Philadelphia is a city dominated by the memory of Benjamin Franklin. Statues, memorials, tourist stops – seemingly everything in town honors this notable Founding Father. (The rest? That’s reserved mostly for the Philly cheesesteak.)

At the UPenn Wharton UI Conference I attended in late July (Big Ben founded UPenn, too) Franklin spoke from the hereafter to educate and enlighten on the topic of web content management.

In a great presentation about how colleges and universities deal (often perilously) with web content management, Jen Yuan of UPenn invoked some of Franklin’s most notable quotes to illustrate salient points. (In an earlier post, I reference her research that found approximately 20 CMS systems are used at Penn.)

I’ve highlighted a number of the great CMS-centric Franklin-isms below and Yuan’s deftly crafted points – applicable to non-EDUs as well.

“Haste makes waste.”

It appears Franklin foreshadowed one of the biggest and most common web content management mistakes –rushing into CMS projects. If we’ve learned anything here at the CMS Myth, it’s that acting too quickly leads to trouble. Yuan notes: schools may be good at creating spec sheets and technical requirements for a CMS, but end up trying to hustle through CMS projects to achieve their objectives. This shows up in several ways:

• Because budgets are always an issue, schools make hasty CMS decisions to implement to get a quick payback in terms of reducing the number of people and time required to manage and publish content and sites.
• EDU web committees and individual stakeholders (let’s call them Big Thinkers) often believe their expertise in one discipline – say, physics  – gives them license to work fast to conquer anything, including this whole CMS thing. A common sentiment: “It can’t be rocket science; I should know, I am a rocket scientist!”
• Colleges and universities, in the move to implement, typically don’t spend enough time defining their complex organizational structures and hierarchies and prepare them to work together for web CMS success.

To avoid “Haste makes waste” problems, ask and answer critical questions: Does implementing a new CMS make sense right now? How much work, at what cost, in what timeframe will this all take? How long will we use the CMS? What’s the CMS lifecycle, and how long will it take to reap real benefits?

Further questions to explore: If we already have a CMS, does it make sense to keep our existing CMS or switch to another solution? Are we prepared to assemble an effective evaluation team with the time and fortitude to lead an enlightened product review and selection?

And finally this important question: Do we have sufficient organizational support at the highest levels to get buy in to get the time, money and organizational commitment required to do CMS right?

“Half the truth is often a great lie.”

Ben was a great philosopher. And with those eight words above, he nails one of the most overlooked factors in CMS adoption. Namely: what will the ongoing maintenance costs add up to, and are you ready to support them?

As Yuan pointed out as comparison, making a baby and raising a child are far different. Conducting CMS research, running RFPs and holding vendor interviews and demos help you identify a solution – and the winning vendor will love you for it. But remember to pay attention and factor in all the additional costs associated with buying into a CMS product – and ask your vendor to paint a full and complete picture of the costs. (Far be it from us to cast aspersions on CMS vendors.)

The lesson for you, CMS buyer: Look beyond initial software license costs, for one. That $100K software license for a commercial system will run you about 20% in annual maintenance costs, costing you another $100K over a five year period. Of course, that’s a fraction of what you’ll end up spending when you add up time, agencies, internal resources, upkeep and other expenses.

Other great chestnuts attributed to Franklin and applicable to CMS and the web:

“Distrust and caution are the parents of security.”

The bottom line: DON’T underestimate security requirements for your CMS and web properties. Schools frequently fail to allocate proper security resources, Yuan notes. If anything, go the extra mile during the planning stages to align and allocate the people, process and policies to ensure bulletproof security (especially a college and university culture dominated by independence, diversity of CMS use, dozens or hundreds of authors and a “do it myself” attitude) .

“He that teaches himself hath a fool for a master.”

