I’m in muggy Orlando for a few days to present at Synergy09, Ektron’s world-wide user conference. By good fortune, I sat next to web operations guru Lisa Welchman at lunch, and then caught her keynote on ‘the three wise web monkeys.’

I find myself nodding along to pretty much whatever Lisa says, and today was no different. Us content management folks can use a healthy dose of web governance advice.

Lisa is quick to say she’s not a ‘tools person.’ Meaning she stays far away from the nitty gritty of CMS tech.

Her talk was a call to arms for the web community to drive change inside their own organizations. Lisa calls for a ‘management transformation’ to help with the current disconnect between the executive team and the web team.

Using the three wise web monkeys as a metaphor (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil), she rallied the crowd to speak, hear and see like an executive in the way they approach the web internally. After all, she asks the crowd, why can’t the web guru of today be the CEO of the future?

The message clearly resonated, but it may have been too much too quick for a developer-centric crowd still tinkering with the latest software release.  I’m guessing it will take a while to settle in, but it’s just a matter of time.

We deal with a lot of governance issues here on The Myth, but these discussions need to be happening at a higher level than CMS. A grassroots web strategy revolution can start to affect change, but the C-suite needs to get far more web-smart and begin treating the web as an integrated part of their business, not a specialty discipline within marketing.

The good news is that a CMS project is usually the by-product of a larger organizational change and shifting web strategy.  It’s perfect timing to start changing the culture inside your organization.

So let’s get to is, shall we?

Related posts:

1. Are You Making the Right CMS Promises?
2. The five stages of CMS grief
3. How Many People Does it Take to Screw in a Content Management System?

The Obama Administration recently challenged the language services industry to achieve “automatic, highly accurate and real-time translation between the major languages of the world.”

It was a bold but reasonable statement, and one that directly challenges human translators and multilingual content professionals, whose work millions of people depend on to eliminate global language barriers. It has significant implications for CMS and content managers, too, as CMS tools and professionals increasingly need to efficiently manage multilingual web properties.

I immediately wondered how the industry would respond. I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

The next day Dr. Jiri Stejskal, president of the American Translators Association (ATA), published a response letter to President Obama. The letter urged Obama “to take a long-term approach to language security by investing in human skills and promoting greater awareness of and expertise in foreign languages.” (The text was actually bolded in the letter.)

The next sentence in the ATA’s letter reveals an attitude similar to that displayed by the automotive industry in recent decades on the issue of electric cars:

Are we against technology? Certainly not – in fact, most professional translators already use computer tools to speed up their work.

With all due respect, this is about as cogent a statement as a car industry exec downplaying electric cars by stating that gas-powered vehicles already incorporate electrical systems. I don’t want to carry the comparison too far, but I can’t help but see a legitimate parallel.

When California created more stringent fuel efficiency guidelines in the early 1990s, automakers quickly responded, in part, by rolling out electric vehicles to comply. However, the automakers were widely accused of deliberate self-sabotage, failing to adequately promote their electric vehicles in order to create the false impression that consumers were not interested in electric cars, while fighting against the [California] mandate using lobbyists and lawsuits. (Wikipedia)

From the ATA letter to President Obama:

Despite all the changes wrought in our lives by technological advances, no computer can match the language skills of a five-year-old child. The reason is simple: Computers cannot translate effectively – that is, they cannot entirely convey meaning from one language to another…

Let me be clear about my stance on this: I’ve delivered numerous presentations on what a disaster it can be to rely on machine translation alone. Or to use it in the wrong situations.

At its current level of sophistication and quality of output, machine translation should be avoided for creative copy: branding, marketing, advertising, literature, poetry and so forth. In this type of writing, language is often manipulated, plays on words made and other devices employed to purposely use language creatively and outside the way it has traditionally been interpreted. By definition, this creates a serious hurdle for accurate machine translation.

Sensitive, highly nuanced documents related to diplomacy, law, and medicine, among others, should also not typically be entrusted to machine translation.

