Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
- MR. TAMBOURINE MAN

A change is as good as a holiday, they say. Well, after ten brilliant years at the company now known as LBi, it’s time for a change. I wasn’t looking for anything, but an opportunity came along that, had I turned it down, I’d probably regret for the rest of my life. More on this here; I plan to keep this blog going strong – time and lawyers permitting.

To all my LBi colleagues, thanks for the wonderful times, the beers and the things you’ve taught me. You’ve got an awesome gig going, and the road ahead looks rosy. In particular, thanks to the exec for their vision and guidance, the technical architects for all their wisdom, and my development teams for fucking up far less projects than the industry average.

To the Dream Team (@mislip, @laurajaybee, @dacrumb, @skinnybouffant and @shakster), congrats on a job well done and I’ll be watching a certain site with eager anticipation. And a huge huge thanks to my boss, Mark, for keeping me honest for the last few years.

To end my Paltrow-esque blubbering – to all my wonderful, well-informed clients that read this blog, thanks for letting me go near your projects, and for making most of the work a pleasure.

We’ll always have The Pride. It’s been real.

P.S. If anyone wants my old job (the best job at the best agency in London), mail careers@lbi.com for the attention of Mark Agar and the subject “I want Jon’s old job”. I’m serious.

Come gather ’round friends
And I’ll tell you a tale
Of when the red iron pits ran plenty.
- NORTH COUNTRY BLUES

Asterix was worried. Once again he’d woken up with his bed surrounded by water. It appeared that the melting polar ice caps were leading to a rise in the sea level, which was threatening to flood the whole of Armorica. The only solution would be to move the entire town further inland, and they’d run out of magic potion. He got up, got dressed, and went to find Overcomplix, the town’s architect. When he found him, Overcomplix looked worried too.

“So, Overcomplix, how are the plans to migrate the village inland progressing?”, inquired Asterix. “To be honest”, replied Overcomplix, “not very well. You see, when we designed this village, we opted for a tightly coupled, fully integrated architecture. The town hall is joined to the market by solid iron girders, and all of the houses are tightly welded to the market. If we could move one building at a time, we’d be okay. But if we try to separate them, the whole village will fall apart. I think Gantchartix is working on a plan, though.”

“That’s no good at all”, sighed Asterix. “I’ll talk to Gantchartix, but it sounds like we’ve built a monolith. Let me find Obelix. He’s helped us out of tight spots before.”

When Asterix found Gantchartix, he was surrounded by Microsoft Project Plans and grinning from ear to ear. “I’ve created a masterpiece”, smiled Gantchartix. “The village is saved. All we need to do is get one hundred thousand doves and connect them to the village with pieces of rope. Then, all the doves need to lift off at exactly the same moment, fly inland a bit, and land at exactly the same time. If one of them mistimes it, the village will fall apart. But look at my project plan – it’s perfect.”

Asterix wasn’t convinced. Once again, Gantchartix was living inside his plan instead of reality. “That sounds like a Big Bang approach to me, Gantchartix. Those never work. Your plan is a monolith. I really need to speak to Obelix. He has experience with these things.”

All this worrying had made Asterix hungry. He decided to visit Procurafix to grab a bite to eat.

“Sorry, Asterix, we don’t have any food,” explained Procurafix. “We are in the  middle of evaluating responses to our Supply Everything To Armorica RFP. The lawyers are embroiled in a battle over the Boar Hunting Rights clause, so the process might take a while yet. Rather annoyingly, this probably means we won’t have grain or water for a while either. It’s a single contract for everything.”

“That is annoying”, said Asterix. “In fact, your process sounds rather like another monolith. I’ll see if Obelix can move it forward. He is good at that.”

Obelix seemed to be the only one that could bypass Procurafix’s rules as when Asterix found him he was feasting on nuts and oysters. Asterix explained the sad state of affairs, and asked Obelix for help.

“Sorry, Asterix. I’m afraid I have some bad news. The Goths have offered me a much higher day rate as part of an extremely attractive package. Effective immediately, I’m working for them. You’re on your own.”

“Oh no! We’re doomed,” cried Asterix. “We should never have made those fucking monoliths.”

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.

