January 28, 2011

It’s Deja Vu All Over Again…


For those who’ve have been around the world of technology the last 2 decades, there are times SharePoint seems like déjà vu all over again.   The other day, I came across a Fortune article entitled “Why Microsoft Can’t Stop Lotus Notes” from 1994 discussing the hype of Lotus Notes with millions of licenses and the birth of the “groupware” category. The Fortune article quoted Ray Ozzie discussing Notes:

“The intention,” says Ray Ozzie, the program’s inventor, is to enable “people in business to collaborate with one another and to share knowledge or expertise unbounded by factors such as distance or time zone differences.” That’s a pretty good description of a product so multifaceted and versatile that it defies precise definition….

The 1996 Fortune article went on to say:

…”For customers, Lotus Notes is in a sense addictive. Notes becomes the repository for much of an organization’s corporate memory; to remove vital data once it has spent a few years accumulating in Notes would be costly and disruptive”…

Fast forward and SharePoint has slowly but surely taken over and been hyped very much the same way.  I think you could easily remove Lotus Notes and insert Microsoft SharePoint into the statements above.   Interestingly enough in 1995, Larry Ellison predicted that Notes would be the “Visicalc of groupware” (referring to the once dominant PC spreadsheet that was killed off by Lotus 1-2-3).  Well, no one talks about groupware anymore and Notes has indeed not only become Visicalc, but Lotus 1-2-3 as well.  Or perhaps there a handful of people in the world who don’t use Microsoft Office….

My interest and passion in this space began working on Notes and I followed the waves into eRoom, Documentum and eventually SharePoint like many.   More and more each enterprise deployment or solution development project have similar concerns as they did 15 years ago.  From the Fortune article: “The first challenge to rolling out a Notes system is cultural”.   Sounds familiar.  Technically, beyond understanding the business requirements, it’s still about provisioning repositories, sites, governance, backups, taxonomy, content types, etc…  As far as solution development — remember in the 90′s when people were also talking about “component software” with service based characteristics?   That’s what Notes was all about….”Notes makes such homegrown applications and the data they contain accessible throughout an organization”.   Except today it’s about composite applications, sites, communities and content all packaged into an “enterprise collaboration platform” called SharePoint (collaboration being an even broader term compared to its groupware relative).  The more consultants I talk to whose careers span 1 or more decades all tell me they’re doing the same thing they did 10-15 years ago.   Except today, we do it all on SharePoint.

On a final note, I had an interesting conversation over the weekend with someone who said Microsoft is becoming irrelevant by the day with so much hype around iPad/iPhone-like devices and Android smart phones.  My response was just the opposite.  Microsoft has actually seemed irrelevant for a number of years….and they’re now finally becoming more relevant (slowly) once again.

“I would be insane to say that Microsoft won’t be competitive….It is an awesome force in American capitalism.”  – former CEO of Lotus, Fortune Magazine 1994

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January 19, 2011

Using the CMM to Benchmark Your SharePoint Investment?


How do you know if or when you truly are optimizing the investment you’ve made in the Microsoft SharePoint platform?  You’ve spent last year creating your SharePoint roadmaps and have grand plans for social capabilities or perhaps the cloud.  Or maybe  you know enough about SharePoint to be dangerous and are just getting started with formulating your enterprise implementation.  You have a few success stories about how SharePoint has enabled productivity or saved money and you’ve justified the business case to move to the latest 2010 release.  However, is there end state to a platform that offers what seems to be an infinite amount of features and capabilities for solving an infinite amount of business problems across all functions and industries?  Is there a point when your implementation of the SharePoint platform reaches an optimized level of maturity?

Among the tools out there that might help you is the capability maturity model (CMM).  Management consultants seem to love this model and I see it from time to time.   However, often times I encounter a version of this model that is simply vague or too broad.  Then I scratch my head and wonder how can this CMM practically help me?    It’s quite subjective and doesn’t seem to tell me what actions I need to focus on.   Can I really apply this to SharePoint?

The Capability Maturity Model involves creating some type of benchmark for comparison.  It is interesting to note that the CMM was originally developed to assess government contractor processes relating to software development projects. Wikipedia has an adequate definition of the model as I won’t go into too much detail here.  In a nutshell, the CMM has 5 levels of maturity upon which something is measured.  The following triangle diagram is simply illustrative and the CMM usually takes the shape of a matrix format:

  1. Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, individual heroics) – the starting point for use of a new process.
  2. Managed – the process is managed in accordance with agreed metrics.
  3. Defined – the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process, and decomposed to levels 0, 1 and 2 (the latter being Work Instructions).
  4. Quantitatively managed
  5. Optimizing – process management includes deliberate process optimization/improvement.