Translation: Properly address your organization’s training requirements when adopting CMS. Don’t gloss over the needs of your users. Starting out with a new CMS is hard on the people tasked with using it. Software products tend to be geared toward engineers and developers; CMS vendors still have a long way to go to make their products easy to use. Low levels of user satisfaction means low user confidence levels and failure of adoption; robust training can breed familiarity and confidence and overcome some of these problems.

“There are no gains without pains.”

Ben must have had the CMS Myth on his mind when he spoke those words. We like to say CMS is not a silver bullet. No pain, no gain? We agree with that. Organizations need to realize content management is an ongoing process involving people, process and content. CMS can bring a world of positive change, but change is ongoing with CMS. And it can be painful when you introduce a new CMS to the organization.  So be innovative. Rethink your business processes, workflow and rules – embrace the opportunity for change and digital improvement that a CMS can support. Be prepared. Start early and anticipate ongoing needs for maintenance, support and preventative care for your CMS and sites.  And budget for it – now.

Related posts:

1. How many CMS systems in YOUR organization?
2. Should you throw out the CMS or just the implementation?
3. What can three wise web monkeys teach us about CMS?

I spent time last week at the UPenn Wharton UI Conference 2010 in Philadelphia, where I was treated to a session that was music to my ears.

“Your CMS is Not a Toaster,” led by Jen Yuan, an IT communications analyst in Penn’s IS and computing department, hit the nail on the head: CMS is NOT the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s a tool to help you achieve your website goals. Nothing more, nothing less.

There was a lot to take in from her session (more in a later post) but it was her research into CMS systems currently being used on campus that really made my eyes pop out.

A few months ago, Yuan conducted a survey targeting anyone who manages CMS or CMS-like systems on campus. In all, 64 people responded. The slate of questions included one asking which CMS a given group or department was using.

Care to guess how many CMS systems are in play at Penn? Five? Ten? Go higher.

Yuan’s survey identified approximately 20 (yes 20) CMS or CMS-like systems in play at Penn. The leader by far: open-source Drupal, being used by at least 14 separate departments or groups on campus, followed closely by “custom systems” (eight) and Joomla (seven).

And, old friend WordPress was cited six times by respondents, recalling for me the debate we sparked here at the Myth a few months back with our post, “Is WordPress a CMS?”  But I digress.

Rounding out the remainder of the systems consisted of a who’s who of systems and tools: Adobe Contribute, Documentum eRoom, Open Text/Red Dot CMS, Expression Engine, DotNetNuke, Sharepoint, PaperThin CommonSpot … the list goes on.

Granted, Penn’s like any other large, decentralized university operating with many, many fiefdoms that don’t easily roll up into a central web authority. But it would seem a natural to try to rationalize at least some of the systems in an attempt to standardize, save on costs, reduce the range of programming expertise required, and so on. I know – easier said than done.

It begs the question: How many CMS (or CMS-like) systems are in play at your organization? And, what are you going to do about it?

Related posts:

1. Is WordPress a CMS?
2. What Ben Franklin Can Teach Us About Web CMS
3. Does it Matter Which CMS Product You Choose?

We welcome guest mythbuster Rahel Anne Bailie to the blog. Rahel is the president of Intentional Design and a well-known expert in the world of content management and content strategy. If you’re considering an enterprise content management solution, you’ll appreciate Rahel’s sizzling summary of the whoppers you may hear in the evaluation process.

Never mind “the check is in the mail” or “you can’t get pregnant the first time” as the top untruths of our time. Now we have a high-tech list of what I’ll call misconceptions about big-box software. We’ve changed the names to a generic “Big Box” to protect the innocent, and to avoid the guilty. Hey, no one wants to get sued, right? These claims are sometimes made by vendors, who we call PSV (Predatory Software Vendors) and sometimes by integrators who we call PITA (no explanation needed). We get these situations dumped in our laps and are left to make the best of what we’ve been handed. And depending on what’s happened before we got there, the situation can be pretty grim.