Now I gotta friend who spends his life
Stabbing my picture with a bowie-knife
- I SHALL BE FREE NO. 10

Last week, LBi hosted the Umbraco 2009 UK meetup. This was mainly due to the enthuasism of the organiser, Darren Ferguson, and the power of Twitter. Our involvement started after I saw this:

How To Get A Free Venue

Darren and I hooked up, and the rest is history. So Twitter can get you free stuff too. The 20 people was a bit conservative – turned out that nearly 60 people signed up. Even CMSWire covered the event which makes it famous. According to Darren, the biggest cock-up of the event was the live coding demo which, true to form, failed spectacularly. I never trust a live coding demo which works properly so maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

Waiting near the barista before the start

For me the highlight was a chat with Niels Hartvig (@umbraco), Umbraco founder and guru. We talked mainly about XSLT which, I think, he likes. W00t! Turns out that he’s presenting later in the year at the Best Conference in the World. Yours truly is speaking there too. Come along – you know you want to. He flew over from Norway to be at the Umbraco Day, which kept all the groupies very happy.

Niels reveals the bonus features in the upcoming Umbraco version

I also really enjoyed chatting to Gregory Roekens (@roekens), CTO of Wunderman. It’s great to have a couple of beers with someone that works for another big agency and has to deal with the same kind of issues that I do. Hoping we’ll be able to do it again soon and, in his words, become good frenemies.

Thanks to Darren for organising, Marcus for doing all the logistics at LBi and Percipient Studios for taking a whole load of cool photos that I’ve stolen. You can also read more about the day on the LBiQ blog by @bijeshtank and @mobragauk. If anyone else knows of any other blogs or photos, please add links in the comments.

I got my dark sunglasses,
I’m carryin’ for good luck my black tooth.
Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’,
I just might tell you the truth.
- OUTLAW BLUES

Just looked at the Econsultancy CMS Survey Report 2009. It’s a great survey, and the results make interesting reading. There were over 800 respondents, with just over half representing customers, and most of others being CMS Vendors or implementers. There is a good spread of company sizes and business sectors. Most of the vendors/agencies are quite small with 90% of them having less than 100 employees. I’m not going to include any of the graphs or anything from the report as I’d probably end up in the same place as the Pirate Bay dudes. If you want to see them, you’ll need to buy the report yourself (£150) or download the free sample. The report was carried out in association with Squiz.net.

I wasn’t that surprised by most of the findings. The thing that struck me most was how well Customers and Agencies agree. The report kindly separates out the responses from the customers and suppliers, and I didn’t see many fundamental differences at all. This must be good news for the industry if everyone has basically the same world view. However, this does beg the question – if the companies and the agencies think in the same way, why are some parts of the process often like medieval torture?

The three questions that did yield significant differences:

• Why CMS projects fail – One notable difference was the scoring behind “CMS technology limitations”. Behind ease of use, customers cited this as the second most common cause of failure, with 44% selecting it. The agencies, however, had it as only the sixth biggest reason with only 25% selecting it. Of course I’m with the agencies, here. The customers often confuse the core technology with bad requirements or a poor implementation.
• Downsides of current CMS – Here, 47% of the customers cited “Lack of support for Web 2.0 functionality”. The agencies didn’t swallow the Web 2.0 buzzword hype quite as badly and it came in second, with slightly less. The agencies had “Not intuitive to use” as the major drawback (64%) while only 39% of the customers thought this. Maybe the customers are easier to please than the agencies. I’d have expected more customers than agencies to complain about ease of use.
• Are your clients planning to spend more or less on CMS in the next 12 months – An interesting difference here. It seems that the agencies and vendors don’t trust the clients to spend what they think they’ll spend. The customers think they’re going to spend more, the suppliers think they’ll spend less. Not too surprising.

Some other interesting observations:

• The average lifespan for a CMS system in the survey is about three years. That’s about what I would expect, although most customers would be horrified if you told them that. I am assuming that average “Length of time of CMS usage” for the current CMS equates roughly to average lifespan, but I think that’s probably fair. Janus Boye also thinks three years is about right.
• More customers prefer best-of-breed supplier with focus on a specific capability than a one-stop-shop solution covering the entire CMS space. This is even more true for the larger companies. Paradoxically, most of the big CMS vendors are trying to offer the one-shop-shop solution. Maybe they haven’t done their research – seems to be a supply/demand mismatch going on here.
• There was one result which surprised (nay, horrified) me. About half the customers wanted the implementation services from the CMS Vendors. No wonder so many vendor Professional Services teams rake in the cash. I’m very skeptical of this approach. I’m not particularly fond of vendors with a large PS arm that compete directly with their own partner network. And I hate vendors that claim to be partner channel only, but slip in the sneaky implementation when they think the partners aren’t looking. We’re watching you – don’t you go starting that vendor-partner dance again.
• Only 10% of customers want to do the implementation themselves. That’s good, and a sign of a more mature customer that has been burned in the past. Most customer IT teams don’t have much experience with the newly selected CMS, and the first time you implement a system is invariably a bit of a balls up. As Willy once said: Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Surveys Rock

