Jon On Tech

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame.
All day long I hear him shout so loud,
Crying out that he was framed.
- I SHALL BE RELEASED

How many WCM implementations leave customers grinning from ear to ear? The statistics make sad reading. But if so many projects don’t meet expectations, who is to blame? Is it the vendor, either because of a crappy product or dodgy practice? Or the implementer that eats your budget while making a beautiful product smell real bad? Or are the customers naive, unrealistic or worse?

On Wednesday morning, the Web Content Management Track of the Greatest Web Conference in the World kicks off. The opening session, “Inconvenient truths and unsolved industry challenges “, has a rather unambitious aim – to solve the world’s WCM problems. A bit like WCM World Peace. On the panel we’ll have Janus Boye himself representing the customer viewpoint, Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch representing the analyst massive, and little old me defending the honour of the implementers.

The topics are sure to be varied, and our esteemed moderator will be sourcing questions from the crowd, and from Twitter. We’ll be using the hashtag #fixwcm so be sure to set up your Twitter search now, and get involved in the discussions. Apart from blaming each other for multiple disasters, some other issues we might be covering include:

• Does the term WCM even make sense these days?
• Are there too many vendors out there, and will we see consolidation?
• Can buyers navigate the marketplace themselves?
• Why do so many projects fall on their face?
• Will Open Source vendors dominate in the future?
• Do you need hard requirements to select a CMS, or is it a philosophical decision?
• Are more Web / Content Standards the answer to our prayers?
• Why are the Requests for Proposal always so bad?

You can start shaping the session right now by tweeting your thoughts using our #fixwcm hashtag. We want to hear why you think WCM is broken, and what the biggest challenges are. Or if you just want a 140-character rant about a horrorshow of a project, that’ll be fun too.

Join us live on Twitter on Wednesday 4th November between 10:30 and 12:00 CET to throw in some curveballs. And if, for some reason, you’re attending the conference but choose to attend one of the competing parallel sessions (like the great Kristina Halvorson, Bob Boiko, Jane McConnell or Shawn Shell – it’s a tough pool), you can still participate on Twitter at the same time!

See you in person or in the Twittersphere. It’s going to be cold as hell in Aarhus, but the discussions are sure to get heated.

P.S. If you think the main WCM problem is the design of the content repository, it looks like @pmonks, @justincormack, @micycle and others might have it fixed before our session starts. Hope they’ll share their findings live! The Content Tree is Dead. Long Live the Content Graph.