Given that this is an election year, the challenges associated with new technology investments – from the glimmer of a great idea to going live – has special urgency. Elections mean changes to staff and, more importantly, priorities. The effect of periodic election cycles is often a source for discussion, and CIOs are affected more than other government staff.

Long development and deployment cycles are common with government technology projects, and it seems to be the case now as state agencies prepare for healthcare reform and to replace legacy systems. The problem is there’s often a mismatch between the urgent need for better systems and the length of time needed to design, test and deploy those systems. In the meantime, government suffers as it tries to do the same work with less staff and aging systems.

Government has to be nimble in order to implement key technologies, keep ahead of changing political initiatives and support government work. Consider these principles as you select, design and implement government solutions:

Simplify, standardize, optimize and centralize – Whatever word you use, it’s a call to simplify your organization’s IT architecture, reducing the number of systems to support so you speed up deployment and continue building your expertise on smaller, more manageable applications. Start by reusing and building upon existing systems used by other departments to speed up discovery. This also means looking for solutions with horizontal potential – solutions whose core services many departments. Sharing solutions means building upon the collective development of your organization. In this case, simple means affordable.

Avoid custom-code solutions – Custom coding is the single greatest cost factor and must be carefully explored in current budget conditions, especially given the long usage of systems.

When selecting a solution, ask vendors the hard questions about their software, like:

• How many hours of service are needed?
• What configuration tools are used – especially for workflow automation?
• How long will it take to respond to ever-changing mandates the system must support?

Make sure you also talk with peers and check references beyond those provided by vendors.

Go mobile – Mobile solutions are key to engaging faster with your constituents AND providing better, faster service to them. Your solution must be able to easily support field staff without difficulty and multiple moving parts. As we replace the current generation of solutions, we need to take advantage of mobile capabilities to improve government service.

Cloud – Cloud solutions offer web-based delivery of computing and storage, and may be the answer for ECM challenges that need immediate solutions. This is because the software provider deploys, manages and maintains the solution while you focus on more important initiatives.

Things to ask vendors when considering a cloud-based solution include:

• Is there an available hosted option?
• Is it proven?
• How many deployments have been done?
• What security features are offered?
• Who owns the data?
• If you chose a premise-based solution, what’s the ease of migration?

Government isn’t known for nimble IT, which is understandable given the disparate legacy systems they run. Fortunately, our collective technical know-how is vastly better than it used to be – better code, applications, mobile ability and hardware. So, there is no reason government can’t move faster on IT deployment while surviving political cycles and changing regulatory environments. These ideas are just part of finding the nimble in government IT and making it successful.

It is no secret, especially to TV executives, that consumers today want anywhere-anytime access to both live and on-demand TV content. They want to watch American Idol on so-called “third screens,” namely their iPad tablets, smartphones, even gaming consoles.  Unlike their music industry counterparts, entrenched broadcasters and cable companies are not sitting idle for a company like Apple to kick sand in their faces. Cable execs know that the mainstream is tapping into the online stream.

Because of this, savvy innovators are jumping in to fill the technology gap left open for new applications of content management.

Apps that call for content transference -- from publishing broadcast-quality content to website video players, to the synchronization of content across all endpoint consumer devices: those iPads that exist today, and whatever else lurks in the future, such as the entire IP-addressed ‘smart’ house.

Nielsen just reported how 88% of U.S. tablet owners use them while also watching TV at least once a month; and 45% of tablet owners watch the tube while using their tablet at least once a day.

 “One of the biggest trends happening outside of anyone’s control is that people have the second and third screens open while they are watching TV,” says Alper Turgut, CEO of Anvato, which uses the cloud and proprietary software to publish TV content directly to web video players then syndicated to affiliates. “This is the opposite of what people previous thought about TV being replaced by mobile or by the PC.”

You’ve seen the pictures. Mom, dad, the kids, each buried in their own laptop vortex, yet all sitting together on the couch. This new picture of the nuclear family will have big consequences on how commercials are served up. It’s only a matter of time before broadcasters team up with Facebook, the king of targeted ads based on user profiles, to pin custom ads directly to viewers as they watch TV. Collecting the IP addresses on mobile devices is all the information that advertisers need for unambiguous, sniper-like targeting.

Bringing the laptop into the living room is the best thing that has happened to TV advertisers. Coupons and incentives are made meaningful for the first time. A web broadcast commercial break during a video streaming of Glee can be customized for Sally, who is 16 and will respond to acne cream products. Her father will get a Dodge RAM commercial, and mom will be fed something by Anne Taylor or Walmart.

