Jonathan Adler meets Liberace...

Lather, rinse, repeat...

Um, about the new cover sheet on the TPS report... (In my best Bill Lumbergh voice) Pretty much sums it up.

“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” -Marshall McLuhan

Your CMS: With any luck you’ll outgrow it and need to replace it. But there are some companies who have to replace theirs long before that point. In fact, they’ll never outgrow it because they never got it to work to begin with. I find these to be the most challenging and interesting projects, and I’m lucky to have reached a point in my career where I’m usually only asked one question, “can you turn this failing project around and deliver a successful CMS?”.

Deciding to pull the plug on a moribund CMS may seem simple, but for most businesses deciding to stop fixing and start replacing is a difficult and painful process. And consultants are not always comfortable with telling a client their baby is ugly, or even able to early enough to head off disaster. But after a year or two of struggling to make a failed system work even the most irrational businesses are usually ready to cut their losses. And when they are there are some often overlooked concepts that make the bitter pill go down a bit more easily. The first of these is the concept of sunk costs, or specifically, avoiding the sunk cost fallacy.

In both economics and business decision-making, sunk costs are retrospective (past) costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Once a decision-maker has irreversibly committed resources, sunk costs become an unavoidable cost and should be included in any decision-making processes. For example, if a business is considering purchasing a new CMS system, but has not actually purchased it yet, the cost remains avoidable. But in the case of a failed CMS, a business must choose between the following two end results:

1. Having paid the price of the system and continuing to suffer with a system that does not address their needs, or;
2. Having paid the price of the system and having changed course to buy and build something more suitable.

In either case, the business has paid the price of the system so that part of the decision no longer affects the future, meaning the current decision should be based on whether it can be made to work at all, regardless of the price, just as if it were a free system. Since the second option involves suffering in only one way (spent money), while the first involves suffering in two (spent money plus wasted time), option two is obviously preferable. But complicating this is the fact that managers and CTOs have a strong aversion to “wasting” resources, called “loss aversion”. In this example, many managers would feel obliged to continue with the project despite not really expecting any success because doing otherwise would be wasting the cost of the CMS and the time and cost of the teams implementing it; they feel they passed a point of no return. This is the sunk cost fallacy, and it’s flawed reasoning. Because the first option misallocates resources by depending on information irrelevant to the decision, it is in truth more wasteful than the second while superficially appearing to be less so.  The more quickly decision-makers decide to go with the second option the better it will be for both them and the business as the costs associated with time are reduced or avoided completely. Understanding why people ‘throw good money after bad’ helps decision-makers avoid this flawed thinking and make effective decisions faster.

Managers often make a subjective decision that by purchasing a CMS they are making a public and professional commitment to launching and running it successfully. To abandon the chosen system is to make a lapse of judgment obvious to the business, an appearance they may rationally choose to avoid. But a more effective line of thinking and approach is to stress the positive aspects: Though they may have comprehended the flaws of the first choice later than ideal, they still recognized the opportunity cost early enough to change course. Obviously the sooner the decision to re-platform is made the more effective this approach.

Which brings us to another useful notion from economics: Opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the next-best choice available to someone who has picked between several mutually exclusive choices. Opportunity cost is assessed in terms of anything which is of value such as money, time, and material. For example, a business which desires to launch a CMS and a DAM simultaneously and does not have the resources to execute both can launch only one of the desired systems. Therefore, the opportunity cost of launching the CMS could be launching the DAM. But if a business delays one program while launching the other, the opportunity cost will be the time that that business spends launching one program versus the other. One case I was involved in was a project that decided to devote a period of time to conducting more integration testing rather than spending it on UI design. The opportunity cost of having a more stable system was therefore a prettier and friendlier UI, a decision that made sense for this business. In the situation of deciding what to do about a refractory CMS, the opportunity cost to a business of struggling with fixing CMS A would be implementing CMS B. For the team making that decision, the opportunity cost of staying with the wrong system could be twofold – the extra costs of struggling to fix the first system, and their reputation within the company and their field. This has a lot of explanatory power when trying to understand why companies press forward regardless trying to make the wrong system work.