But even in some of these cases, a hybrid of human and machine translation is a perfectly viable option. By employing a solution that is customized for the domain or profession, output is improved through limiting the scope of allowable substitutions. This technique is particularly effective in domains where formal or formulaic language is used. It follows then that machine translation of government and legal documents more readily produces usable output than conversational or less standardized text. (Wikipedia)

No one is saying that quality human translation is going away any time soon. In fact, I speculate we’ll need huge numbers of skilled human translators for decades to come. But the misgivings and fear – bordering at times on enmity – that currently exist within the professional translation associations toward those toiling away on improving machine translation needs to give way to acceptance and greater collaboration between them – especially as the volume of web content continues to grow, and the opportunities to create truly global communications expands relentlessly.

Just as the planet cannot sustain an ever-increasing number of petroleum-fueled, inefficient cars on the road, global communication, education and cooperation can no longer be constrained by the bottleneck of, in the ATA’s words, qualified human translators. As I said in my last article here, the time for machine translation has come.

Related posts:

1. The global language mashup: Blurring linguistic lines in the age of social media
2. The increasing importance of global content accessibility
3. The global CMS reality

Rolling out a new CMS is a challenging proposition. How you train and support your web authors can make or break the success of your CMS adoption and overall website.  Beyond training on new technology, each user brings a different level of technical experience, enthusiasm and available time.  Not to mention they all use the website in different ways.

Drop-in labs are a great way to make the rollout process smoother. A drop-in lab is simply a set time where you invite users to a working session with staff on hand to help. Not only will the labs help reduce support calls and e-mails, but they can foster community among your web authors and encourage peer support.

You’ll help end users with real questions in way that the curriculum-based classroom training can’t. Web authors will begin to support each other and feel less frustrated realizing they’re not in it alone. Plus it gives folks less of an excuse in complaining about difficulties with the CMS.

Here are a few tips we’ve learned from our drop-in labs:

1. Encourage users to bring actual work so that way they leave the lab with something accomplished.
2. Schedule the drop in labs soon after formal training sessions if possible, especially if your trainer will help out at the labs.
3. Pay attention to common challenges and look for ways to address them for all groups.
4. Make sure users are trained before attending a lab.
5. Keep plenty of documentation and support materials on hand.
6. Don’t get frustrated if all users don’t attend. It’s amazing the number of people that simply find comfort knowing they are available.
7. Hold them at a regular time and place and make them well advertised.
8. Consider having different staff on hand including designers, editors and developers.

Related posts:

1. The five stages of CMS grief
2. Why switch to a commercial CMS product?
3. Are You Making the Right CMS Promises?

The web content management consulting game can be rough and tumble for both the CMS service provider and client.  Speaking from an agency perspective, we see two very different types of organizations seeking CMS services – let’s call them the commodity shopper and the strategic investor.

If it sounds as if it’s all about price, it’s not.

We often ask: Where does your organization place value in obtaining outside help? Do you prefer someone who can get the job done -stat! – or an agency that will challenge assumptions and make strategic recommendations along the way to help create a better site and overall user experience?

First, it’s important to know there isn’t a wrong answer.

However, understanding your approach to CMS initiatives is critical BEFORE you decide on an agency partner, both for successful relationships and project outcomes.  It’s important to align with a partner who fits your organization’s mindset.

What do we mean? 

Readers of the CMS Myth know there are a boatload of challenging issues facing any organization seeking a CMS partner.

Just look at the pool of agency candidates— it’s deep, broad, and can be extremely confusing. Do you go with a big, strategic minded web/CMS agency? Little tactical shop that can just get it done technically? A jack-of-all-(interactive)-trades consultancy that can help with planning, strategy, design, CMS dev and web marketing? The two-person IT agency across town? Or a specialist firm fluent in all the ins and outs of the specific CMS you want to use?

The many questions facing your organization can help determine whether you’re a tactical or strategic CMS client. Is your organization built to tackle a full website and CMS project? Or do you have a few good people but need strategic oversight and advice? Or at the extreme, are your developers averse to anyone outside their ranks offering help?

Your need for speed can also be a guide. Agencies can get it done well and in due time … or quick and dirty. So can your team. Commodity services? Strategic thinking? You’ve got plenty to think about.