“The scenario we are observing is that when they check into the brand or content, they want to get something back—a coupon, recognition, reward points. They expect interaction,” Turgut says. “Marketing people cannot strictly rely on the apps on the TV and must get the word out and encourage people to interact with their brand. They need a way to synchronize the multiscreen consumption experience.”  Turgut says that large broadcasters such as Univision are investing in live broadcast-to-Web streaming with the help of his company’s software, which synchronizes the TV experience to a second and third screens.

“As you are watching TV, it’s synchronizing your application experience with the content,” he says. “For example, if you see a Disney ad, it recognizes it, and your application will get a message from Disney, push a coupon through, or interact. You can expect your app to react intelligently and know what you are watching at the same time.”

So what is arresting the meteoric rise of the content aggregators? Well there are several factors at play here but ultimately content is king. If people can’t get the content they want then they will go elsewhere. Cable companies are able to offer much more lucrative deals to content providers thanks to their subscription fees for customers. That allows them to demand exclusivity in some cases and so the content that is available for web based services like Netflix is limited. As it stands, if you want good news or sports coverage, or you want to watch the latest HBO show, then you need a cable subscription.

The truth is that content aggregators like Hulu are not doing anything that cable companies can’t emulate. The technology is accessible, they already have the customer base and they have strong relationships with the content providers. Cable companies can easily match and even surpass the experience being offered by their competitors if they are willing to change.

If the cable companies are prepared to start cannibalizing their content before someone else does, then they are well placed to wave off any threats. They can deliver a TV Everywhere service that will put the content aggregators out of business, but it will mean adopting a different business model that could prove less profitable than traditional cable subscriptions.

Is it a trade-off that cable companies will be willing to make? If they want to stay relevant and keep their customers happy then they just might have to.

Victor Cruz is a blogger whose articles have appeared in American Venture, CommPro.biz, Developer Tech, eSecurity Planet, Web Security Journal and others. 

 
Robert Tommy Jr., director of product management for global payment solutions at Fiserv, said ECM programs are now critical to banking, with automation extremely valuable for any of the companies that are considering adoption of the technology.

Addressing compliance concerns, records management needs, cost reduction, improved customer service-there are a myriad of benefits to be gained with the right technology.

And each organization will experience their own unique advantages.

What Should I Save?

Many companies think saving everything in their organization can be a good way to go, but having too much information can lead to compliance issues.

Too much information can mean chaos, even with a great document management system, so companies should look to clear out old, unnecessary documents regularly.

Preparing for Growth

In a piece that appeared on BobsGuide, one enterprise content management professional said banks and financial institutions are looking for ways to accomplish growth goals, please customers and improve technology while reducing risk and costs.

Thus, banks and financial institutions are aiming for a better way to manage and store content, while still maintaining compliance and minimizing costs and potential risk.

Although this isn’t an easy task, the right technology can allow these companies to have the opportunity to add efficiency and still appropriately address budget concerns. In fact, it can actually help address compliance and risk responsibilities of this increasingly strict industry through automation and enhanced reporting capabilities.

 
Ultimately, the right tools and technology will help the organizations that opt to invest become more efficient and offer much better customer service, two things the industry needs to help with the economic recovery.

You might also like:

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The term knowledge management has been around for much longer. There are various tales on how the term got started. Here is one. Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak, provide an interesting story about the birth of the term “knowledge management” in their new book, What’s the Big Idea? It seems they were having tea in the spring of 1992 at the Boston Athenaeum, near their Center for Business Innovation office. They frequently adjourned to the Athenaeum, an old Boston private library used by Emerson and Alcott, to discuss their projects. They were working on a research project to look at how organizations could use information as a strategic advantage. Not happy with the term “information,” they discussed the issue over tea.

“While munching a tasty lemon square, Tom argued, ‘We should really be focused on higher value forms of information.’ Finally, Larry looked up and asked. ‘Don’t we really mean knowledge?”

As they say, the rest is history. In the book, Tom and Larry point out that while in some ways the long term success of knowledge management is still to be determined, it has out lasted many other “big ideas” and there are signs that its take up is increasing. They state that knowledge management appears to be headed toward pervasive adoption by organizations. Knowledge management has certainly had it sups and downs in the market but my own experience with clients and talking with analysts supports their conclusion.

Why automating the capture of paper closer makes sense

There are four main reasons I see for why capturing documents closer to the source makes sense.

1. Delays will inevitably occur when you are sending paper documents from location to the next.

2. Operational costs – think about the cost associated with mailing of documents or even the labor required to manually send documents to another location, and the time spent tracking them.

3. Lack of access to information – Documents that are mailed from one location to another are not accessible until they are digitized and stored in a central repository. This will impact the service you may be able to provide given the content is not accessible to those who need access to the information.