Fundamental to assessing the true cost of any business decision or course of action is assessing opportunity costs. Ignoring opportunity costs results in the illusion that benefits cost nothing at all where there is no explicit cost attached to the course of action, or the cost is negligible. The unseen opportunity costs then become the implicit hidden costs of that decision. Keep in mind that opportunity cost is not the sum of the available alternatives when those alternatives are mutually exclusive to each other. The opportunity cost of a business’ decision to dedicate a server to a CMS is the loss of the server for a DAM instance, or the inability to use the server for a backup, or the money which could have been made from renting space and time on the server to a partner, as any one of these would preclude the possibility of the others. Most opportunities are difficult to compare but it remains a crucial exercise in the end.

And there are another set of commonly ignored costs that impact re-platforming decisions: Switching costs. Switching costs are any impediment to a customer’s changing of suppliers. Simply put, switching costs are barriers  to making a switch to another vendor, platform, framework, anything, really.

Types of switching costs include: search costs, learning costs, cognitive effort, emotional costs, equipment costs, development and operations costs, financial risk, psychological risk, and social risk. Some of these costs are easy to estimate. The more tangible of these to a business, search costs and learning costs; the effort and expense required to find an alternative vendor and learn how to use the new product, are usually expected in these situations, as are the costs of developing and integrating the new system, training users, and supporting it in production. But chronically underestimated or overlooked by businesses are the psychological, emotional, and social costs of switching. These switching costs go a long way to explain the reluctance of some managers to cut their losses when it becomes obvious a system is never going to meet the business’ needs.

Conversely, you can use switching costs to your benefit when soliciting a new project by employing the 10x rule business strategy. It states that order-of-magnitude improvements in costs, efficiencies, and benefits to the business will overcome most reluctance arising from switching costs. If you can show that a new system delivers improvements in most aspects on the order of 10x, you’re much more likely to secure approval, funding and have the project be deemed a success.

Assuming you launch it successfully.

I wrote the passage below as a reply to the question “Open Source vs Proprietary [enterprise] CMS: why go either way?” in a discussion at LinkedIn on this topic. I’m re-posting it here after requests from some who do not belong to the group and have no interest in joining.

It has been my experience that in every vendor selection I’ve participated in at the enterprise level proprietary CMS have always won out over Open Source CMS. OS CMS tend to suffer from absent the robust sorts of functionality that are found in proprietary enterprise-level CMS that these customers seek: Easily and highly configurable workflows, group management, search, deployment, multichannel support, and scaling and performance. I’ll expand on each of these specifically, below. Before the OS fans rush to point out that there are add ons/modules/plug ins for their preferred OS CMS for each of these, let me acknowledge that yes, they exist and point out that they are not as integrated and/or configurable and feature-rich as enterprise customers expect and need.

Workflow and group management are two sides of the same coin: Enterprise customers need a robust and configurable workflow and configurable with meaningful group management to automate complex business processes across teams through the workflow.

Search: OS CMS search is good enough for their intended use, but not for the sort of searches and indexing across millions of records that is needed at the enterprise-level. TeamSite’s Idol search engine is considered state of the art at the moment at the enterprise level.

Deployment and multichannel support are also two sides of the same coin: Enterprise ecommerce sites often need to publish the same content, maintained as a single source, to different targets simultaneously in different formats based on business rules that are baked into the CMS. The transformations that need to take are not something easily accomplished with Drupal, Joomla, or even Alfresco, nor is publishing to multiple targets in different domains without some crafty tweaking. Whereas this is native functionality in an enterprise CMS like Ektron, SiteCore or TeamSite.

