Content Management: Modern Mastodon in a Tar Pit, Part One
April 17, 2009
Editor’s Note: This is a discussion of the reasons why CMS continues to thrive despite the lousy financial climate. The spark for this essay was the report of strong CMS vendor revenues written by an azure chip consulting firm; that is, a high profile outfit a step or two below the Bains, McKinseys, and BCGs of this world.
Part 1: The Tar Pit and Mastodon Metaphor or You Are Stuck
PCWorld reported “Web Content Management Staying Strong in Recession” here. The author, Chris Kanaracus, wrote:
While IT managers are looking to cut costs during the recession, most aren’t looking for savings in Web content management, according to a recent Forrester Research study. Seventy-two percent of the survey’s 261 respondents said they planned to increase WCM deployments or usage this year, even as many also expressed dissatisfaction with how their projects have turned out. Nineteen percent said their implementations would remain the same, and just 3 percent planned to cut back.
When consulting firms generate data, I try to think about the data in the context of my experience. In general, pondering the boundaries of “statistically valid data from a consulting firm” with the wounds and bruises this addled goose gets in client work is an enjoyable exercise.
These data sort of make sense, but I think there are other factors that make CMS one of the alleged bright spots in the otherwise murky financial heavens.
La Brea, Tar, and Stuck Trapped Creatures
I remember the first time I visited the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. I was surprised. I had seen well heads chugging away on the drive to a client meeting in Longbeach in the early 1970s, but I did not know there was a tar pit amidst the choked streets of the crown jewel in America’s golden west. It’s there, and I have an image of a big elephant (Mammut americanum for the detail oriented reader) stuck in the tar. Good news for those who study the bones of extinct animals. Bad news for the elephant.
Is this a CMS vendor snagged in litigation or the hapless CMS licensee after the installation of a CMS system?
I had two separate conversations about CMS, the breezy acronym for content management systems. I can’t recall the first time I discovered that species of mastodon software, but I was familiar with the tar pits of content in organizations. Let’s set the state, er, prep the tar pit.
Organizational Writing: An Oxymoron
Organizations produce quite a bit of information. The vast majority of this “stuff” (content objects for the detail oriented reader) is in a constant state of churn. Think of the memos, letters, voice mails, etc. like molecules in a fast-flowing river in New Jersey. The environment is fraught with pollutants, regulators, professional garbage collection managers, and the other elements of modern civilization.
The authors of these information payloads are writing with a purpose; that is, instrumental writing. I have not encountered too many sonnets, poems, or novels in the organizational information I have had the pleasure of indexing since 1971. In the studies I worked on first at Halliburton Nuclear Utility Services and then at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, I learned that most organizational writing is not read by very many people. A big fat report on nuclear power plants had many contributors and reviewers, but most of these people focused on a particular technical aspect of a nuclear power generation system, not the big fat book. I edited the proceedings of a nuclear conference in 1972, and discovered that papers often had six or more authors. When I followed up with the “lead author” about a missing figure or an error in a wild and crazy equation, I learnedthat the “lead author” had zero clue about the information in the particular paragraph to which I referred.
Flash forward. Same situation today just lots more digital content. Instrumental writing, not much accountability, and general cluelessness about the contents of a particular paragraph, figure, chart, whatever in a document.
Organizational writing is a hotch potch of individuals with different capabilities and methods of expressing themselves. Consider an engineer or mathematician. Writing is not usually a core competency, but there are exceptions. In technical fields, there will be a large number of people who are terse to the point of being incomprehensible and a couple of folks who crank out reams of information. In an organization, volume may not correlate with “right” or “important”. A variation of this situation crops up in sales. A sales report often is structured, particularly if the company has licensed a product to force each salesperson to provide a name, address, phone, number, and comments about a “contact”. The idea is that getting basic information is pretty helpful if the salesperson quits or simply refuses to fill in the blanks. Often the salesperson who won’t play ball is the guy or gal who nails a multi million dollar deal. The salesperson figures, “Someone will chase up the details.” The guy or gal is right. Distinct content challenges arise in the legal department. Customer support has its writing preferences, sometimes compressed to methods that make the customer quit calling.
Why CMS for Text?
The Web’s popularization as cheap marketing created a demand for software that would provide writing training wheels to those in an organization who had to contribute information to a Web site. The Web site has gained importance with each passing year since 1993 when hyperlinking poked its nose from the deep recesses of Standard Generalized Markup Language.
Customer relationship management systems really did not support authoring, editorial review, version control, and the other bits and pieces of content production. Enterprise resource planning systems manage back office and nitty gritty warehouse activities. Web content is not a core competency of these labyrinthine systems. Content systems mandated for regulatory compliance are designed to pinpoint which supplier delivered an Inconel pipe that cracked, what inspector looked at the installation, what quality assurance engineer checked the work, and what tech did the weld when the pipe was installed. Useful for compliance, but not what the Web marketing department ordered. Until recently, enterprise publishing systems were generally confined to the graphics department or the group that churned out proposals and specifications. The Web content was an aberrant content type.
Enter content management.