If you applied the CMM to SharePoint, it’s likely most large and small organizations are currently somewhere between #1 and #3 in the model (whatever that means).   However, applying this model to a SharePoint implementation that addresses dozens of business needs with dozens of capabilities and features is just not as easy as it looks.  If you’re assessing the maturity of SharePoint, you really need to assess the maturity of collaboration and ECM in your organization.  And it may involve cultural considerations as well as other SharePoint-related technologies (e.g. OCS/Lynx, Office, Project Server, etc.).   So where to begin if you want some type of model to benchmark your SharePoint implementation against?  How do we get to #4 and eventually to #5 so you can pat yourself on the back knowing you are finally optimizing your investment?

Perhaps more appropriate questions we should be asking are:

  • What do #4 or #5 really mean to you and your organization?
  • Is #5 Optimization what you should be striving for in the first place?

I might suggest that “Optimization” be replaced by something like “Value Creation” (defined by concepts like knowledge,  analytics, collaboration, learning, innovation, and relationships).  Whenever I wonder if I’m helping a client “Optimize SharePoint”, I tend to think about maximizing value while minimizing the effort (and costs) involved for administrators, developers, project managers, and all individuals that use and support the platform.  Isn’t this the real nirvana we should be striving for?

I’m hoping to research this more over the course of this  year and am interested if other’s have attempted something like this.

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January 14, 2011

Share Your Journey…


Changing the way people work, share information, manage knowledge, and communicate with each other is very much a challenge of organizational cultural. Let’s face it — implementing technology like SharePoint is a journey. Most of us IT or business professionals who have led or are currently leading their organization’s “social and collaborative” transformation leveraging the SharePoint platform share similar experiences. Many weeks or months of effort, off-hours and weekends learning & experimenting, and selling decision makers & users on the benefits. Our journeys have taken some groups from the dark ages of manual paper-based collaborative activities to innovative automated digital solutions built all on SharePoint. Some involve custom development, yet many were built with shoe-string budgets leveraging out-of-the-box functionality of SharePoint with the occasional third party application. It’s not often that those in trenches get to swap their stories. If you’re lucky, you get to attend one of the many SharePoint conferences and listen to someone else tell their story. Fortunately Microsoft understands the best way to share knowledge and sell the benefits of SharePoint is to let customers tell their own story and demonstrate real results and benefits in the real world. I encourage everyone to share your SharePoint story. The first step on the road to SharePoint success is simply understanding the possibilities so you can chart a destination of your own.

You have until February 16th to submit your story: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepointjourneys/Pages/default.aspx

 

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January 2, 2011

2010 in review


The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 6,800 times in 2010. That’s about 16 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 41 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 78 posts. There were 36 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 7mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was August 17th with 153 views. The most popular post that day was How to Staff Your SharePoint Project.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were linkedin.com, twitter.com, sharepointpmp.com, facebook.com, and sharepoint.alltop.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for messaging clip, microsoft sharepoint cost, microsoft sharepoint pricing, cost of microsoft sharepoint, and sharepoint roi.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

How to Staff Your SharePoint Project August 2010
4 comments

2

How to Determine the True Cost of Microsoft SharePoint July 2009

3

SharePoint and Connectors July 2009
3 comments

4

Seven Tips for Managing Projects on SharePoint July 2010
2 comments

5

Ultimate Guide to SharePoint Governance – download the outline now. July 2010
4 comments

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December 17, 2010

So what’s your New Year’s Resolution for 2011 to clean up this information mess?


I work with many organizations with SharePoint intranet sites that are simply a MESS!   Yes, that’s you and your intranet!   Admit it — your intranet sites look like they were built in 1999 with big fonts, bigger graphics, static and outdated links & content, and absolutely no organization of the information and navigation presented to the end user.

Over the last decade perhaps small enhancements or attempts at redesign evolved your intranet incrementally.  You now have some level of standards and branding at a global level. Perhaps your organization has finally consolidated and standardized on SharePoint and are even thinking about upgrading to 2010 in the next year or two.  You’re also focused on the latest buzz words like “social” and “collaboration” – baking them into your overall strategy.   However, down in the trenches you still have sites for functional areas or business units or regions that remain an unorganized mess of stale information.