4. Lack of control over he information – If you could capture and digitize paper closer to the source, the benefit would be better control over the information.

Shift in scanning technology will lead to greater adoption

One of the new products I talked about in my session was the EMC Captiva Cloud Toolkit, which is a software developer kit (SDK) comprised of modules that help web application developers to quickly add scanning and imaging functionality directly to their web-based business applications. It is ideal for document capture vendors, software developers, and enterprise organizations that want to create custom web-based applications that are fully scan-enabled complimenting their business solution offerings.

What is unique to this new development kit is that it requires no plug-in of any kind in order to perform scanning within a browser. That allows Web-based scanning applications to work across all browsers, and overcomes one of the common IT barriers which is resistance to deploying Web apps, that require a plug-in.

The runtime components that are required for applications built around this toolkit, can either be packaged up and installed one time on the desktop or in the case of new businesses scanners that ship with the Captiva ISIS device driver, the runtime components are being included with scanners this year.

Partners building solutions that leverage the new development kit

During my Momentum session, I highlighted two partners who have already built a Web-based scanning and indexing application that leverages the new Captiva Cloud Toolkit. The first application I showed was from our partner Business Imaging Systems (BIS). Their new application called MAX Capture provides scanning, indexing, lookups, and field-level validations all within a browser. The current release supports connecting into Captiva InputAccel, ApplicationXtender, and future connectors will be available for other repositories like SharePoint. If you are at EMC World, I’d encourage you to stop by their booth (1125) in the Solutions Pavilion and get a live demonstration.

The second application I showed was from our partner ImageAccess. Over the past few years they have built a very rich scanning and indexing Web application and have recently leveraged the Cloud Toolkit to take advantage of scanning capabilities of the new toolkit. This application is currently in use at a couple large financial institutions, and I discussed one of these use cases during my session.

In talking with the customer, he described how their account management team meets with financial advisors who are moving clients over to their organization. To bring these new customers (investors) on-board involves quite a bit of paperwork (account set-up forms, asset transfers, supporting documentation, etc). In order to help facilitate and speed up the process, the account management person meets with the advisor and performs all the scanning on-site. By enabling the account management team to scan and index documents on-site, this has cut down on delays in on-boarding new customers and ensures all the appropriate documents are captured and stored electronically.

Moving capture to the forefront not slowing down

There are some who think paper is a thing of the past, but many of us believe capture has become an even more important technology in how businesses can become more efficient in their day-to-day operations. There are many ways in which distributed scanning can function - it could be its own application that connects with backend systems, or you could have scanning built directly into a line of business application. Scanning in a line of business app is an intriguing concept and could be useful in some cases. Take for example a SaaS based offering like SalesForce. What if I have a customer contract, and I want to scan and store it in SalesForce? With the new Captiva Cloud Toolkit, I could build a simple scan application that embeds a scan button into SalesForce. This same concept could be applied to other applications as well.

Furthermore, we are seeing imaging apps being developed for mobile devices like the iPhone and Android. Most of the apps so far support very ad hoc use cases, others mobile imaging apps like mobile check deposit have been developed specifically for the consumer. The consumer apps are all about convenience and retaining customers, and we expect that mobile check deposit is just the start for how mobile imaging could be used for other consumer related services. 

Mobile imaging is still very much in its infancy and we are only scratching the surface on what can be possible. What we will likely see is purpose-built mobile apps that require imaging within the app to help facilitate completing a task or set of tasks. For example, an insurance company might want a mobile imaging app that supports an agent kicking off a claim process. Part of that claim process, could involve taking photos of documents or uploading pictures and/or videos, and inputting some basic data. The app might leverage backend capture services, but also help facilitate with connecting the end-user with the content, and back office processes.

All of this is very exciting and really shows just how important imaging technology is today. If you are EMC World this week, stop by the Momentum Zone in the Solutions Pavilion and check out the latest solutions we have and learn more about what is possible when it comes to using intelligent capture.

I’m constantly fiddling with this blog and my dog’s blog Hi, I’m Sadie Shih Tzu. So while you might not see new posts from me here every week, you can be fairly confident I’m working away in the background on one of my blogs, experimenting with new plugins, fonts, colours, themes and more.

Over the past few months I’ve fallen in love with some fantastic design blogs. They either offer great design downloads, tutorials or both.

I think my favourite find is Pugly Pixel by Katrina Tan. I’ve used many of her super Photoshop video tutorials. I’ve bought a membership to her premium design downloads (one of the most affordable memberships ever) and I’ve poured over her design freebies. Katrina is a blogging chick who totally gets it.

I also adore Jo Kilma’s work. She runs The Darling Tree and August Empress. Her free downloads on August Empress are breathtaking. And every time I check out her design work on The Darling Tree I’m totally in awe.