Truth be told, I didn’t set out to write this post. It all started with a few of us gathered around a booth at a tradeshow, remarking with some incredulity about a couple of comments we’d heard during the morning conference sessions. Before I knew it, we’d amassed our favorite ten laughable claims by those who had something to gain by perpetuating the myths. The conversation started with the first point, which is my particular hot spot, and quickly evolved (devolved?) into a rounded “top ten” list. So without further ado:

1. Yes, it does component content management.

Well, Mr. PSV, no it actually doesn’t. And your product manager said it doesn’t (yes, I spoke to her/him at length at last month’s trade show). In fact, you don’t even know what component content management is, I can tell from our conversation. In fact, you’re using content management and document management and collaborative workspaces all pretty interchangeably. How many clients will it take who say “well, we bought Big Box product because Mr. PSV said it did” will it take before you hang your head in shame? On second thought, I don’t need to hear the answer.

2. No, it’s not contagious.

Well, actually, it is. We call it the Big Box virus. It spreads like wildfire. You install it in one department, and next thing you know, three other departments have an installation, too. Of course, none of them get implemented properly, so at some point, you have a staffer in one building getting frustrated with a staffer across campus because “the document is in the subfolder “Marketing > Proposals > 2010 > North America > Drafts>” folder. Only it’s just in the folder of the installation the yeller is using; the file doesn’t exist in the folder the yellee is looking in. So not only is the entire premise of collaboration out the window, but each rogue installation spreads the virus throughout the corporation. Gives “going viral” a whole new meaning.

3. Aw, just get the office admin to set it up.

Ridiculous? We’ve seen it done. Example. An organization had the software installed, and needed a bunch of subsites set up,  and in their infinite wisdom, assigned an office admin to “copy and paste.” Only that didn’t work (obviously), so she was left to copy down all the settings, and then set up two dozen sites, one at a time. It took her several (unnecessary) weeks. And the end products were all cookie-cutter sites, which annoyed the internal clients with department-specific needs. And she got no support from IT, who didn’t much about the product from the actual user end, it seems. And the list of gaffes goes on and on.

4. We have a price point you can’t beat.

Mr. PSV doesn’t tell you about all the hidden pricing that can run into the six figures. You’ll hear about how cheap it is, maybe even free. And it is, until you try to actually use it for any business reason.  This leads to the next misconception in this series.

5. You can use it out of the box.

It’s more like: You can use the box … as a door stop. Any real work you want to do? Oh, that takes customization. Of course it takes customization! There is no “generic” business that can use things out of the box! It’s not some desktop product like word processing that you download, install, and use. If it’s your first Big Box experience, then you’re forgiven for not knowing that. Mr. PSV isn’t. He knows that we call them Customize ‘R Us when we see their people drive up. And then the price list comes out. And the professional services people swoop in. Because, of course, without having their people do the upgrades, you get to the next misconception.

6. Sure, we support your customizations!

If the number of hankies from tears shed over this one were stretched end to end, it would reach to the moon and back, twice. OK, maybe I exaggerate. One-and-a-half times. I would wager than the vast majority of installations – dare I say virtually all? – require some sort of customization to make the application useful for a specific organizational context. But what happens when a PITA customizes your system is that product upgrades may very well break your customization. So the vendor will then tell you that your particular customization isn’t supported because, well, it will cost money to fix any breakage during the upgrade. Which leads us back to the vendor doing the customizations. Because otherwise, you have the following problem.

7. Of course we document our product revisions.

I’m sure that some PSV or PITA will take issue with this, and emphatically assert that they do, they, do, they do document all the changes as they go. Sure, right, go ahead and ask them to put it in writing. Good luck.

8. You don’t need to do any usability testing before your launch.

Yes, I know, somewhere, back at the ranch, some usability testing was done on your product before you launched it. But that was long ago, and before your upgrades, and before our customizations. How do we know the end result will work for our users?