For their part, agencies love to achieve a mind-meld when it comes to a client’s CMS and website project. Most don’t want to end up in a bad client relationship where core philosophies and ideas clash mid-project. Agencies that DO offer strategic depth want the leeway to bring forward ideas and advice, not just execute to a ‘T’ the plan you have in mind. 

Speaking of your projects and plans, it may be very useful to measure your plans and expectations against our three types of web content management projects, defined in a previous CMS Myth post.  Generally we see projects falling into one of these categories. Note the time vs. cost, strategic vs. tactical trade offs in each:

• The Technical Migration
• The Visual Redesign
• The Strategic Redesign

Like we say, there are no wrong answers here with your choices. In reality, it may take you some time and a few false starts to find your comfort zone in making a decision. But keeping the question in mind  — and helping your organization identify its preferences as you wade into the CMS agency pool —  will help  immeasurably.

Related posts:

1. Duck and Cover: Avoiding Drive-by CMS Implementations
2. Three types of web content management projects
3. Does your CMS fit?

With 2010 closing in, here’s one Web content management trend bound to make our predictions list for next year: You will tire of CMS vendors trying to sell you on their integrated marketing suites.

It’s easy to see the future when it’s happening now. This week alone, I count at least three CMS vendors pitching webinars, or demos, or downloads of their integrated marketing tools, customer engagement suites, etc. Nothing wrong with the pitch – and, usually, nothing wrong with a CMS that can do more within the confines of the software.

If past is an indicator, vendors will double down in 2010 on the promise of an integrated CMS with online marketing tools like personalization, analytics, and email marketing, giving you the sense that all-in-one is the only way to go.

We’ve seen this before – and you have too – this debate over integrated tools vs. best-of-breed apps that integrate and play nice with your CMS and website. (See: editor tools, WYSISYG. Or Search. We could keep going.)

On one hand vendors are eager to differentiate with integrated marketing tools. There is merit to a single solution that works well. Switching in and out of apps to get to data and take actions isn’t fun when you’re already too busy. Make life easier for me.

On the other hand, the same vendors are eager to offer APIs and plug-in architectures – an open invitation for others to come to the party and play nice in a federated web ecosystem. Give me flexibility.

Which is it going to be? There may not be a “wrong” answer or a “right” answer, but bet you will be asked for an  answer that’s best for you and your organization.

Related posts:

1. Powering Corporate Content, Collaboration and Community with CMS
2. Shifting from Content Management to Content Delivery
3. Managing Website Optimization

We started the CMS Myth two years ago, riding into the Boston Gilbane Content Management Conference wearing our white hats, guns blazing (sort of), and raising the alarm against an epidemic of poorly planned and ultimately failed web content management projects.

That’s pretty much been our focus for the past 24 months: take the combined 50+ years of CMS experience among our MythBusters and deliver you best practices from the field.

And don’t forget the many metaphors to help explain the complex, the daunting or the just plain bizarre in CMS. Have you read Is Your CMS Project a Dead Monkey? Instant classic!

We’ve taken the Myth on the road with ISITE Design to conferences and private briefings from Portland to Boston and dozens of cities in between. We busted myths. And we listened and learned. And confirmed that CMS is a wonderful, powerful tech tool.

And we affirmed the core of the Myth, that success in most website projects isn’t about the CMS technology at all – it’s about your planning, strategy, expectations, user experience, marketing and more.

For all the myths we punctured in the past 24 months … we figure we can at least double that in the next 24.

As we celebrate our blog’s two year anniversary, we invite you to review these great CMS Myth moments in time – a few editors’ picks covering web content management and the intersection with website strategy, governance, marketing, analytics, globalization and more.

From The Content Building Blocks of Web Content Management
“…Planning a content management driven website requires a rigorous look at the underlying content. Proper planning in the early phases of the project can ensure a content architecture that is flexible and scales with your website. This can also significantly reduce the complexity of the implementation by identifying the common elements that can be reused.”

From How Many People Does it Take to Screw in a Content Management System?
“I’m the first to agree with limiting the number of cooks in the kitchen, yet it’s hard to ignore the fact that building websites today does require more specialized skills (and processes that can effectively integrate them). In fact, when it comes to CMS implementations, I’ve found that many projects go off track when the wrong people do the wrong tasks (i.e. Developer doing information architecture).”