I bet dozens of so-called team sites have also popped up with the intent of providing a better place for your organization to manage and update important content that really should be out on the intranet site for everyone to consume.  However, those team sites also added to the mess.  There’s even morenoise and confusion by limiting access and navigation to information with redundant content and links.

We call this information overload and have all read the stats on the hidden costs and wasted productivity because knowledge workers spend too much time looking for information.   With the amount of digital information continuing to increase beyond expectations, it’s now even more difficult to search, browse, filter, and find the information than it was a decade ago.  The year 2010 is coming to an end with over a decade of internet evolution and you ask yourself “Am I more productive today than I was 10 years ago?”

So what’s your New Year’s Resolution for 2011 to clean up this information mess?

Now I’m sure you’re reading this post and immediately are Googling “New Year’s Resolutions” which returns top ten lists containing the resolution to: “Get Organized”.    No doubt you also Google “clean up information mess” and you find  a helpful article on Oprah.com about cleaning up clutter in your life.  One interesting comment the organizational expert on Oprah.com made was how he defined clutter:  ”anything that stands between you and the vision you have for your best life.”   You can’t go wrong if you quote Oprah.com and this statement is so true — especially in our professional lives.   Clutter is not necessarily an individual issue, but an organizational issue.  And if your SharePoint implementation is a cluttered mess of information, then SharePoint stands between you and the vision you have for your business.  And I have to highlight that the mess is not just something IT needs to address.  The business users owns the information inside of SharePoint and the clutter is a shared responsibility.  So what can you do?  What can the champions, managers, power & end users of SharePoint do in 2011 to get organized?

There are 3 keys to get organized and clean up the SharePoint clutter:

1. Information Architecture. A somewhat abstract concept for non-technical people.  This is not only about figuring out what you want your website to look like — the UI design perhaps.  It includes identifying the intended audience and the inventory of content you intend on managing within the site and the users intend on consuming.  It’s also about the underlying structure of the site or site collection and the images, documents, links, lists, and libraries you plan on managing and maintaining. Yes, it’s about metadata and your user’s ability to search, browse, filter, and find information.   So start by:

“categorizing your information and blueprint how content should be structured and stored within SharePoint and presented to the end user”

2. Security. Once you have an understanding of the information architecture, you can then ensure your information is secure.  Do you know if the content in your sites is secure right now?   Are you absolutely sure with 100% confidence?  Difficult questions to ask sometimes as politics always seem to play a part in the discussion with IT and Business here.  It’s amazing how SharePoint forces the conversation about ownership, roles, and responsibilities.  So sit down in 2011 and look at your security and answer the questions:

“In your SharePoint site(s), who owns what and who should have access to what?”

3. Governance. While governance is always a hot topic, the usual reference to this term is the overall SharePoint deployment with sub-topics such as backups, site creation, etc…  However, this also refer to site owners and site collection administrators.  Do they have a plan to ensure specific content has owners and is continually updated?   What the process to source new content and ensure that information is posted in a timely manner to those individuals who should consume it?   Who maintains membership to your site or site collection?  So…

Define what governance means to you in 2011 and start governing your SharePoint Sites!

For those fans of Dexter…”tick, tick, tick”….that’s the sound of 2010 coming to an end.  It’s time to get your information organized inside of SharePoint and focus on a clutter free world of sharing and pointing!!!

 

Follow me on twitter….

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December 17, 2010

Demystifying Business Intelligence on SharePoint


One of the more confusing aspects of SharePoint is its Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities.  Why is it confusing (at least for me)?  Well, this is AIIM and we spend most of our time discussing information involving unstructured content as opposed to data.   And the BI world involves databases and data warehouses and OLAP cubes and other related buzzwords like EPM or business analytics.  BI is really its own unique niche.  Leave it to Microsoft to build BI capabilities into SharePoint along with everything else and in the SharePoint 2010 wheel — it’s called “Insights”.  Whatever you call it, the hidden value of SharePoint is its ability to manage data and content together.

One typical example of a SharePoint solution involving BI and data is a performance reporting portal.  In generic terms, this is what a Performance Reporting Portal might include:

While I hesitate using the word “portal” in today’s world of social sharing & collaboration, business users love their portals and dashboards.   This is also a request I am seeing more and more of as business users are beginning to realize that SharePoint can be used for more than just intranet pages, team-sites and document libraries.   Additionally, there is real business value that executives recognize in this type of solution (and they’re more willing to approve funding for this type of project).