9. Our product is intuitive.

I looked up the word intuitive, and the meaning is (and I quote from Princeton’s WordNet Search): spontaneously derived from or prompted by a natural tendency; “an intuitive revulsion”. Well, I don’t want to point out the irony, but when their products give users what we’ve come to call “the never-ending tree” of folders, subfolders, sub-subfolder, and sub-sub-sub-sub-subfolders in which to lose, er, store their information, that’s a pretty basic problem with the intuition. Too bad we couldn’t store our annual maintenance fees in that same tree and send the vendor to intuit where it might be. Find it and it’s yours! And that brings us to the last, but not least, in our list: finding information.

10. Just put a search box on it.

Sure, let’s compensate for a non-intuitive product with a search box so that we can drive our users round the bend when they query a document and get thousands of search results. There is a time and a purpose for search, but this is not one of them.

Related posts:

1. Does Size Matter with CMS Vendors?
2. Get your CMS vendor off their script!
3. Does your CMS fit?

Great news folks, CMS is now officially complete. Stick a fork in it, it’s done.

Perhaps I’m reading too much here, but this tweet just came across my desk.

If you’re not familiar with Bryan Ruby, he tirelessly covers the CMS technology landscape on the CMS Report. From Alfresco to Zope, he channels a mountain of information about the industry.

So, I may be going out on a limb here, but I’m going to call it. The CMS is feature complete.

Timestamp: June 10, 2010, 11:22 am Eastern Daylight Time.

Everything that could be built has been built. Every feature that could be imagined has been bolted on. Every vendor has achieved #leader status. We’ve seen the last gratuitous press release. The final track has been laid on this grand and epic journey from static web pages to full on Web Experience Management excellence.

Now, what to do with the rest of the day?

Related posts:

1. Go Beyond Feature List When Seeking CMS
2. Are CMS vendors selling to marketers or building for marketers?
3. Who will provide your business social apps?

Part four of four in a series on the post launch paradigm

By now you’re hopefully on board that a website is not a project.

So, what can you do to keep momentum after the dust settles from a big website launch? Here are 14 ideas to get you started. Long time readers may recognize a few of these from Life After the Redesign.

1. Create an editorial calendar: Set up a schedule for publishing new content and ensuring the site remains fresh. A simple spreadsheet will do.
2. Reward progress: Find ways to have small celebrations along the way and identify top performing team members.
3. Create ongoing releases: Determine a schedule for new releases. Consider tying it to something like the seasons (i.e. the winter release). You can’t delay Mother Nature.
4. Communicate upstream: Keep the executive team informed and in the loop while staying aligned with the business strategy. Metrics, metrics, metrics!
5. Document everything: Create style guides and document key processes to ensure new team members and external consultants can easily pick up where someone else left off.
6. Build community: Get the folks who work on the web together in person for monthly or quarterly meetings to share ideas and discuss progress. Nothing beats face-to-face interaction.
7. Solicit feedback: Send a survey to folks outside of your core team to get feedback on ideas and changes. Sure, Bob from accounting wants the site to be baby blue, but you’re bound to get some good ideas too.
8. Schedule drop in labs: Have a reoccurring time where content contributors and CMS users can drop in for help from the web team.
9. Review the competition: Nothing renews a sense of urgency like a competitive audit to ensure you’re keeping up with the Joneses.
10. Test something: You don’t need expensive analytics software to conduct a simple A/B test. Pick a high priority page and test an alternative. Measure the results and report back to the team.
11. Publish a newsletter: Send a regular communication to the team on what’s new on the site. Or better yet, create a running blog.
12. Invite external experts: Energize your team by bringing in outside points of view on what makes a great website.
13. Show visible progress: Proactively work to create scorecards that clearly articulate achievements and key metrics to the rest of the organization.
14. Test with real users: Nothing uncovers the need for more fine tuning than watching real users try to use your website. Ongoing testing helps you stay user centered and sharp.