I recall the first system that I looked at closely was called NCompass. When I got a demo in late 1999, I recall vividly that it crashed in the brightly lit, very cheerful exhibition stand in San Jose. Reboot. Demo another function. Crash. Repeat. Microsoft acquired this puppy and integrated it into SharePoint. SharePoint has grown over time like a snowball. Here’s a diagram of the SharePoint system from www.JoiningDots.net:
SharePoint. Simplicity itself. Source: http://www.joiningdots.net/downloads/SharePoint_History.jpg
A Digital Oklahoma Land Rush
By 2001, CMS was a booming industry. In some ways, it reminded me of the case study I wrote for a client about the early days of the automobile industry. There were many small companies which over time would give way to a handful of major players. Today CMS has reached an interesting point. The auto style aggregation has not worked out exactly like the auto industry case I researched. Before the collapse of the US auto industry in 2008, automobile manufacturing had fractured and globalized. There were holding companies making more vehicles than the US population would buy from American firms. There were vast interconnected of supplier subsystems and below these huge pipelines into more fundamental industrial sectors like chemicals, steel, and rubber.
CMS today is more like a fruitcake. The fruitcake I have in mind is a tasteless, heavy concoction with chunks of vegetable matter distributed more or less at random. The heavy, dark “cake” is reserved for special occasions, and I can’t wait for an opportunity to toss the half dozen or so people give me every year in the mine run off pond. My goslings won’t eat the stuff. As an addled goose, I may peck at the agglomeration.
Yummy. Enjoy digital fruit cake throughout the year. One cake lasts a long, long time.
CMS or content management systems caught fire. The reasons for the interest in enterprise software that would provide tools and functions for putting content on a Web site are not far to seek:
- Remove the nerds from strategy meetings. CMS put the nerds who knew how to manipulate marked up content on servers were put on the sidelines. Marketers and sales managers who wanted to use the Web as a door way to revenue heaven did not have to attend meetings about the Web site or ecommerce site. Who wants technology and programming to get in the way of converting a Web site into a TV commercial or a full blown software application.
- Make it easy to “create content”. Once designed, content (in theory) could be drafted by a person with knowledge and writing skills (quite assumptions in my experience) by filling in blanks, clicking on topics, or highlighting a graphic on a work flow diagram. (Yikes)
- Keep track of who did what and when. CMS provided a way to know who wrote what, when, who approved the content, who changed the content, and, in some cases, roll back a change to a previous version and update the appropriate file on the Web server “out there” on the Internet.
CMS became available in as many different flavors, styles, and colors as thread in a button shop. Free and open source systems have been around a long time. High end systems flowed into the market from giants like Microsoft to little known start up outfits like Ektron. As the need to update Web sites grew, CMS expanded into portals, not just content but comprehensive systems to display virtual machines or containers of information. One now defunct outfit called Sagemaker, combined search from Retrieval Technologies with an early version of mash up technology. The demo was impressive, but the flakiness of the underlying code was the undoing of some clients’ appetite for that brand of fruitcake.
Human Caused Problems
The lay of the land today is similar to San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.
Chicago fire, caused by a human and allegedly a bovine. The bovine did not say much. The remains of the city look like the CMS vendor landscape in my opinion.
There are some structures standing like Documentum and Interwoven within hardened corporate shells. But for the most part, there’s quite a bit of smoke and fire, fear, costs, and hassles.
What’s the fix?
Enterprise publishing systems and tools such as those provided by MarkLogic may be part of the answer. Cloud vendors like SquareSpace.com may have another part of the solution. Whether you want on premises solutions or managed services solutions, today’s big names are likely to find themselves in a seismic zone. Some like the building in the graphic above will survive. Others will have to be knocked down and replaced.
And Where Does Search Fit?
I think this is an interesting question. My recollection of early CMS is that search was an after thought. Most of the systems provided some finding features; for example, one could display the documents in alphabetical order or the documents “owned” by an authorized user. A search would use whatever facility was baked into the system. NCompass, according to my notes from 1999, supported key words.
I recall hearing a briefing given by the boss of Verity. The principal recollection I have of the talk was that he was an avid skier with a love from his home country’s slopes. The other point I noted was that Verity was beating the bushes to find companies to license the Verity search system for inclusion in other enterprise software. Content management systems vendors, I jotted down, were “targets”.
Today, search in content management system dates from this Verity model as I think of it. A search vendor licenses a search “stub”. The search function was a part of the plumbing and pretty much a basic way to locate a document. For the CMS vendor, the user complaints about not being able to find a document were reduced somewhat. For the search vendor, the search stub was a rain check for a search sales call.
Here’s how that worked. The licensee of the CMS would want to locate content “outside” of the CMS. To achieve that, the CMS vendor would point the customer to the search vendor. The leaders in this sector were first Verity (acquired by Autonomy) and then later a wide range of companies offering findability solutions. The CMS licensee would say, “I need to tap into this file system or access that repository.” The search vendor would say, “No problem. Just license the full Autonomy IDOL system and you are good to go.”
This worked surprisingly well but started to lose traction two or three years ago. The CMS licensees started to wonder about the cost of the full bore systems, which could easily zoom into seven figures. Open source solutions were becoming available. Larger vendors would “toss in” enhanced search with other enterprise software. Googzilla showed up with the Google Search Appliance and the “it’s simple” sales pitch.
Stephen Arnold, March 17, 2009
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