Finally, I’m pleased to report that according to the survey, CMS customers are happy. In fact, they’re even happier than the agencies think they are. Maybe they are just whining to us to get discounts and freebies! The CMS’s are split into 4 categories here: Community Open Source, Supported Open Source, and Proprietary Specialist CMS Vendors, Proprietary “Household name” vendors such as Microsoft or Oracle. The last group gets the worst results in the customer satisfaction survey. The others all come out quite close with less than 20% of the customers and agencies giving them a Poor or Very Poor. 80% of CMS implementations are Okay or better. About half are Good or Excellent. All in all, it sounds like a happy customer base. Woot \o/.

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
“I thought you’d never say hello,” she said
“You look like the silent type.”
- TANGLED UP IN BLUE

I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked. When I started this blog, I planned to post a lot more from the “Agency Perspective” but all the recent CMS activity has kept me busy. This post was the post I planned to write first as it helps to set the scene for things I’d like to talk about in the future. So, “Hello Everyone”. Welcome to my blog.

What is a Full Service Digital Agency?

Let’s start with just the Digital Agency part, and use Wikipedia for that:

A digital or new media agency is a business that delivers services for the creative and technical development of internet based products. These services range from the more generalist such as web design, e-mail marketing and microsites etc. to the more specialist such as viral campaigns, banner advertising, search engine optimisation, podcasting or widget development etc.

The million dollar question: What exactly is a Full Service Digital Agency? I’m going to take some liberties here and invent a new acronym:  FSDA. Everyone and his dog seem to be one these days. New Media Age (NMA) tracks Agencies in their Top 100 Interactive Agencies list. I wouldn’t trust everything you read in here. Most of the numbers are volunteered by the agencies themselves, so you’re never quite sure how reliable they are. One interesting aside – the agencies have to put themselves into one of three categories: Marketing, Design & Build or Technical. Quite a few of the agencies listed would love to pick more than one of these, but you are forced to choose. Rules is rules. As a techie, I’d prefer to see us listed as “Design & Build”, but that does seem to exclude many of the other services we offer. So we’re listed as Marketing. I’m a marketeer now, I guess.

As most of you know, I work for LBi in the London office (for the purposes of this post, I’m only going to talk about the UK market in isolation, although in reality I spend a fair bit of my time working with the other offices in the network). We call ourselves “The Largest Full Service Digital Agency in the UK”. I’m going to off-brand and say we’re quite possibly also the smallest Full Service Digital Agency in the UK, if indeed it is possible to be Full Service at all. For the record, the 2008 Top 10 Agencies (by Turnover) is shown above. We’re the biggest by headcount in this list but, as I said, some of the numbers in here might be crap. The LBi headcount numbers are correct. I’ll post more about these numbers some other time. We’ve got about 350 permanent employees in the UK.

What are the services?

So, what do all of these people do in an FSDA? By definition, everything digital. I’m not going to attempt to say what this is, but I will outline what my agency does by listing all the departments in our London office. To stop myself rambling, I’ve decided on a self-imposed 140 character limit per department. All you crazy people can tweet the definitions to your friends. Or tweet me better definitions if you don’t like mine. Especially if you’re from LBi and I’ve insulted your department. I haven’t mentioned User Centered Design here as this is a key philosophy that spans all departments. In a vague project order:

• Planning & Strategy – Consultancy, Business Plans, financial models, requirements, user research/testing, personas, planning and buying
• Experience Architecture – Information architecture (sitemaps, taxonomy), requirements, wireframes, usability
• Concept & Design – The Officially Creative People. Concepting, Design, making things look pretty, copy writing, win lots of awards
• Technology - Architecture, Product Selections, Interface Dev (CSS/HTML/JS), App Dev (Java/C#), RIA (Flash, Adobe), Testing, QA
• Managed Services – Live projects. Hosting, maintenance, monitoring, application support, incremental development, tickets, help desks
• Media - Where to spend your online media budget, keywords to bid on, place ads. Campaigns, email marketing,  outbound email comms
• SEO - Get you into the first page of Google organically. Analyse algorithms. Semantic markup, crafted content, link building. Analytics.
• Delivery Management – Ensure projects are delivered, as usual, on time and under budget. Producers, Project and Programme Managers
• Client Services – Keep existing clients sweet and “grow” accounts. New Business Development (Sales) and Account Management. Play Golf

That’s 9 different departments. Within each department, things can get even more specialised. For example, our Technology department is split into 3 sub-departments: Technical Architecture, Quality Assurance and Development. The Development Department is split into Interface Development, Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft and Java. Within each of these, things get even more specialised. As the interwebs mature and spread, the number of technologies we need to be expert in continues to grow. And it isn’t going to converge any time soon. Other departments specialise in a similar way. Note that these departmental divisions are often more of an organisational need then a working reality. We try to get our teams to blend well together and many individuals could easily fit in to many of the little boxes on the org chart.