What are we missing? How do you keep momentum post launch? Leave a comment and let us know.

Related posts:

1. Your website is not a project
2. CMS post-launch lessons for improving your website
3. A False Choice for Web Content Management

Part three in a four part series on the post launch paradigm

One of the hardest parts of a website project is figuring out what’s in scope and what’s not. If only we had an infinite supply of time, money and resources.

But hey, there’s always phase two, right?

Battle-tested web veterans let out a collective chuckle when they hear the phrase ‘phase two.’ They know it’s synonymous with ‘phase never-gonna-see-the-light-of-day.’

Why is this?

Going through a first phase website overhaul is a big undertaking. Organizations typically underestimate the effort and take heroic steps to land it successfully.

When the dust settles, the budget is gone, the team needs some R&R, and that list of stellar phase two items is a distant memory.

But here’s the catch—There’s still a phase two. It’s just not the one you imagined.

The post launch paradigm is something you often can’t imagine until you get there. Organizations enter survival mode, fighting fires, handling routine maintenance and dealing with internal politics. Some days it can be hard just to keep the digital lights on.

The savvy organizations have planned for this.

They understand a website is not a project. They have an established web governance structure and ample resources for both keeping the web operations running and investing in new strategic initiatives.

The sad part about never getting to that next phase is that those are typically the impact ideas that that will drive the business forward. They are they competitive differentiators that you plan to invest in after you’ve done the blocking and tackling.

It’s worth asking…

Was phase one even necessary?

What if phase two became your phase one?

Related posts:

1. Your website is not a project
2. The five stages of CMS grief
3. Does your web governance have teeth?

Part two in a four part series on the post launch paradigm

Paying attention to your web analytics is critical to post launch success. I hope we can all agree on that one. But analytics is complicated and making heads or tails of the data can be a full time job.

As a result, many web managers create dashboards that organize key metrics for an at-a-glance view of a website’s performance.

This often involves repackaging key metrics from a tool like Google Analytics into a format that can be more easily shared (PowerPoint or Excel).

Getting more complicated, these dashboards can combine data from multiple systems.

And on the extreme-don’t-try-this-at-home-unsupervised category, they can be completely automated, pulling from data warehouses across the organization.

While the effort is admirable, I’ve found that dashboards are usually woefully ineffective at actually enabling the organization to improve a website’s performance.

Here are a few common issues

• Too much data
• The wrong key performance indicators
• Lack of alignment to the business
• Nobody knows what to do with the data

So what’s the solution?

Try ditching the dashboards and creating simpler goal-oriented scorecards aligned to a handful of key objectives on your site.

Then focus on improving one goal at a time and develop a process for reporting, analyzing, changing and re-analyzing.

Document what works and broadcast the results across the organization using the scorecard as a framework.

I know, I know. You think I’m solving the problem simply with a semantic shift from dashboard to scorecard. What you didn’t see what the hand motion I am also using when saying the word ‘scorecard.’ That was a joke (but I do have a hand motion).

While dashboard and scorecard can be used interchangeably, they shouldn’t.

Data geeks will talk amongst themselves, but my definition is pretty simple, and of course the correct one (it’s my blog after all).

Dashboard’s are a monitoring tool used to provide an at a glance view of a broad set of data.

Scorecards are goal oriented, focus on a limited data set and align directly to a business objective.

There’s a role for both, but more often than not, organizations use dashboards as the end game. They gather some data, manually re-organize it into a nice excel doc and send it off in an e-mail.

It ends up being management eye candy with little connection to site optimization activities.

So let’s ditch the dashboards, move to scorecards and start rolling up our sleeves to take action from the data.

Related posts:

1. 14 ways to keep the pedal to the metal post launch
2. CMS Marketing Suites: Sweeter in 2010?
3. Content Analytics: The Great Equalizer

This is the first post in a four part series on the post launch paradigm.

There is no start, middle or end to a website. Yet we still operate in a project-based mentality when managing a web channel.

