as he composed that tweet. As well he should have.
The more types of computing devices there are the more complicated figuring out use case fit is going to be.
The future of tablets
The future of tablets seems promising in the near term since neither PCs nor smartphones can match their information and entertainment consumption experience and tablets will get better at aiding productivity. The better they get the more market share they’ll take. And of course we haven’t seen all the new industry apps where the tablet form factor and interface is a net productivity advantage.
On the other hand, the right kind of user interface – perhaps a high resolution holographic interface not dependent on form factors for projection – would free us from our quaint categories of PCs, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, glasses, and be truly disruptive. Once computing power and user interfaces become independent of physical size all bets are off.
Further reading on iPad growth:
The iPad’s Curse — Ben Bajarin
iPads and Tablet Growth – Benedict Evans
Don’t Give up on the iPad – Ben Thompson
How Apple Could Continue to Own the Enterprise Tablet Market — Tim Bajarin
The Astonishing, Disappointing iPad – MG Siegler
For the third year, Findwise, an enterprise search system integrator and consulting firm based in Sweden, is doing a global survey of user experiences with content findability tools. Many of us in the field of search technology want to see how enterprises are progressing with their search initiatives. Having a baseline from 2012 is a beginning to see what the continuum looks like but we need more numbers from the user community. That means participation from institutional implementers, funding managers, administrators and end-users with a stake in the outcomes they receive when they use any search technology.
Please do not let this opportunity pass, and sign on to the survey and sign up to get the resulting report later in the year. I especially hope that Findwise gets a good uptick in responses to report at the December Gilbane conference. We need to hear more voices so pass this link along to colleagues in other organizations.
Here is the link: Enterprise Search and Findability Survey 2014
Don’t miss The Gilbane Conference Call for Papers
Proposal deadline is May 9!
The Gilbane Conference on Content and the Digital Experience is designed for marketers, content managers, technologists, and executives responsible for building strategies and implementations for compelling multichannel digital experiences for customers, employees, and partners. Topics are organized into four main tracks:
Content, Marketing, and the Customer Experience – Designed for marketers, marketing technologists, growth hackers, content managers, strategists and technologists focused on customers and digital marketing.
Content, Collaboration and Employee Engagement – Designed for content, information, technical, and business managers focused on enterprise social, collaboration, intranet, portal, knowledge, and backend content applications.
Re-imagining the Future: Technology and the Postdigital Experience – Designed for technology strategists, IT, and executives focused on the future of content and either internal or external digital experiences.
Digital Strategies for Publishing and Media – Designed for publishing and information product managers, marketers, technologists, and business or channel managers focused on the transition to digital products.
If you have not spoken at our conference before please read the Speaker Guidelines.
The Gilbane Conference call for speakers is out and submissions are due in three days, May 2. As one who has been writing about enterprise search topics for over ten years, and engaged in search technology development since 1974, I know it is still a relevant topic.
If you are engaged in any role, in any type of content repository development or use, you know that excellent accessibility is fundamental to making content valuable and useable. You are also probably involved in influencing or trying to influence decisions that will make certain that technology implementations have adequate staffing for content metadata and controlled vocabulary development.
Please take a look at this conference track outline and consider where your involvement can be inserted. Then submit a speaking proposal to share your direct experiences with search or a related topic. Our conference participants love to hear real stories of enterprise initiatives that illustrate: innovative approaches, practical solutions, workarounds to technical and business problems, and just plain scrappy projects that bring value to a group or to the whole enterprise. In other words, how do you get the job done within the constraints you have faced?
Track E: Content, Collaboration and Employee Engagement
Designed for content, information, technical, and business managers focused on enterprise social, collaboration, intranet, portal, knowledge, and back-end content applications.
- Collaboration and the social enterprise
- Collaboration tools & social platforms
- Enterprise social metrics
- Community building & knowledge sharing
- Content management & intranet strategies
- Enterprise mobile strategies
- Content and information integration
- Enterprise search and information access
- Semantic technologies
- Taxonomies, metadata, tagging
Please consider participating in the conference and especially if content findability and accessibility are high on your list of “must have” content solutions. Submit your proposal here. The need for good findability of content has never been higher and your experiences must be heard by vendors, IT managers and content experts together in this forum.
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