StarSunFlower Studio is written by Susan Smith who does a brilliant round up of design freebies every week. Susan also has her own shop which sells many of her own fab designs.

I’m totally addicted to Pinterest and have found it a great way to discover designers. One of my favourite pinners is Noor Alqahtani who runs a blog called Little Pink Strawberries. Noor constantly pins links to great design stuff.

These are only a few of the many folks I follow closely and seek inspiration from.

What are you favourite design resources? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

I recently attended CMS Expo and there was a lot of discussion about “engagement” — presentation-side functionality to create more enriching experiences for customers (on the website and beyond). Engagement is a pretty hot topic within the CMS industry these days. By focusing on engagement, companies can get more value from their content and serve their customers better. The upper tier of WCM vendors have fully committed to this trend. Sitecore now describes its offering as a “Customer Engagement Platform.” Adobe calls CQ the “foundation of the Adobe Web Experience Management (WEM) solution”. Ektron has its “Digital Experience Hub”. OpenText puts its WCM products under the “Engagement” section of their portfolio. Autonomy has theirs under “Customer Experience Management.”

When hearing about the opportunities and benefits of engagement, you could see the audience (mostly open source CMS developers) thinking about how they would build these features into their platforms. What struck me though is that thinking about engagement as a technology problem, to be solved with code, is doomed to failure. Yes, we can program some logic that displays different content under different conditions and automates some actions. But as long as we think of engagement as “features” that the developers leave behind, the result will be a fortress of software that insulates an organization from its customers and inhibits real engagement. The software will be correct to the specification but fail to achieve its goal of enhancing visitor experience. In fact, it is more likely to assume wrong and frustrate visitors than get lucky and do the right thing. We all know how hard Amazon and Netflix work with their algorithms and they still get it wrong.

Engagement is a two-way conversation. To create an engaging experience, a company needs to deeply understand its audience. A company needs to listen for the slightest hints of delight or disappointment and continually adjust to get more of the former and less of the latter. Like with anything, you can only automate engagement once you get really good at doing it manually. You can only offer good suggestions if you have been observing what people pick on their own and know how happy they were with their choices.

If you start to build in business logic to engage visitors, you better have metrics and in place, constantly monitor them, and have the skills and the time to tune your algorithms. Engagement functionality is not going to work for companies with a set it and forget it attitude. But for companies that are already executing a content strategy (so they have the right content) and actively seeking performance feedback (through analytics and anecdotal information), engagement features will present opportunities to serve their customers even better.

The same is true for the editorial side of content management technologies. If a company is not good at developing and organizing effective content, if it doesn’t have the right skills and processes, a CMS is not going to help much. But in the hands of an organization with a good content strategy and strong executional capabilities, a CMS is an invaluable asset. You can’t execute a content strategy without one. Some CMS vendors get this and have developed training programs to help build the organizational capabilities necessary to execute a successful content program (both on the editorial side and on the engagement side). The ones that don’t risk losing customers who fail to meet their goals and wind up blaming the product.

Engagement is something that all companies should strive for. An unfulfilled visit is a huge missed opportunity. It could be a lost sale. It could lead to an expensive call to a call center. Worst of all, it creates frustration with your brand that, through social media, spreads like kudzu. Companies won’t succeed with engagement because they bought software with the word “engagement” on the tin. They will succeed by having the organizational capacity to learn and serve their customers and by working with tools that support their optimized business processes.

While search provides an answer to a question you already know. “Discovery” provides awareness to things you might not have anticipated in areas that interest you. While still at an early stage, there is a new breed of tools, content discovery engines, that are gaining traction to complement search engines. They do not replace search they provide another line of inquiry into what is happening on the Web.

Discovery goes beyond search as it can help you uncover meaningful content without having to formulate a question.  It can provide ongoing monitoring of an area of interest and report back variances in information patterns. It operates in real-time and does not have to wait for popularity to drive content forward. This is approach taken by the Darwin Awareness Engine™, one of the new breed of content discovery tools. 

The story still is this:

• B2B software Customers are becoming more proactive Buyers and have taken the driver's seat in buying decisions
• These customers want relevant, quality content to learn more about problems that matter to their companies and potential solutions to those problems, which may include the offerings of a particular B2B software company
• And they'd like to learn about vendor solutions through honest, well-written content – instead of brochure-ware filled with "marketing" hype  
• But many B2B software companies are not providing the content that customers want

 A lot of data points show that for all types of companies there is tremendous content marketing activity going on now, as well as strong future growth potential:

• A recent report notes that U.S. content marketing now comprises a $40 billion industry
• About a quarter of worldwide marketing budgets are committed to content marketing efforts
• 60% of companies forecast increases for content marketing budgets by mid-2012
• According to Outsell, companies spend $67 billion annually on their websites, where a lot of B2B content marketing takes place right now
• A HiveFire study found that 82% of B2B companies were using content marketing – and the longer the sales cycle, the more use of content marketing

So why do so many B2B software companies struggle with execution and achieving beneficial results?