Does Size Matter?

Ignoring our internal “Core Services” (HR, Finance, Operations, Resourcing, Office Services, Marketing and Upper Management) which every company has to have, I’m told, we’ve probably got a shade over 300 “project work” people in our London office. The rough breakdown of department size by headcount looks something like this:

The information isn’t top secret, in case anyone was wondering. We disclose it on our NMA Listing (albeit mapped to their categories). When you break it down like this, an uber-agency of 350 people suddenly has less than 40 project managers (which means less than 40 active projects), under 60 designers, and less than 80 techie nerds like me. Which brings me to my point. In order to provide all the services we need to provide in order to be a credible FSDA, we couldn’t be any smaller. I’d say that any company under 300 people cannot begin to claim to be an FSDA.

It is also interesting, referring back to the Top 5 from the NMA list, that all of them have a similar number of employees. Why aren’t there any agencies with more than 400 people? The short answer – because it is difficult to keep the “agency vibe” using the structures needed to manage a massive company. The larger agencies are not trying to be like the big IT services/consultancies (Atos, Deloitte, KPMG, Accenture, Fujitsu, Cap Gemini, PWC, Wipro etc). They’re trying to behave more like a “boutique”, while maintaining the scale, professionalism and expertise needed to service the major accounts.

Neil Potter from RedWeb (another FSDA) blogged about FSDAs recently on his excellent blog . He argues that the LBi view of full service (a one stop shop that can provide everything) is outdated. While I do agree that being truly full service is probably impossible, I think a handful of agencies (in the UK) get pretty close. Neil’s blog entry says:

As Richard Sedley, Director of cScape Customer Engagement Unit and Course Director for Social Media at Chartered Institute of Marketing, told me “Today you can be full service with a limited focused offering”. I like this. “Full service” doesn’t have to mean jack of all trades. In fact, it shouldn’t mean that at all. Nowadays clients need specialists; people who know their discipline intimately and who can work with the client from conception of the idea to delivering the end product, and then studying its performance. This is where the real skill and expertise comes in.

I don’t understand the quote from Richard Sedley. Full Service does not mean “limited focused offering”. Can anyone shed any light on this for me? I agree with the rest. Of course Full Service doesn’t mean jack of all trades. Of course you need specialists. You need lots of them. You need more than 300 employees to have them, too. Yes, size matters.

You didn’t answer the question!

Sorry. In closing, I’ll define an FSDA as a Digital Agency that provides all the services you need – a one stop shop. Of course there will be gaps in the offerings, but the FSDA should have partners to help plug these. Often customers will only engage an FSDA to perform a small subset of their services. This can be a very sensible “avoid all eggs in one basket” strategy, or they already have specialist agencies with which they’re very happy. In these cases, the various agencies on the account need to work closely together. Other customers will choose to use all of the services offered as they see benefits gained when different disciplines blend. Or they just want one agency to shout at if things go tits up.

Some parts of an FSDA compete with more traditional above the line marketing agencies. Other parts (like mine) will compete with pure play systems integrators, although it looks to me like the SIs are trying to become more like agencies these days, introducing elements of the User Centered Design process into their traditionally purely technically offering.

Seeing as I’ve been agency-side for the last 10 years, I’ve got a decent understanding of most of the disciplines. But of course I know most about the technical ones, and that is what I plan to use this blog to talk about. If you do have any particular burning issues you’d like me to focus on, please let me know. Nothing quite like pandering to a non-existent audience …

I’ll go to some bar room
And drink with my friends
- MOONSHINER

Today was Day 1 at Internet World 2009 a.k.a. #iwexpo for the Twitterrati. I got there nice and early, got myself a coffee and settled in to CMS Watch’s Theresa Regli talking about “Findability in a Web 2.0 World”. It is really difficult for the speakers to pitch these at the correct altitude as the audience is so varied, but I quite enjoyed the talk. My favourite part was when she called most marketing “crap”. A nice relaxed, honest presentation.