Now this type of solution is just one example.   As Microsoft defines it, there’s also business intelligence for the community as well as the organization.   I’ll reference this Technet article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394320.aspx on “Choosing a business intelligence tool in SharePoint Server.   There’s a great diagram and related information that map the capabilities of SharePoint BI tools to the appropriate business scenarios where they might be used.  While you may not require all the services SharePoint provides, you’ll want to identify your requirements and business needs.  You might also consider drafting a roadmap for your business unit or organization that outlines your use of SharePoint in the short and long term.

In some cases, you might find yourself completely replacing your Hyperion or Cognos applications with Microsoft’s SharePoint Business Intelligence.   In other cases, you might think about how your SAP reporting and SharePoint can work together more seamlessly.  There are obvious cost savings in consolidating platforms and vendors and it’s quite possible that 80% of what you use your existing BI tools for can be migrated to and managed on SharePoint’s platform.   Furthermore, there are also added benefits of combining data, dashboards, and reporting with all the collaborative and social features that SharePoint provides.   And perhaps one day, we can end the use of the word “portal”!

——————————————————————————–

Reference: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=167170

This covers an overview of business intelligence in SharePoint Server and provides you with an overview of each business intelligence service and when you might use the service, architecture for application of the business intelligence services and how they work together in a topology, a list of possible data sources for each business intelligence service.

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December 8, 2010

A Look at Microsoft BPOS


It’s the time of year that many IT organizations are finalizing their 2011 budgets and strategy.   One of the things on the radar screen for many organizations is Microsoft BPOS (aka as business productivity online suite which will soon fall under the umbrella of Office 365 now in Beta).  BPOS is a set of hosted messaging and collaboration solutions for the “cloud” comprised of SharePoint, Exchange, and Communications (and soon Microsoft Office).  I don’t intend to discuss how to migrate Exchange mailboxes or SharePoint sites to BPOS as other resources on the web already address that more technically.  I do, however, want to begin the BPOS conversation because I have yet to see anything written about it on AIIM Communities to date.

One of the first questions I had about BPOS was “is it any different than web hosting?”   Generally, when I think of web hosting, it’s a situation where the hosting company supports the hardware and operating system but not the applications.   With most hosting agreements, you’re charged a fee for hosting, storage and bandwidth.   With BPOS, it’s a service charged per user per month where the applications are supported by the vendor (e.g. Microsoft) and you simply administer the application.   At least that’s how I differentiated the two.

Another question I had was which version of BPOS do you need?  Well, there are currently 2 versions: BPOS-S and BPOS-D.    BPOS-S is the Standard suite where you’re essentially renting 1 or more SharePoint site collections with web based administration (and 250 megabytes of storage allocated per person).   BPOS-D is the dedicated version which requires a minimum of 5000 seats and longer term agreement with more granular administration and unlimited site collections.  There will also be a government version as well with more attention paid to security, privacy and compliance.

The third question I had was simply “why BPOS”?  And the answer is simple economics.  BPOS reduces the administrative burden and associated data center, hardware, and software costs as you’re shifting to a pay as you consume service model for your messaging and collaboration infrastructure.  Organizations won’t have to worry about backup/restore, disaster recovery, hiring technical resources to support the infrastructure, etc…  You’re essentially shifting some risk to a 3rd party vendor.  Another key advantage is time to market.  In most IT organizations, it can take months to go from approval of funding to implementation of the technology solution.   BPOS can help you accelerate the deployment time for solutions.

Of course the broader conversation here beyond Microsoft’s BPOS offering is collaboration and ECM in the cloud.    It’s about trusting a 3rd party to manage your messaging and unstructured content and hopefully providing better capabilities for end users at a lower cost.   And for anyone interested in understanding more about the value of Microsoft’s online service offerings, I’d recommend checking out the following:

http://www.microsoft.com/online/partner/solutions-showcase.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/tags/customer+story/

 

 

Posted in cloud, sharepoint | 2 Comments »

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December 2, 2010

How Facebook Messages Will Influence SharePoint…


The other week Facebook announced a new capability called Facebook Messages — their new email/SMS/chat functionality that doesn’t care what technology you use to reach your friends.  Mark Zuckerberg called it “next generation messaging” and described it as seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal, and short.   In an interview with Joel Seligstein, the Engineering Manager in charge of Facebook’s new Messages product, he was quoted as saying:

“One main thing that we noticed was that lots of communication was happening both in Facebook and outside Facebook. I’d send emails to people all the time — that means I have to check my email address many times a day. I’d really rather have that personal, people-to-people communication along with my other Facebook messages. Same thing over SMS — as I moved to an iPhone, for example, I was kind of obsessed with how those messages came in through that channel. So really what we’re trying to do is figure how to bring all personal communication together.”