The success of your website and CMS depends on you breaking this habit.

Here’s how most of the web world operates today.

We parade in an army of consultants and agencies for a big budget web project only to see them scatter the second it launches.

We reassign an internal all-hands-on-deck team to build the site, only to release them to their day jobs after its complete.

We spend six figures on a new web content management system, but usually can’t justify a single full time editor.

We organize reams of web metrics and reports but rarely take action on the data.

This model only works if the web isn’t an integral part of your business. And I’m not seeing many of those companies these days.

Unfortunately it’s also the way web content management is sold. We’re still caught up on the myth that a CMS should reduce costs and that technology itself solves problems.

This myth is reinforced by the vendors–technology and service providers alike. Because the cheaper the total cost of ownership looks, the more likely you are to sign by the end of the month.

It’s time to start having a more mature conversation.

And it starts with simply understanding that your website is not a project. It’s an ongoing process that takes a sustained focus, ample resources and a culture of continuous improvement.

The day your website launches is when the real work starts.

Related posts:

1. Should you throw out the CMS or just the implementation?
2. Professional Services: Do you know what you are really buying?
3. Eight ideas for nurturing online communities

More than two weeks have passed since I spoke at J.Boye 2010 in Philadelphia on The Post Launch Paradigm with Lou Rosenfeld and Jeff MacIntyre. Our presentation was so hot, the fire alarm went off one slide into my bit. Unfortunately, that’s not a joke.

An ill timed distraction, but the building was in fact not on fire and we largely recovered, ending with a solid Q&A session with the small, but engaged audience.

I’ll be covering some high points from my talk on this blog over the next few weeks. We talk a lot about building websites, but very little about how to maintain and support them. Feel free to set off your own smoke alarm while reading to get the full conference experience.

Oh, and we had a little fun at the start of the event with a launch of our own. Hat tip to Mark Greenfield for capturing the festivities in the video below.

Related posts:

1. CMS post-launch lessons for improving your website
2. Life After the redesign with CMS
3. Two Years On: Still Puncturing Myths & Taking Names

The Gilbane San Francisco conference hits this week, offering two days of innovation and inspiration for content management and marketing pros. Here at the CMS Myth we’re thrilled again to be a Gilbane media sponsor.

But we’re even more excited for our ISITE Design colleague Melissa Casburn, our director of user experience and a UX visionary, who’s been asked to co-lead an important session Thursday afternoon titled “How to Mold the Customer Experience.” Melissa has helped clients as diverse as Zipcar, HP and MTV with user experience transformations.

Her talk (Thursday, 2-3:20 p.m., Session E7) is a must-see for anyone who values delivering more personalized and relevant web experiences for online visitors – a goal more achievable than ever with the smart use of CMS and analytics.  Melissa’s co-presenter is Randy Woods, co-founder of agency non-linear creations.

Before Melissa jetted off to San Fran this morning, we caught her just long enough to conduct an insta-interview previewing her session:

What will people learn in the session – any actionable takeaways?  Definitely. We’re going to focus on six techniques for shaping and improving your UX by merging your knowledge of users with analytics and your CMS.

What are the six? We’ll talk about developing personas; mapping personas to business outcomes; defining visitor types; personas on the page; optimizing the user experience; and integrating with analytics. Optimizing the user experience and leveraging analytics data is a missed opportunity for a lot of companies. There’s a lot of room for wins in this area. We’ll explain why optimization is a process, not just a project.

What about the intersection of CMS and UX? I like to think of it this way: If users are the steering wheel, your CMS is the engine – it allows you to apply what you know about your users to the creation and delivery of a more personalized experience.

Check out Melissa Casburn’s profile on the Gilbane website.

Related posts:

1. Gilbane CMS Conference Invades Boston
2. CMS World Evolves at Gilbane San Francisco
3. Gilbane SF: Let the Games Begin