I spent most of the day chatting to vendors. Got the lowdown from (in alphabetical order) Alterian, CoreMedia, Ektron, EPiServer, EZ Systems, FatWire, FirstSpirit, Gomez, Hybris, Jadu, Kentico, OpenText (nee RedDot), SiteCore, Squiz and Vyre. I enjoyed my chat with Ian about the crazy CMS shit we all got up to in the late nineties.

I am alway interested to see who has the biggest stands at these events. A few years ago, Tridion were all over Internet World but they aren’t at here at all any more (maybe the SDL influence?). Vignette and EMC weren’t there either. Autonomy/Interwoven were there although their collateral isn’t merged yet. Last year, Vyre had the biggest stand but they’ve decided to spend their marketing budget elsewhere and went for a normal stand this year. EPiServer seemed to have biggest stand and the most people this year. SiteCore had a big one too. Peer 1, a dedicated hosting company, had a massive stand and some really hot chixors in hotpants who looked nothing at all like network engineers.

There was a stand labelled “Plone” which made no sense and smelled a bit like a systems integrator trying to pull a fast one. It was actually manned by a company called Netsight that were trying to hijack the Plone brand. I don’t like those guys at all. Don’t give them any money please. [UPDATE: I got this very wrong. They did actually get permission to do this and are, by all accounts, good guys. So you can give them money. See the comments below or the Netsight blog for their explanations. Apologies to Netsight, Matt and everyone else. Although I'd still be happier if the booth company name said Netsight. ]

One of the cool things about these events are the freebies. I couldn’t find many stress balls this time. I did pick up one from Kentico and another from SiteCore. I’ve recently defined a new approach to Vendor Selection Exercises, so thought I’d ask the expert (my 11 month year old son) to perform an one:

After much thought, he picked SiteCore over Kentico. I’m pretty convinced he went for the rugby ball shape over the football shape, but it might have been down to cost or the developer API. As soon as he can talk, I’ll let you all know. Sometimes vendor selections can be rather random.

I watched LBi’s Dom Collier and Jill Lloyd (and our friends at the British Red Cross) talking to a packed session about a recent LBi project. For the LBi groupies, Mikey and Mark are talking about British Gas tomorrow at 13:00. One of my personal favourite projects. Get along and have a listen to that one.

The highlight of the event was, for me, the drinks afterwards. Was lucky enough to share quite a few pints with Tony Byrne from CMS Watch, Lau Andreasen from JBoye, LBi’s very own Microsoft guru Riaz, wise man James Hoskins and some other top secret guests. I can’t think of many things I enjoy more than a few pints of Guiness and a chat about CMS. Hope we can do it again some time soon. And I hope Tony has a better photo than my crappy iPhone one below.

All in all, a really interesting and enjoyable day! More tomorrow. I love this game.

We’ve been through too much tough times that they never shared.
They’ve had nothing to say to us before,
Now all of a sudden it’s as if they’ve always cared.
All we need is honesty, a little humility and trust.
Oh, darlin’, can we keep it between us?
- LET’S KEEP IT BETWEEN US

Janus Boye just posted blog about SITATM: When system integrators take all the money. I work for an SI, so should I be horrified by these accusations? Not at all. I think nearly everything he says is true, and I urge you to read his article before carrying on with this one. I would say that most SI’s do not try to take the money and run. We need long term accounts and repeat business to survive.

I do disagree with his final symptom:

You’ve worked with the same system integrator for a very long time on many different projects involving many different vendors and technologies.

In my experience this is, more often than not, a positive thing. Sure, you need to continually re-evaluate all your supplier relationships and not be complacent, but a long history is normally a healthy sign, not a worrying one.

But there are other worrying signs, some of which are also fairly clear to the SI. Here are some more you should watch out for:

• People stop questioning fundamental decisions that were made earlier in the project for fear of the answer. If the customer stakeholder that selected the SI is the same one that will look foolish if they get rid of them, things can spiral out of control. Or, as MacBeth once said to the wife: “I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
• Certain features or deliverables are created/demanded simply because they were part of a Statement of Work that is extremely old. Everyone knows the deliverable is useless and will never be used, but the contract is the contract …
• You look at your implementation one day and realise that slowly but surely the CMS product that you’ve bought has been replaced by custom modules until there is nothing recognisable left.
• The excellent team the SI gave you in the pitch and the initial project phases have been slowly replaced by a more junior, less passionate team that doesn’t know your account very well.