Symptoms, Root Causes and Steps in the Right Direction

There are many marketing-oriented posts about how B2B vendors are going wrong when it comes to content marketing. Most of what's called out is not surprising: failure to write properly on topics that customers prefer - added to failure to even find out what customers want to read; poor writing quality; non-engaging material; promoting brochure-ware instead of useful, thought-provoking material. There is also failure to understand how to match the right content to the right channel, and lack of knowledge regarding the channels that customer segments prefer for various kinds of content.

But these are mostly symptoms -- not root causes for the disconnect between B2B companies and the execution of a content marketing strategy for successful outcomes. One root cause: many companies have no cohesive long-term strategy for content marketing.

First, let's take a couple of steps back: if there's no strategy for content marketing, then it's likely that marketing is not positioned strategically in the enterprise with upper management backing. So it's not just content marketing that may be lacking executive buy-in at the top, but the overall marketing function. Unfortunately many technology companies continue to treat Marketing as an add-on silo'd function, or worse, as voodoo magic that can miraculously fix whatever is lacking from company offerings or hoodwink potential customers into buying the product, whether it's any good or not. In this ridiculous second situation (it happens more than we'd like to think), Marketing is of course the culprit to be punished if the "voodoo magic" fails to save the day.

Marketers were asked to explain what particular challenges they face within their own organizations. We noticed a number of themes running throughout their comments:

 Getting buy-in: "Management patience - mgt needs to understand that in today's B2B environment it takes time to engage prospects. The prospect has a lot more power than they did in the 90's and 2000's."

Now, a couple more steps back and we're looking at: enterprises that are also lacking in integrated systems and processes for internal and external customer interactions; employees who have not been empowered/enabled to interact with customers; poor understanding of target markets and target customer roles; silo'd business functions; poor use of data assets. So before we can make the journey to a well-crafted content marketing strategy, upper management must make the commitment to the integrated enterprise that is customer-focused, market-driven, and process and data savvy. Overall strategies must reflect these tenets. Marketing must be included as part of overall strategy, and the value of content marketing to reach the customer-as-buyer must be given credence, support and enablement. Now we can set about creating an excellent content marketing strategy.

Bottom line: content marketing is not a short term campaign or project; it is a strategic commitment that impacts most of the enterprise.

 Content Marketing: What It Takes to Execute Well

Why does it matter that technology companies implement content marketing? Software vendors should be neck-deep in content marketing if they are willing to take the right steps forward with the right strategic decisions in place. Content marketing (if done well) keeps the company focused on understanding and meeting the needs of customers – something these companies should be doing anyway, in every aspect of business. Align the business with Customer, align content with Customer. Content marketing is a natural progression from the recognition that the customer-as-buyer is more and more driving how and if sales happen; content marketing provides a dynamic way to connect to those customers. At a higher level, strategic content marketing is an affect of the enterprise becoming integrated and agile – hopefully of the enterprise becoming a "social business".

It strikes me that a strategic commitment to content marketing parallels the kind of strategy required to successfully implement and sustain good community management: dedicated team and participation of other enterprise teams, strategic backing from the top down, long-term commitment to the success of the community, allocation of healthy resources to ensure community success, strong integration with multi-channel customer service, and dynamic business processes. A vibrant community can also be seen as a stellar artifact of healthy content marketing.

An integrated content marketing strategy provides a single home base for all content so that real sense is made of how an enterprise is connecting with prospects and customers. The strategy for content marketing pulls together individual marketing programs and initiatives so there is potentially seamless transition for the customer from channel to channel. Connecting the tactics of marketing to a content strategy also makes it more possible to construct metrics that track the effectiveness of insightful content that can be tied to functions such as lead gen and sales funnel.

Customers know that B2B software vendors are in the business to sell products – customers want resources to figure out if a vendor's offering will answer their needs. And customers want to know if vendors understand their business problems, if vendors are thinking into the future. But the bottom line still is: the software vendor better have products worth buying and using.

