Strategy

In his well-known book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” which is regarded for its timeless insights, Robert Fulghum reviewed some basic lessons of life we all learned as children that are universally true, even at the places where we work and within our social interactions. There’s a reason we invest a good portion of our educational funds in early learning: what we absorb and come to believe during our formative years influences our thoughts and decisions throughout our lives.

If you haven’t thought about each of the ten timeless truths listed below in terms of your business process automation goals, it may be time to rethink your ECM strategy. The payoff for ‘getting it right the first time’ is significant.

Here they are, rephrased a bit to help you make the connection:

1. Remember that everything dies. Hamsters, mice, people, and even company projects have limited life spans. Routine business processes, too, ultimately outgrow or outlive their usefulness. Take time to put everything in perspective. What are your company goals? Are your processes still relevant and in line with your vision? Are there processes you maintain purely because things have ‘always’ been done a certain way? Is anything ripe for change?
    
2. Be prepared. Remember the first day of kindergarten? Probably not, but chances are good that you carried a backpack or bag with everything you needed to address the routine challenges of the day. If you’re investing in technology, give yourself and your staff the time and resources they need to be prepared. You can’t expect miracles from even the best software and hardware. However, if you give your people sufficient time for analysis, planning, and improvement, ECM technology can produce phenomenal results.
    
3. Play fair. Be considerate. Even if you’re starting with a small project, keep the company’s enterprise goals and other departments’ needs in mind. Although you need to remain dedicated to your own vision, being selfish about your needs, simply refusing to make your project transparent, insisting on your own way of doing things, and similar self-centered practices will hurt your company in the long run. You’ll also miss great ideas for improvement that others could offer. You may have terrific ideas and plans, but someone else’s contributions might help them to prosper more fully.

"There is no best content management system. But there is probably a good CMS for what you’re trying to do. You need to do your homework and find the right fit. It's not something you put on a wishlist for Santa to take care of."

- Irina Guseva, 10 Common CMS Implementation Mistakes, CMSWire.com, December 16, 2010

Slowly but surely, CMSReport.com has turned into a nice side business for me. The problem is that this site has grown to a point that it demands more of my time than I can currently offer it. The future of CMS Report is now sitting at crossroad. I plan to be spending the next few months deciding where this site should go from here.

Some of the options I am considering for this site include:

Why Web Content Management Systems are the way of the future, making traditional web development a thing of the past

The Web is an exciting place. With excitement come innate complexity and an overwhelming abundance of choices when defining how to take your website into the future.  Ask web evangelists of today versus evangelists of say 5 years ago, and they will highlight the importance of device support, marketing tools, analytics and focusing on creating great content that will stand the test of time.

Recently, companies like Google and Apple have prompted questions to the public, such as, “Why are we still building things like we did 30 years ago?” These types of provocative questions are spawning answers in the form of new tools, such as the iPhone 4 and the upcoming wave of Google WebOS notebooks. Ask yourself these questions:

• Would you still create artwork using MS Paint?
• Would you still write articles using Notepad?
• Would you still use Netscape as an Internet Browser?

Then why are you still developing websites in the traditional approach?

Let me start by defining what I mean by “traditional”. Traditional Web Development refers to the act of taking a Web Framework such as HTML, ASP.net, PHP and building a website from the ground, up. This includes everything from setting up Database connections, setting up Database Tables, creating separate files for your Contact Us and Products page, the list goes on. Most web agencies that I consult with have control libraries that make this process less tedious and time consuming but this is not addressing the fundamental issue, being, this is a traditional methodology for building web sites. Weddings should be traditional; your grandmother’s brownie recipe should be traditional. Your web presence should be innovative.

What are the enterprise trends in content management? This past month, I've given a lot of thought on the evolution of content management and social media in large organizations. Perhaps the amount of time I've recently spent on the plane traveling both coasts of the United States gave me too much reflecting time on this subject. Most of us understand the impact Enterprise 2.0 has had on enterprise content management, yet I feel like we're missing pieces to the puzzle. Luckily, there are a lot of smart people out there giving us clues to what the current enterprise trends are with content management.