Scaling and performance are critical: My current employer has over 8 million records active in its CMS. Joomla is limited by it’s own code to around 70 thousand articles. Drupal is somewhat better, and only Alfresco can support numbers like ours we found. This brings up another OS limitation: IA. The two OS CMS you mentioned, Drupal and Joomla, were intended to manage content as ‘articles,’ such as a blog. Enterprise content tends to be far more rich and have complex relationships that demand substantial and meaningful information architectures. Something that those OS CMS are fundamentally unable to accommodate without extensive modification, yet again is present and native to enterprise CMS. Yes, you can customize your OS CMS to meet business requirements, but therein lies a huge risk: customizations can take your application off the upgrade path. And once off the upgrade path you’re forced either into very, very costly development and QA efforts in order to port your customizations to the new point releases or just muddling along with the version you have which inevitably will become unsupported without an additional support contract. Either way is costly and ultimately unnecessary in enterprise CMS. I’ve seen this issue happen many, many times, and it never ends well for those who made these decisions.

The trope ‘Free Like A Free Puppy’ sums up another concern that many large enterprises have that OS CMS may have a lower upfront cost, but greater total lifetime costs due to lack of adequate pre-release QA and post-release support. Large ecommerce businesses find it very compelling that proprietary CMS have dedicated support and engineers on staff whose sole role is to help you integrate and write code as well as an active QA team and a genuine, meaningful engineering cycle.

Again, I understand that OS CMS can be extended to cover these cases, but it’s risky and expensive. Large ecommerce businesses often ask why bother when you can buy a CMS that was designed with the same functionality baked in and is fully tested and better supported.

I noticed several interesting trends in the various responses. Most notable (and alarming) was a lack of understanding of the term ‘enterprise.’ Another was the total denial in partisans that the lack of enterprise features in their preferred OS CMS would have anything to do with it not making an enterprise’s short list. Benford’s law of controversy tells us that passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available, so perhaps the latter is driven by the former.

Link to the original discussion

Also, instituting content governance presents organizations an opportunity to conduct some meaningful knowledge management by sharing knowledge across teams while creating and spreading consensus. Since most people bristle at the idea of suffering through compliance reviews and spend far too much time striving to pass audits and not adding more meaningful value like improving content integrity and time to market, I feel it’s the responsibility of those conducting content governance to ensure the success of those who must comply. Provide users the tools they need to comply, don’t leave them to their own devices. A user-maintained visual style guide on an intranet is a must-have. Smart organizations will leverage native talent and use crowdsourcing here.

The first issue listed in this topic, findability of content, touches on this but is but one facet of a content model and not necessarily the most critical, though some frustrated content managers would no doubt disagree. Other IA facets that need you should keep in mind in both governance and content modeling are content reuse, multichannel, personalization, and regulatory compliance. Since this discussion is about content governance I won’t get into the IA aspects here, but without proper IA at the beginning content owners will likely find themselves hamstrung on one or more of these and all the governance in the world won’t solve the mess.

Done together, proper information architecture and a sufficiently empowered content governance mechanism in place to ensure compliance through enforcement are a powerful but inexpensive tool that can yield meaningful, noticeable and recurring results to a company’s bottom line.

How so? By making content governance a part of a company’s organizational learning. The knowledge represented in the content standards can be leveraged as a strategic asset by sharing the knowledge via the before mentioned visual style guide. This helps people and groups to learn and share valuable content insights to avoid redundant work, to avoid reinventing the (content) wheel with each project, to cut training time for new employees, to keep intellectual capital as employees turnover, and to more quickly adapt to changing technologies and markets.

Just as there’s more related to content management than pushing content to the site, there’s more to content governance than enforcing content models. If content management is truly 20 percent technology and 80 percent process as they say, then modeling and governing your existing workflows, practices and infrastructure and maintaining that information where people and groups can access and easily understand is just as crucial. Being able to explicitly see how changes to tools, content models, and process are likely to affect people’s jobs and impact projects and the business is powerful and saves money. Only when you can see across the full spectrum of content, workflow and systems can you genuinely streamline workflows and do any true  optimization for time to market. Remember, optimize the whole, not the parts.