 All marketers have the opportunity to increase effectiveness, and they all can learn from the "best in class." Just as was the case last year, effective marketers spend more and are more strategic in their approach:

• They allocate 31% of their budget to content marketing, compared to less effective marketers who invest 18%
• They are 50% more likely to consider the "stage in the buying cycle" when developing content, whereas less effective marketers are less likely to tailor content in any way.
• They benefit from substantially more buy-in from senior members of the organization. Only 8% of effective marketers complain about lack of buy-in from higher-ups, versus 17% of those who rate themselves as less effective (though, on a positive note, this number has declined, dropping down from last year's rate of 24% for less effective marketers).

                                          Source: Greg De Tisi (with my "strategic" addition)  

Content for the Customer-as-Buyer

 è Content Value is strictly from the Customer POV

Just as the customer alone owns the customer experience, the perceived value of content solely rests with the customer. Learning customer desires for content is where a lot of time should be spent. Just like software solutions must be right-fit for customers needs, the same goes for content. Just as vendors should be segmenting target markets and target customer roles for being able to connect their solutions to customer needs, the same segmentation should be used for content. Decisions are then made: who are the key customer roles that are most interested in content at different stages of the buying cycle, what topics matter to them, what kind of content, where do they prefer to consume it.

 è Insights, critical thinking and expert knowledge-sharing

Software vendors need to provide content about current problems and future directions for topics that matter to customers. With so much content available on the internet, writing about yesterday's issues is not engaging to most customers, unless yesterday's issues address problems still plaguing customers. Then the content should look at what might be done to solve those problems. Customers realize that technology is in constant flux, in good and bad ways. Helping customers to see into future trends that could benefit their businesses, and the potential gotchas of new technology, is likely to provide valuable content from the customer POV.

 è Diversity of content

Content can be expressed in many forms, multiplied by many channels – which means companies really must understand for each target customer role what are the preferred content types and preferred channel for each content type. A matrix is now coming together for understanding and managing optimal communication with different customer roles. Mobile platforms present good but difficult channels that must be understood and handled well. Opportunities are increasing for more interactive components related to content. Creative, sophisticated approaches to most content should be considered – simplicity and clarity are other constructs to consider.

 è Quality over quantity – and reliable continuity of quality content is vital

Customers and prospects don't want to waste their time on junk content or thinly disguised brochure-ware. Imperatives for effective content marketing artifacts are quality, creativity, hot topics, deep insights – essentially respecting the target audience by producing excellent work. Constant and reliable content creation is important, but what this means will vary by content type and channel.

There are a lot of reasons why content marketing doesn't work for some companies…But the biggest culprit (and it's not even close) is a lack of consistency, and, in some cases, a content stoppage. Research from IBM in 2010 stated that about 80 percent of corporate blogs never post more than five entries (hat tip to Rebecca Lieb). That is a truly unbelievable stat…

è People, money, time

Content marketing is sustained only by realistic allocations of resources: people, money and time in particular. B2B software companies should be tapping internal subject matter experts (SMEs), as well as external ones, to deliver the kind of content that customers want. Internal tech experts are also needed as reviewers and editors to ensure that content is accurate. Strategic-thinking enterprises cannot expect their employees to participate in content marketing on their own time or to work it into already busy work schedules, as a "sideline". Upper management has to make sure that content marketing participation for an employee is a recognized part of regular compensated responsibilities.

 Strategy and planning to execute, and the responsibilities of creating relevant content must come from company staff:

 Content marketing is brand marketing, cubed, and as such requires the full attention and supervision of your team. Prospects and customers now expect to engage with you— and by engage with you we mean get to know your brand—through your content. Creating content assets to support content marketing is a centralized strategy that relies on a consistent brand voice and vision to work. It's a bad habit left over from legacy thinking to allow your marketing organization to create content as one-off campaign or program assets without thinking of the broader implications.

Content for the Customer Journey

The customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints, which are all interactions with any and all enterprise functions, employees, and marketing / digital channels. They all matter – they are the milestones of the customer journey. Touchpoints are also components of multi-channel marketing, including content marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, during the customer journey.

The hard work is taking what frequently is a collective of separate touchpoints and harmonizing the collective to enable excellent customer experiences. Orchestration and integration are key aspects of approaching a seamless experience across touchpoints – again this only works if the customer truly perceives such a unified experience.

The buying process for B2B software can be complex and involves multiple steps for the customer, both for arriving at a decision and for making the purchase itself. The "customer" frequently consists of multiple roles: techies (IT), line-of-business decision-makers, financial and budget managers, executives, and sometimes the actual users of the technology. (One of the flaws on the buyer side of the equation is too often the "end" user is left out of the decision-making process.) Content marketing has a fantastic opportunity to help potential buyer roles with the decision steps and foster positive experiences as part of the customer journey.