From Measure Twice, Cut Once With Web CMS
“…Every web project manager has had one misadventure to know: long days/sleepless nights, plus an added tariff of missing your timeline, killing your budget, shedding your internal credibility ….  We continue to advocate that, to do CMS right, you need at the very least a vision, a plan, and a well-defined process  – remember as carpenters say, measure twice, cut once — to deliver a successful CMS outcome.”

From Shifting From Content Management to Content Delivery
“…With CMS feature sets expanding and the lines blurring between different platforms, acquiring content delivery tools bundled with CMS is both an opportunity and a risk for organizations. The right tools can greatly reduce development costs and speed up time to market. However, just because a CMS vendor has a specific feature does not mean it is best of breed or right for your organization.”

From Are CMS vendors selling to marketers or building for marketers?
“…CMS vendors have largely made the shift to speak more directly to the needs of a marketer. This is happening with the website messaging, marketing-friendly feature lists and solution-selling scenarios developed within the sales teams. This shift is both smart for business and absolutely necessary to meet the changing needs of the web-driven organization. However, it’s critical to take a closer look at specific vendor offerings to see if they can walk the walk that their marketing speak talks.”

From Now driving CMS adoption: Customer experience
“Now that marketers are increasingly driving the CMS discussion and adoption, the conversation is rightly shifting toward ideas like customer engagement and content optimization – how to make the most of your website and your content to drive home a message, convince and persuade visitors, prompt them to take an action, buy a product, or become more deeply engaged with your brand.”

From, Get your CMS vendor off their script!
“In the last month I have talked to a lot of people at the beginning of a CMS selection process.  …  The thing I have been ‘hearing between the lines’ as I talk to people is that (the) very scripted dog and pony shows CMS vendors can conduct only end up confusing the potential customer more than help them towards a final selection.  What they often get is a solid hour or so of product greatest hits and shiny toys with only a passing reference to anything that is relevant to the customer’s actual needs. … What I have been advocating to help keep everyone focused is that internally the customer comes up with three critical requirements that the CMS implementation must nail.”

From The Increasing Importance of Global Content Accessibility
“I’m still surprised at how many content creators and website developers tell me that they don’t need to worry about internationalization, localization or translation — that their audience is comprised of U.S. English speakers only. That’s a shortsighted, limiting – even selfish point of view. Whether yours is a business, government, non-profit or academic organization, there’s no way for you to know who may have an interest in and benefit from your content.”

Related posts:

1. Get your CMS vendor off their script!
2. CMS Marketing Suites: Sweeter in 2010?
3. Three types of web content management projects

Attempting to do a precise time and cost estimate at the very beginning of a CMS project can be a difficult if not a bad thing.  These type of estimates can come back to bite you, and they can bite hard.

At the heart of the problem statement is that someone—a client, a boss, a procurement officer—is demanding a precise answer to a question that cannot be answered with certain precision.  Now if everyone understood that simple fact everyone could be happy and we could ride our unicorns off into the sunset, but in the real world people get those imprecise estimates and dates fixed in their heads, and odds are that that number is going to be lower than the real number.

Let me use a very… colorful… example to illustrate the point.

You’re a rocket scientist. Someone comes to you with the problem statement: “I want to send a monkey to space. I need you to tell me what that will cost and when do you think we can launch?”

Well.

Aside from the fact you want a monkey shot into space (been there, done that) the problem here is the wild imprecision based on not knowing… a lot of things. For starters:

• Is the monkey alive?
• Is this a one way trip?
• If there is a return trip do you want the monkey to be alive when it comes back?
• How long is the trip?

Out of that first round of questions come a whole slew of second tier questions like: if we’re launching a live monkey what is it going to eat? And what are we going to do about the monkey poo?

Give me five minutes and I’ll have 20 more questions—each of which impact scope, time, and price of the monkey-to-the-moon initiative.

At the end of the day, an estimate for strapping a dead monkey to a rocket with duct tape is not quite the same doing a round trip of 10 days, with ripe bananas on the menu, and expecting a dancing monkey at the end of the trip.