And some more suggestions to customers for avoiding SITATM:

• Don’t ask for a fix price for a big monolithic project. If you need a fixed price to secure budget, get one for a smaller, more predictable phase and ask for indicative costs for future phases. Make sure each phases does have useful, tangible deliverables. Reserve the right to use any outputs of Phase X as part of a new SI selection process for Phase X+1. Even if you never do it, it should keep the SI on their toes.
• After working with your selected SI for a Fixed Price project or two, ask yourself if you would trust them on an Agile/Variable Scope basis, or a Time and Materials basis. If the answer is no, you might have the wrong SI. I firmly believe everyone gets better value from a more agile/T&M based approach. But the customer and partner need to first earn one another’s trust – it is a two way thing.
• Don’t be afraid to admit earlier decisions were wrong. As you learn more about the project, you become more informed. Question everything, all the way. Show me a project that got everything right in the initial requirements, and I’ll show you a project team with their head buried in the sand.
• Ensure you have the budget for the support, maintenance and ongoing development of a project. If the budget for the initial launch is massive and then enormously scaled down, it is only reasonable for the SI to scale down accordingly. As a wise colleague of mine recently said, “The real success of a project is determined by the ease of delivering Phase 2″.

Many SI people would argue we should write a “How Do You Know When You’ve Picked A Bad Customer” article. It isn’t uncommon to hear vendors, agencies and sytems integrators saying “X is a nightmare customer. We’ve lost a fortune on that account“. I don’t buy this. I believe there is no such thing as a bad customer. But that’s a story for another blog post.

Well, Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, they were the best of friends.
So when Frankie Lee needed money one day, Judas quickly pulled out a roll of tens
And placed them on a footstool just above the plotted plain,
Sayin’, “Take your pick, Frankie Boy, my loss will be your gain.”
- THE BALLAD OF FRANKIE LEE AND JUDAS PRIEST

Corruption in Tech Paradise?

Janus Boye recently posted a thought provoking article on his blog (Is corruption an issue?) which highlights various activities in the online industry which he considers extremely dodgy. He gives some examples of some goings-on which sound pretty shifty. After listing these issues, he goes on to say:

I’ve seen many examples of contracts being signed with a vendor that was not actually the best fit for the project. As my old mentor always used to say: “The best product never wins”. Perhaps he was referring to the fact that many buyers are corrupt.

This got me thinking. He is, of course, correct although the “influencing” happens at many different levels. At one level, the corruption and kickback can get rather big. About two years ago, the US Justice Department sued Accenture, Sun and HP for fraud relating to exactly this. Many technology companies were also looked at (including a few vendors I deal with), and IBM and PWC have each coughed up more than $2 million. I’ve got no idea if the case has ended, or still going on. EMC are being investigated at the moment for similar things, although the events in this case are 10 years old.

But I digress. Before I get to the dilemma, here’s a bit of background. I work for a “full service” digital agency. I’ll write a post on what the hell this means at some point in the future, but in a nutshell the client hires us to do everything. This includes strategy, branding, research, media, creative design, user experience work and a whole lot more. Importantly, it can also include vendor selections, site build, rollout, hosting and support. There are many good reasons to want to have a single supplier perform all of these tasks for you. There are also many reasons why it might be a terrible idea. Maybe another blog post on this later too. I strongly believe that in most cases the positives outweigh the negatives – or I wouldn’t be working where I do – and for the purposes of my argument I’ll trust you to humour me.

A Hypothetical Project

Phase 2 (the implementation) isn't defined yet

Picture the scene. Client X has an idea for a large public facing web site, and engages a full service agency. At the risk of horribly over-simplifying, someone needs to do the following:

• Step 1: Firm up the requirements to an appropriate level, help with a business plan and plan the project
• Step 2: Perform some user research and testing to ensure the idea is a valid one
• Step 3: Design the user experience (UX), and do the creative work
• Step 4: Pick the tools (for example WCMS, Search and Analytics) that will satisfy the requirement, design and UX
• Step 5: Build and launch the site, which includes integrating the selected third party products
• Step 6: Continually support and improve the site post launch

Now this seems like a sensible order of events to me, with the vendor selection exercises being performed as late in the project as is sensibly possible. The more information we have at point of vendor selection the better. On all large projects, these exercises are formal and involve the customer’s Procurement department, who exist partly to combat the very corruption mentioned by Janus.

The Dilemma

So here is the dilemma. Even assuming no vendor kickbacks, no bribery and pure hearts everywhere, how can the agency/systems integrator that is going to do the build possibly be impartial?