Work done for target customer segmentation and for mapping the customer journey is very useful for organizing types of content, and how and when content is made available to various customer roles and needs. Some content will be tagged to certain steps in the buying process. Some content will help existing customers use technology solutions for greater benefit and find out more that the vendor can do to help with business success. Some content is meant to pique interest for anyone unfamiliar with the vendor.

Developing several related pieces of content for a particular topic can enrich how content marketing aligns with the customer journey. People come back for the next installments, and the vendor can develop more in-depth coverage via different media and different channels.

 Source: Content Marketing Institute

Delivering What Customers Need

The work to be done to understand how to deliver the right content to customers and prospects is the same work that B2B software vendors should be doing to deliver the products and services that customers and prospects want and need. The work being done to identify optimal target markets and customer roles for products should be extended to segmentation for content marketing purposes. In all of these cases the ultimate "product" for the customer should be high quality, reliable, useful, easy to put to work.

Content marketing cannot survive as a strategy in a vacuum. Nor can it have any impact if it is treated as a short-term project or campaign. Strategic content marketing is long-term, with continual development and evolution that parallels the changes that occur for the company, its target markets and customers, and other factors that impact software vendors. Orchestration and implementation of content marketing impact many groups in the enterprise, not just Marketing. The strategies for content marketing should be part of overall corporate and marketing strategies. Similarly metrics for content marketing should fold back into hierarchies of metrics for marketing and overall corporate measurements for achieving goals.

Proponents of the first approach say it offers a more cohesive methodology that facilitates better decision-making and saves money over the long haul, while backers of the second claim it yields a rapid return on investment and allows users to select tools that best suit their needs.

Each approach has its merits and drawbacks. But, does implementing enterprise content management (ECM) solutions in insurance have to be an “either/or” decision? Can’t insurers begin departmentally and evolve to an enterprise-wide solution?

Blending the two – departmental and enterprise – is often the best approach because no solution is one-size-fits-all.  While an enterprise-wide deployment strategy may bring loads of power, functionality and the economies of having everything in one system without having to integrate multiple separate applications, it also brings lengthy, complex implementation and administration.

For many, this kind of undertaking is too much to deal with to address the operational or tactical problems of one or more departments. On the other hand, departmental deployments address one specific need, are easier to implement and tend to be much more feature-rich and robust relative to enterprise suite offerings. But they have the headaches of integration.

To further complicate things, the functionality gap between best-of-breed departmental offerings and enterprise suites has narrowed. At the same time, best-of-breed departmental offerings available as Software as a Service (SaaS) help lower the upfront costs of purchasing new systems and modern technologies (.Net, J2EE, and XML) make it easier to integrate different systems quickly.

If you find yourself torn between implementing an enterprise-wide solution and deploying a scalable, best-of-breed departmental one, consider the following:

1. Are your needs really that specialized? A surprising number of insurers think their business is entirely unique. While some areas are, many are not – and, vendors have been addressing those “unique” insurance needs for a long time.
2. Do you really need to integrate all of your systems? Insurers start researching new solutions assuming that integration is essential in every single case, when, in fact, many business functions are disparate.
3. Does your existing core solution vendor offer what you need, and is it truly integrated?Although many core systems vendors have built out functionality over time and claim to offer breadth within their suite, most fall short of delivering the business requirements insurers need. If your vendor acquired the system, or built it on a different code base, it might not be “truly” integrated, sacrificing functionality.
4. Do you have the necessary IT resources? While the .Net, J2EE, and XML platforms make integration easier, they still require IT expertise to implement and manage – not to mention a commitment from end users.
5. Is it better to reap smaller, short-term returns, or hold out for greater, long-term improvements? As the saying goes, “Time is money.” For technology decisions, time is also risk. The longer the wait, the greater the challenges – including technological changes, “scope creep” and evolving business processes.
6. How viable is the vendor? While some vendors are financially and strategically viable, others may be too young and/or have too narrow of a focus to survive in a competitive industry fueled by acquisitions.
7. Is a deep discount offsetting less functionality? While adding a module to an existing core system usually costs less than implementing a best-of-breed departmental system, best-of-breed systems cost about the same and deliver considerably more value.
8. Does the new system warrant a different deployment model, like SaaS? If the business requirements include collaboration, mobility and/or remote access, implementing a best-of-breed departmental system via SaaS makes more sense.

Researching, evaluating and selecting new software solutions are notoriously tough endeavors. They don’t teach this stuff in college and very few professionals make a career out of buying software solutions. Taking time to consider the questions above will help guide your decision.

Processes, procedures and work instructions are all part of the business eco-system, and just like life on earth, they work best when we work to manage all of them together in perfect harmony.

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A Brief History Of Process – From the Industrial Revolution To Today	Battling the Paper Addiction-3 Ways to Help Employees Detox	ECM…who actually uses this stuff?