While Facebook focuses on our personal lives, the important take-away from their recent announcement is how Facebook is providing the capability for its 500 million global users to consolidate both synchronous and asynchronous communications into one unified platform and interface.   Similar to how communications are happening outside of Facebook, business conversations mostly occur OUTSIDE of SharePoint.   As knowledge workers, we continue to use email and mobile devices which has made it more and more challenging to track:

  1. what was said and who said what
  2. who is talking to who and who should be talking to who
  3. what decision was made and approvals
  4. what the resolution on a specific issue was
  5. status of projects, issues, ideas, etc…
  6. threaded discussions and responses
  7. what tasks are assigned and when they’re due

Of course it’s not just about digital communications in email.  There’s IMs, voicemails, web conferences, phone conferences, etc…   Enter Microsoft Lync 2010 just announced today which aims at enhancing that unified communication experience.   From what I’ve seen, Lync looks promising.   Perhaps Microsoft is working closely with their Facebook investment behind the scenes as the timing of Facebook’s and Microsoft’s announcements seem coordinated.  However, I’m wondering exactly how Lync will actually provide an easier way to capture and manage all of the threads of synchronous messaging information into an organized “context”?   And more importantly what integration will Lync have directly into SharePoint?

In an ideal world, SharePoint should provide similar capabilities as Facebook — integrating synchronous messaging more seamlessly into the platform and providing a more organized “context” to manage this information.   For example, the business context might be a project team site — a concept we all understand.   Ideally, all related project communications and activity streams might be captured inside a team site or perhaps in some organized fashion within my sites.   As a project manager or executive, I might want to view the status of all project issues in a SharePoint list and see the all the related synchronous messages associated with each issue.   Why can’t SharePoint capture or tag all related messaging threads related to a project?   Why is that I can’t see all the activity streams AND emails AND instant messages AND web/conference recordings related to a project all in one place?    Why is that compliance and e-Discovery aren’t easier by consolidating all communication streams within 1 organized business context?

Just as Facebook has said their new messaging capability is not meant to replace email, I don’t see our corporate mailboxes disappearing anytime soon.  I’m hopeful that Exchange, Lync and SharePoint together will enable us to better manage both asynchronous and synchronous information together in a single unified interface just as Facebook is doing with the release of their next generation messaging.   The capabilities of Microsoft’s platforms all represent a promising eco-system for business communication, collaboration, and information management.  And I’m optimistic that Facebook will influence SharePoint for the better and allow for more effective business communication and collaboration “in context”.

References:

Interview with Joel Seligstein, the Engineering Manager in charge of Facebook’s new Messages product:  http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/inside-the-war-room-answering-the-questions-behind-facebook-messages

Facebook Messages Walkthrough Pics: http://mashable.com/2010/11/15/facebook-messages-walkthrough-pics/

Facebook Messages on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdzuFG6q63k

4 Reasons Why Microsoft Will Shift the Business Productivity Paradigmhttp://sp.meetdux.com/archive/2010/11/16/Microsoft-Unified-Communications-Collab-SharePoint-Lync-Exchange.aspx

Microsoft Lync Overview: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/lync/technology-overview.aspx

 

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November 29, 2010

Think Communities, Not Portals!


If you are planning your SharePoint 2010 upgrade and looking at redesigning the hundreds of intranet sites — stop right there!   Don’t redesign, rethink your corporate intranet.

I spend a fair amount of time with clients discussing the redesign of their sites and in most cases I continue to hear the word “portal” mentioned.   When I think of portals, I jump into my time machine and go back a decade or so.  Portals are plain and generally have static web content with outdated information that is seldom accessed by employees.   Look at your intranet today and it’s likely you’ll see a SharePoint site with all kinds of links that’s not very interactive or relevant to individuals.  Maybe you have top-down executive blog that is posted to once a quarter or once a month if you’re lucky.   If the corporate intranet page wasn’t set as the employee home page in the browser, I wonder how many people would actually visit it?  .  Sound like your intranet?  So what’s the point of upgrading to SharePoint 2010 if you’re just going to migrate those plain boring sites you have today?