The moral of the story is that CMS projects can be very complex and need a solid and comprehensive planning stage in order to fully understand what questions and demands are being asked of the CMS and the development and implementation teams.

For the welfare of monkeys everywhere, please make sure you conduct enough planning to ensure you have a live monkey at the end of the day.

Related posts:

1. CMS post-launch lessons for improving your website
2. What’s happening with mid-market CMS vendors in 2009?
3. Gilbane Boston & planning for a CMS

“For the the Internet to fulfill its most ambitious promises,
we need to recognize translation as one of the core challenges to an open,
shared and collectively governed Internet. Many of us share a vision of the
Internet as a place where the good ideas of any person in any country can
influence thought and opinion around the world. This vision can only be realized
if we accept the challenge of a polyglot internet and build tools and systems
to bridge and translate between the hundreds of languages represented online.”
- Ethan Zuckerman, The Polyglot Internet

I had the privilege to speak recently alongside a number of people whose work I’ve admired for some time. We were on the beautiful University of California Berkeley campus at the Berkeley Globalization Conference put on by LISA (Localization Industry Standards Organization). The sessions covered a vast array of topics, from enterprise language intelligence to controlled authoring; from multilingual online marketing communication to the language industry’s role in the content management ecosystem.

Each of the two dozen or so different topics could form the foundation for a great CMS Myth article – or three. And I will no doubt incorporate that inspiration and information into future articles. But today I want to write about the topic that jumped out at me as the most weighty and inspiring one for content management professionals and publishers: the increasing importance of global content accessibility.

Much more than WCAG and Section 508

When I use the term accessibility here, I’m not referring only to making content available to people with disabilties, though that certainly forms an important piece of the global content accessibility puzzle. What I’m referring to in this case is the accessibility of content to as wide an audience as possible, without technological, linguistic or other barriers. I recently heard someone say that only ten percent of scientific papers are ever translated into another language from the one in which they were authored. This person went on to speculate that we may very well already have the cure for cancer or solutions to some of the most critical problems facing the world today. What if pieces of the solution are scattered across scientific papers in Chinese, Arabic, German and English and simply need to be translated and brought together into a single body of information?

Two speakers addressed the topic directly, but nearly everyone who presented
touched on it – whether they did so intentionally or not. Everyone involved
in the creation, publishing and management of content,
from content strategy and authoring through to localization and search visibility
optimization, affects its accessibility. And therefore we all have a degree
of responsibility to ensure the content we shepherd through the lifecycle
is as accessible to as many people as possible. For those of us in the
content management business, this means making sure the tools and processes
we develop, customize and implement encourage and enable highly accessible
content.

Globalization is dead. Long live globality.

I thought the idea of the importance of global content accessibility was introduced
and supported best by Donald Barabé, Vice President of the Canadian
Government Translation Bureau. He started by stating that in the globalized
world, the term “globalization” is passé; that we must now
talk instead about “globality.” He went on to explain that “globality
is the end-state of globalization – a hypothetical condition in which
the globalization process is complete or nearly so and a new global reality
is emerging.” While
some might argue that the intense and widespread economic turmoil of recent
years has caused some nations and organizations to scale back their international
initiatives, it would be difficult to argue that the world is not more globally
aware than ever before and that there is not dramatically greater interest
in cross-border information sharing. And that there are far more and better
technologies than ever to assist with the authoring, localization, publication
and management of that information across language barriers and national borders.

One startling example shared by Mr. Barabé: In 1909, there were 37 international
organizations and 130 international non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
In 2009, there are 500 international organizations and more than 10,000 international
NGOs! (In 1989 there were 300 international organizations and 4,200 international
NGOs.) The United Nations alone has six official languages: English, French,
Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Spanish. It’s for good reason that the staggering
volume of content that is authored, localized and managed at the U.N. is the
stuff of legend in the language services and content management industries.

Information poverty and the Asian language content gap

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” -
Nelson Mandela

In a another mind-expanding and sobering session, Kirti Vashee of Asia Online
illustrated the harsh realities of information poverty. He talked about all the
money and effort going into providing computers and Internet access to children
in developing nations, and the tragic truth that there is little content in their
languages for them to access once finally online.