This article covers the KM movement in India but it is relevant for anywhere. It covers the initial meeting of the Pune K-Community and the author, Madanmohan Rao, covers 12 trends from the session. I will not go into all of them but mention a few that I especially liked and you can view the rest through the link above.

The first one was “Mature KM initiatives address not only internal collaboration but also external collaboration.” As I have written before this is why I like the term social business used by IBM rather than enterprise 2.0. You need to align both internal and external knowledge efforts rather they are through social media or other means. Many companies have recognized the value of involved customers and external business partners in their business decision, rather it be comprehensive crowd sourcing or simple incremental improvements to a specific product. Madanmohan lists Procter & Gamble and Nike as good examples.

Another trend is “Social media are playing an increasing role as knowledge narrative, and mobile cloud is a key trend in workflow infrastructure.”  I feel social media has transformed KM in a very positive way. The first time I saw a blog I saw it as a new way to do KM.  You collect knowledge in the process of doing work so the issue for KM shifts from collection to curation. Of course mobile is huge and will transform many things from how you purchase products to knowledge capture and sharing.

It was also noted that, “gamification is a growing practice in KM, such as coding contests and competitions for best personal KM (MySite) at Unisys, as well as a best paper contest to showcase thought leadership in a field.” Gaming incentives have been around for some time. They just have more tools and the social aspects have increased their visibility and impact.

Then there was my favorite, “the true success of KM is when it "disappears," meaning that KM processes are embedded in workflow.” The author mentioned that 90 percent of the knowledge contributions in Wipro happen as part of the normal workflow and are not created via additional activities. This is where social media is a great enabler. But it does not put KM professionals out of a job as they will be needed to design and upgrade such workflow tools which is was my introduction to knowledge management in the early 90s.

Take a look at the other trends. It is a useful article.

1. Adobe CQ
2. Concrete5
3. DemandWare
4. dotCMS
5. DotNetNuke
6. Drupal
7. Ektron
8. Elcom CMS
9. EPiServer
10. ExpressionEngine
11. eZ Publish
12. Hannon Hill Cascade Server
13. Hippo CMS
14. iApps
15. Ingeniux
16. Joomla!
17. Kentico
18. Liferay
19. Magnolia
20. ModX
21. Octopress
22. OpenText (RedDot)
23. Plone
24. SharePoint
25. SilverStripe
26. Sitecore
27. Tridion
28. Umbraco
29. Websphere Commerce
30. WordPress

Other contributors include Adriaan Bloem (@adriaanbloem), Steven Brent (@stevenbrent), Timothy Davis (@timothydavis), Lee Roberson (@lroberson), Robb Winkle (@robbwinkle), Wes Winham (@weswinham) and of course, the guy who started it all, Deane Barker (@gadgetopia). If you know of any secrets for sniffing a CMS, let me know and I will add it and create you an account so you can use the www.cmfieldguide.com website. If you like to code Python and Django, you can code it yourself and submit a pull request on github.

Strategy Formulation vs. Process Improvement is like architecture and construction:  they are equally important.  And, wholly interdependent.  One cannot be fulfilled without the other.

Without a good  strategic vision of the future, the business you are building  may not be relevant to your market (sounds like too many enterprises we all know, right?).  With a good vision but bad execution the business you build may be nice looking on paper, but certainly not performing for the customer, your employees and your bank account.

Executing a strategy (process) demands relatively far more sustained leadership commitment, resource allocation, continuity, metric and time-horizon precision, and mass participation:  drawing the strategy is easier than actually executing it (process).

We’ve also seen that the “known deficiencies” in an organization’s execution capabilities (absent leadership, weak business process, metric vagueness, measurement imprecision, poor enabling technologies) actually bias, disable and dilute the Strategic process, i.e. “we know that our enterprise isn’t capable of really executing the strategies we actually need to execute, so we’ll just formulate some that we can.” (sound familiar?)

What Is Missing?

What gets measured gets done.

The problem is that most companies don’t improve processes with data instead they keep creating new processes to solve old process problems (adding tactics to existing marketing or operating processes). You can’t improve a process that isn’t being measured. Instead all you end up doing is spinning in circles with no forward advancement.  How do you know if anything has improved unless you have a measure?

The same issues apply to roles and responsibilities. Leadership deals with strategy. Management (all your employees are managers) deals with tactics. The difference between those that are in strategic roles vs. those in tactical roles is emphasis. So that means if there is no executive focusing on strategies and no managers focusing on related tactics then there is no progress worth measuring.

Tomorrow is about strategy while today is tactical.  However without relevant process data today and tomorrow are irrelevant.

Get it?