"The fact is, however, that major IT projects are inevitably going to be about business change, and the two have to go hand in hand. As it continues its steady evolution, IT becomes less and less about individual products, languages or whatever, and more about getting things to work together."

-Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics, Organisational Change and IT: More than a bar-room conversation?, The Register, April 28, 2010

Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead, will give his bi-annual State of Drupal talk in the beginning of DrupalCon SF, where he’ll discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss Drupal 7, usability, the Drupal.org redesign, and other developments to Drupal.

CMS Report is here live at Drupal Con and we'll be blogging about the presentation as we hear it.

Edited: Video from the keynote speech has also been embedded at the end of this post. This video can also be found at archive.org.

Five years ago, my wife and I had a dream. Together, we wanted to start a blog called "Like that Idea" and so we registered the domain LikethatIdea.com. The idea for the WordPress blog was to have a site where we could identify and review neat ideas which we thought others would like to read about. The ideas came in the form of products, books, movies, services, and interesting article that we read ourselves. In the end though, we ran out of ideas to write about and the site never really took off.

By the time many of you read this post, Like that Idea will be never more. I'm currently working on wiping the site off the server. It's time to say goodbye to one of the few joint Internet projects that my wife and I worked on together. Instead, we'll use the time to work on our own personal projects as well as working jointly on the biggest project of our lifetime, our family.

Below the fold is a post I couldn't help but transfer from LikethatIdea.com over to this site. Thinking back at this moment in time still puts a smile on my face.

Who really defines what is a CMS?

You do.

I'm more convinced than ever that CMS experts aren't really in the driver's seat when defining the content management system. Experts in the field of content management are more or less observant passengers that are there to help you not get lost and to point out the significant landmarks on the way. This journey takes you to places while you the customer remain in the driver seat with all the privileges and responsibilities of being the driver.

Over the past few years I've realized that my work preference is to keep things as simple as possible. Sometimes when defining information systems keeping things simple works while other times the system is new and remains too complicated to define. Thanks to my reply in a productive rant against CMS by Laurence Hart I'm not only understanding my aversion to being called a CMS expert but also my philosophy and role in defining what is a CMS. This personal philosophy is developing...

Scott Abel convinced me a few years ago on my own blog that the definition of a CMS is never static and always changing. We’re chasing our own tail when we get nit picky in our definitions of a CMS. Somewhere in all the marketing that has been done for terms such as CMS, ECM, and WCM…we have forgotten the difference between information system and information technology.

There has been a lot of articles written lately on Rupert Murdoch's latest comments regarding the need to charge online readers for the content they access to the business model The Wall Street Journal utilizes. Murdoch recently announced that additional News Corp's newspapers would be charging users access to their online content.

Speaking on a conference call as News Corporation announced a 47 percent slide in quarterly profits to $755 million, Murdoch said the current free access business model favored by most content providers was flawed.

"We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning," the News Corp. Chairman and CEO said.

"We have been at the forefront of that debate and you can confidently presume that we are leading the way in finding a model that maximizes revenues in return for our shareholders... The current days of the Internet will soon be over."

That pay for content business model that Murdoch wishes to spread to the the rest of the News Corp holdings has worked pretty well for the WSJ. Yearly subscription to WSJ.com is around $100 and the business news site recently introduced a cheaper micro-payment system. Deane Barker recently pointed out this story on his Gadgetopia blog. Barker points out that this business model could possibly work for additional online news sources, but Murdoch needs "another big player on the bandwagon, and he might kick the snowball off the hill. Gannet? New York Times Company?". Barker's point is that for News Corp's subscription model to work, access to news content needs to be limited at other places online too. In my opinion, a fight against free online content is a war that has already been lost.

As a subscriber to the WSJ in both print and online content, I do see paid online subscriptions working for niche news sites. I however have serious doubts that the model can work for general news. People are willing to pay and only pay for content they can get nowhere else online. The news articles found in the WSJ is unique content and since its also content of value, I'm willing to pay for it. However, reporting general news is a much different game. Even if the majority of newspapers started charging access to their content it only takes one newspaper willing to offer that same story for free to break the pay for access model.