It’s time to break away from the traditional thinking of intranet “portals” and design a collaborative infrastructure around a complete “community model”.  What do I mean exactly?   If you compare a community to the traditional portal, you may think it’s just a matter of semantics.   However, the concept of a portal is a push relationship as someone is pushing content to you.  Communities are social, interactive, dynamic, and provide a context for individuals to subscribe, collaborate and contribute to.   Communities source information from the bottom up as well as the top down.  Communities have a pull relationship — meaning the community pulls on users to contribute and users pull on the community to consume.  The fact is that every piece of content and every person in your organization is part of some community whether you realize it or not.  The largest and most open community is everyone in your organization and there are likely hundreds or thousands of sub-communities.   Communities also provide a degree of openness in your organization.  So if the information you wish to share has more defined security requirements, that’s when you manage it in a secure team site as opposed to a community.

Now I know what you’re thinking — “we have to have a hierarchical intranet portal”.   Really do you?  Do you need it to be hierarchical?   Sure you might need a directory for people or sites for easier navigation.  You also need enhanced search capabilities as most people would rather search than browse.   Just think about it — is the public internet hierarchical?   Does Google or Facebook or LinkedIn have any hierarchy?   In comparison, you could look at Yahoo as a traditional portal — static, boring, and a site people rarely view anymore.  And that’s why Yahoo has lost market share and relevance today.

Let’s face it — for many of us Facebook is our “portal” on the public internet  and something we visit 1 or more times a day because it’s social and relevant to us personally.  LinkedIn may be your “portal” into your professional life and network.   Do you really need a traditional hierarchy of intranet sites and portals?   Or is it more important to capture, share, and collaborate on information within the context of a community?

 

Posted in sharepoint, social media, strategy | 1 Comment »

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November 9, 2010

Optimize Your Customer Experience First…Then Your Content!


Today, companies need to focus on the 360 degree relationship and interaction they have with customers in all forms of media. It is not enough to just ensure your content is search engine optimized or enhanced for analytics. It’s not enough that your site navigation is simple enough for the average person to find what they’re looking for, or you have a Facebook page or “like” buttons on your site. It’s not about “web experience management” or “web engagement management” that you hear some WCMS vendors talk about. It’s about the customer experience. 

It’s a Multi Channel Experience

People are looking for current and relevant information as well an interactive experience. It’s difficult to capture people’s attention today and they are looking to interact with your brand on your website, on Facebook, tv, in your store, on their mobile device, at work on their laptop or at home on their iPad. It’s critical companies look at the overall multi-channel experience customers have with their brand in a web browser, on their website, in email, in print, tv, in a social network, on their laptop, on their cell phone, iPads, as well as in person!

Customers expect websites to be dynamic, fast and incorporate rich media content. And depending on where and how the customer chooses to look for or access information about your brand, it might dictate a different experience all together.

For example, look at a retailer like Best Buy. I go to bestbuy.com on my desktop browser, I see a rich and engaging experience. I can view the weekly circular, browse products, deals and more. When I access Best Buy on my mobile device, I am automatically taken to a store locator and have the ability to search for a product or read the circular in text based format as well. The mobile vs. web experience is obvious.

iPad-like devices may not be as obvious and may incorporate different UI and navigation design because of the touch screen and “pinch” capabilities. Additionally, I might be holding my iPad vertically vs. horizontally and use the device in different ways than my mobile or desktop. I might even want to bring my iPad to Best Buy, walk through the store, have the latest circular and deals automatically fed to me, and have it tell me where in the store a particular product is located. Of course no matter what I do with any device, I will always want to share that with my friends.

Customer First, Technology Second

The point here is that content management systems are important and will always be a necessary technology no matter what the customer channel. As organizations have begun to move to this next generation of web content management technology platforms, many are doing so without a solid strategy, without optimizing the customer experience, and without an understanding of how that content fits into consumer lifestyles and purchasing decisions.

Fortunately, we’re starting to see at least one major vendor recognize this with IBM’s announcement of their Customer Experience Suite. However, as with any technology, it’s more important to put yourself in the customer’s shoes before pushing that information out through multiple channels.

You need to understand how people prefer to consume the information you’re providing them, in what context, on what device and how customers use those devices, when, and where they use them. Once you understand the process and the people, it will be much easier to focus on the technology, the channel, and the optimization of content and analytics.

Posted in articles and presentations published, ecm, wcm | 1 Comment »

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