Here are just some of the staggering facts Kirti shared: By 2013, nearly half
of all Internet users will be in Asia. Despite this, less than 14% of content
on the Internet is in an Asian language. Of that 14%, 6% is in Japanese, another
6% in Chinese, 1.5% in Korean and just 0.03% in all other Asian languages combined!
If the English language Wikipedia was translated
into the major Southeast Asian languages of Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malay, Tagalog,
Thai and Vietnamese, it would, as one content source, represent more web pages
than all the rest of the online content in these languages combined.

The machine, the crowd and the network

Machine translation has long been the butt of jokes and the object of scorn
among professional translators and language purists. It has historically been relegated to churning
out gist translations of low-priority legacy technical support content and
always accompanied by detailed disclaimers absolving the publisher of all responsibility
for the accuracy of the translation. Broaching the topic of machine vs. human
translation at a language services industry event can inspire the kind of
passionate reactions that you might expect if you were to try distributing
leaflets for your candidate of choice at a business meeting in a presidential
election year. But the time for machine translation has come.

Companies like Google and Microsoft are featuring machine translation ever
more prominently in their offerings and, while still clunky at best in most
cases, machine translation is improving. It has to. There is simply far too
much content in far too many languages needed by far too many people to put
off the aggressive integration of machine translation into the global content
workflow. That said, it definitely has a long way to go before it will be reliable
for things like medical or legal translations – and it may never replace
human translators for creative content like marketing copy.

In the mean time, it continues to improve as a valuable tool for very quickly
generating a rough draft that can then be reviewed, edited and polished by
human translators. Those human translators are more and more coming together
via social networks and platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others
and engaging in what is referred to as crowdsourced translation. In most cases
the crowd is translating from the original language, and in some they are acting
to correct and polish machine translations. In either case, it is proving to
be a very popular and – to the chagrin of many in the language services
industry – often very efficient means of translating and localizing applications
and content.

Think your content isn’t for an international audience? Think again!

I’m still surprised at how many content creators and website developers
tell me that they don’t need to worry about internationalization, localization
or translation — that their audience is comprised of U.S. English speakers
only. That’s a shortsighted, limiting – even selfish point of view.
Whether yours is a business, government, non-profit or academic organization,
there’s no way for you to know who may have an interest in and benefit from
your content. With Google Language Tools, Microsoft’s Bing Translator
and the rapidly growing list of other tools available to enable multilingual
search and machine translation of online content, there are more ways than
ever for Internet users around the world to find and read content in languages
other than their own. But that is only possible if the content is published
in a way that makes the use of these language tools possible.

And that will be my next article. Look for it in the next couple weeks!

Related posts:

1. The global language mashup: Blurring linguistic lines in the age of social media
2. The global CMS reality
3. Machine Translation: Electric Car of the Language Services Industry?

It feels like content management is alive and well, but a quick look at Google Trends indicates that search demand for content management has been on a steady decline over the last five years.

According to Google, search interest for  “content management” is down roughly 75% from five years ago.

A similar trend is apparent for “web content management”

So what do you think? Are people simply searching on different terms now? Is demand for content management technology truly down?

Leave your thoughts below.

Related posts:

1. Shifting from Content Management to Content Delivery
2. Duck and Cover: Avoiding Drive-by CMS Implementations
3. Powering Corporate Content, Collaboration and Community with CMS

Reading Seth Godin’s Bear Shaving post yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of the CMS Myth.

As Seth explains, bear shaving is “the effort we take to deal with the symptoms of the problem instead of addressing the case of the problem.”  As in shaving a bear to deal with global warming.

This rings especially true with CMS implementations and is at the heart of the CMS Myth.

• Dealing with lackluster content by putting in a CMS instead of developing a content strategy
• Setting up workflow in a CMS system instead of dealing with the offline publishing processes
• Replacing a CMS due to end user frustration instead of investing in a training program

The list goes on and on.  Before you put in that next content management system, take a step back to see if you are fixing the problem or shaving the bear.

Related posts:

1. How Many People Does it Take to Screw in a Content Management System?
2. A Good CMS Salesperson will….
3. The five stages of CMS grief