Regardless of size, all implementers will be more skilled with certain products. As it is highly unusual that only one of the candidate products in a vendor selection exercise is fit for purpose, the deciding factor will often be which can be implemented in the most low-risk manner. Which boils down to selecting a product that your implementer is confident enough to guarantee delivery on. If using a formal scoring system, and Product A which I know well and have implemented many times scores 86/100, while Product B, which I’ve never heard of, scores 90/100, it will be better for everyone if we pick Product A. A different integrator would correctly select Product B if they have the appropriate skills. Experience is everything in the CMS implementation game.

So does that mean it isn’t ethical to select the implementer before selecting the tool as the “best product” may not win? If that’s the case, many projects are going to suffer horribly. And full service agencies like mine wouldn’t be able to offer the full service with a clear conscience. We’d have three options (referring to the simplified steps earlier):

• Perform Steps 1-4. Do the upfront planning, research, requirements and design. We’d help the client select the objectively best tools for the job (which I believe we can do), and walk away. The client would need to find an expert in the tool(s) we recommend for the build, who’d we would need to work closely with. Even if it was a tool we knew very well, we still couldn’t build as is it may look like the tool was selected for the wrong reasons.
• Perform only Steps 5 and 6. Build the site only once someone else has defined the solution and selected the products. We do a fair bit of this, but this isn’t full service so the client still might end up with all the issues associated with The Agency Finger Pointing Game.
• Perform all Steps except Step 4, and pray to all that is holy that the non-corrupt, impartial vendor selection exercise decides on a tool we can actually use.

In the first two cases, we aren’t performing our “Full Service”. The third case simply wouldn’t work. So if you can’t select the implementation team before selecting your tools, how do we take heed of the advice of one of Janus’ Web Content Management Inconvenient Truths:

It’s the crew and not the tool – forget about finding the best CMS, but do work hard to find the best implementation crew

A Little Crisis of Confidence

Wait a sec. What does this actually mean? I’ve always taken it to mean you pick an Agency/Systems Integrator (the Crew) first and then let them pick the tool (the CMS) for you? And tell Procurement to look the other way? Is this ethical? Maybe it doesn’t mean that at all. Do you pick the Crew and the CMS as a team, using another consultant with no ulterior motives to help you? If this is the approach you choose, you need to select the CMS very early in the process. It certainly isn’t a workable model for an agency like mine. Or do you pick the CMS first (maybe just flip a coin?) and put the real effort into the selection of the crew around that CMS.

Hmmm. Confusing. I’m starting to wonder if we (agencies and systems integrators) should offer formal vendor selection exercises at all. And which does comes first: the Crew or the CMS? Answers on a postcard. Help. Somebody. Please.

Come and go with me, my pretty little miss,
Come and go with me, my honey.
Take you where the grass grows green,
You never will want for money
- BLACKJACK DAVEY

It’s good to win something every now and again. We recently walked away with the best B2B Award at the 2009 Revolution Awards for British Gas’ Generation Green site. Now this happens fairly often as there are many digital marketing awards. However, I am really happy about this one because it is a site that has a whole boatload of cool technology behind the scenes.

Generation Green Home Page

For those that what to read about the marketing side of things, read this press release. The general idea is to help schools to be greener by performing various tasks, teaching Green lessons, recycling their mobile phones and more. The numbers behind the site (from the press release):

The campaign has been successful – more than 8000 schools (35%) have registered with Generation Green to date and teachers have downloaded more than 13,000 lesson plans and hosted more than 750 ‘green’ assemblies. This means that 3,168,515 children across the UK were potentially impacted by the programme. The popularity of the Green lesson plans with teachers has resulted in British Gas providing over 303,000 hours of learning in UK schools.

For those that are interested in the technology, this little site contains:

• EPiServer 5 CMS with many custom extensions
• A 5 level Flash platform game with WebORB framework to allow the Flash to talk to the EPiServer based server side code (for login, leader boards and more).
• Integration with britishgas.co.uk to generate secure tokens for leaf donation,
• SOAP web services for integrations with order placement at the fulfillment house, the external carbon calculator, and recycool leaf integration to allow schools to earn leaves by recycling their mobile phone and printer cartridges.
• Google Map mash-up for school location and postcode search.
• SQL Server Integration Services used for placing product orders and updating order status.

So, in summary, I think this is a really good idea which has been beautifully designed, and brought to life using a number of technologies. And the site saves the planet. Which is why I wrote this during #earthhour.

Eco-Rangers Platform Game

Now, there’s a woman on my block,
She just sit there as the night grows still.
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
- LICENSE TO KILL

Just come back from a nice Brick Lane curry and a few beers with my old colleagues from Accenture. Just enough beers, in fact, for a minor rant. Before I start, I’d like to say that there is nothing I dislike more than someone that complains about problems without offering a sensible solution. Which is exactly what I’m about to do.