I’ve seen companies not just turn around failing content management teams and systems but make their content and the systems and processes supporting it a competitive advantage by embracing content governance coupled with sound information architecture as its foundation. And I’ve seen content and its management become a burden and hindrance to success when they governance and architecture.

Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ OrganicThreeMinds is about marketing strategy, consumer trends, and the customer experience, viewed through the lens of digital innovation. We want to engage in a dialogue about the design of exceptional experiences. ThreeMinds is a collaborative project of the minds at Organic, a leading digital marketing agency.

via threeminds.organic.com

Again, let me repeat that: “sentiment analysis won’t ever be enough, and not because of sarcasm or industry specific slang, but because we are measuring the WRONG thing. It’s about the effect, not the content of the message.”

click the pic for a full size image

It’s creator, Bud Caddell, has captured some rare insights into how things actually are, if not work, and those insights are profound: “Mediocrity is not a sustainable strategy. Being able to recognize your own weakness is a profound strength, and acting to improve what you do is key to any kind of long term growth and stability” … “We’ve come across things people want us to do, that we do well (or at least better than the competition) that we really don’t want to do. This is perhaps the most fatal trap for any business I’ve worked in. These are the sirens calling you to shipwreck. You’ll hemorrhage your best people, you’ll stop loving what you do, and you’ll lose the passion that built your business in the first place. Start saying ‘No.’“

Aside from embodying the characteristics of the infographic archetype; clarity, completeness, accessibility, the source of my resonance with this particular formulation was the fact that I’d been considering various business models for a social media venture since May. Struggling to find the intersection of what I do well with what people are willing to pay me to do, I was continually confronted with the need to justify why I would not just continue as I have, being paid to do something I do well and people are will to pay for. Staring at the diagram, I realized that it was the graphic representation of the mental process I’d been cycling through in evaluating each model. It was as close to an epiphany I’m likely to encounter. Now I had something to point to and say ‘Here. This is how I came to this decision.’ Something that Bud is able to turn a buck on. Talk about being paid to do something you want to do.

This wasn’t the first time good information design has inspired me, only the most serious. Other times were more entertaining. It started as a nine year old and Otl Aicher’s popular stick figures introduced at the 1972 Munich Olympics. By the 1990′s some of the charm was lost, due no doubt to the pervasive Visio flows that had invaded my work life. But the video for Röyksopp’s “Remind Me” brought it back.

A product of the H5 studio, it illustrates the power information design has to tell a story. A lesson not lost on Areva it seems in its promotion of a more serious topic.

But the fun with information design didn’t stop there. Greg Dizzia showed me that there’s more than one way to present your resume, and an altogether other way to present your dating history (follow this link and view the PDF to see what I mean).

I’m unsure whether I’m more impressed with his method of presentation or the breadth of his data set, considering he’s had only around ten years to accumulate it. At the heart of every infographic is usually data and the point of the infographic is the imparting of the meaning and implications of that data to the reader. There Greg succeeds brilliantly.

Getting across that data in the most accessible means implies choices, and when it comes to chart selection it becomes more art and less science nowadays. New tools used to generate the images are becoming more common and easier to use, opening the even the most complex chart types to amateurs and business managers. Complex types, such as arc charts, take on a beauty of their own. Combine slick graphics with animation and the web, and the experience is most compelling. In the end, information must be conveyed in order to be useful. Sometimes the information is complex notions.

Other times it’s simply just a fairytale.

Either way, the lesson is if you are interesting people will be interested.

Sources

• http://nicolasrapp.com/
• http://www.h5.fr/
• http://dizzia.deviantart.com/
• http://vi.sualize.us
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/densitydesign/

2008 Macys.com Christmas party, the non-gropey one, I think. That's Kent A., president, and Alina B., from HR. She had no idea what the next Christmas party would bring...

Office mates, partners in crime

Time off for good behavior

Good behavior? Not so much...