Here’s my problem. My day job involves me drawing many system architecture diagrams. This poses many challenges: How do I ensure that the solution is fit for purpose, reliable, scalable, extensible, performant, resilient and more? How do I select the best-fit third party products? What colours should the boxes on my Visio diagrams be, and should they have round corners? And how do I say my clients money?

Don't want to do this

It would be ideal if the vendors’ licensing models allowed us to harmoniously achieve all the goals stated above. The sad reality, however, is that the licensing model sometimes means that we have to sabotage our architectures in order to save a fortune on licensing. Some examples situations are given below:

• A per site or domain cost – Many vendors will charge you per “site”, the definition of which isn’t clear. Sometimes this is an IIS site or Application pool, but more often than not it is based on domain. So, if I have a global presense and use domains such as www.globalcorp.com, www.globalcorp.co.uk, www.globalcorp.jp and so on, I can get hammered with a 60 site license. Whereas, if I go with www.globalcorp.com/en-GB/ or www.globalcorp.com/jp/ instead and place simple redirects on my top level domains, I have a single site license. I prefer the first option, but not if it is going to cost the client tens of thousands of $$$/£££’s. Which means we sometimes reluctantly go for option 2. That said, option two does have it’s advantage in that single domains can be easier to manage (SSL certs, SEO and more), but I still prefer a domain per region.
• A per machine / CPU cost for a very small component – There are some vendors which will charge extra for each machine on which a component is installed. My pet hate here is a deployment listener, which is most often seen in a CMS that operates a decoupled publishing model. If, for example, I publish a news story from my content staging environment behind my firewall to my load balanced production environment on the other side, two things normally happen. The content is published to a remote database cluster, and the associated static files (images, for example) are remotely copied to the file system of each in the cluster. If the CMS employs a baking model, the content is normally also deployed as a static file. Now this is all great, until my web tier server farm gets large and I have to pay a ridiculous license fee for each box for the priviledge of having a file copy. The workaround here is simply to install the deployment listener on one server in the cluster, and run some free file system synchronisation tool (for example rsync) that copies that content to the other machines in the cluster. Another workaround is expensive hardware (like a SAN) which may be overkill.
• A cost for each named CMS user or editor - I believe it is extremely important for each user of a system to have a unique username and password, mainly for security and audit trail reasons. However, I’ve seen cases where a single login is shared by multiple editors purely to avoid a per login license. I wouldn’t be surprised if this arrangement violates the licensing terms, and it isn’t something we’ve ever done. I think this model is rare these days, normally replaced with a concurrent user limit.
• Vagaries around inter-, extra- and intranet use – Some licensing models depend on which part of the Enterprise use the system. I think the difference between an internet site and intranet site is still fairly well defined, but an extranet can cause enormous grey areas. Falling foul of this can have massive implications on licensing and needs to be considered when designing the architecture.
• A per hit cost for an Analytics products – Now this is off topic and more a question than a statement. Some of our clients use a free service (you guessed it, Google Analytics), but most use a larger commercial product such as Omniture or WebTrends. The licensing model is often based on the number of hits received by the tracking server. And this is what I was wondering: If I have an extremely high volume site, what happens if I only sample the visitors by, for example, tagging 1 in 1000. This sampling is a bit like an exit poll in an election. It would be quite expensive to ask everyone who they voted for when leaving the booth. Asking a small subset is much cheaper, and yields reliable results if the sample is truly random. This could potentially save a significant amount on licensing, and all I need to do is read my reports in terms of 1000′s of users. Of course this is a terrible idea when using advanced techniques such as A/B Testing or Multivariate Testing to increase the value per user. But it might be a good idea if you’re simply tracking behaviour. For the record, I’ve never tried this and don’t know if it would violate the licensing agreement. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

I could probably go on a bit more. There are considerations around physical machines versus virtual machines, active-passive Disaster Recovery configurations and the definition of a staging/pre-production site. If anyone could add to the list above I’d be interested to hear from you.

I wish I could end this post with a suggestion for the perfect licensing model for the vendors, but sadly I have no answers. The vendors are all well aware of the short-comings of the existing models and people a whole lot wiser than me have been trying to find logical and fair ways to repair these. If any major vendor does think their price list avoids all these issues, I’d love to see it.

Until these issues are properly addressed, we will have to continue to consider vendor licensing models when designing our system architectures. But it depresses me enormously when a quirk in a pricing matrix makes me do something that I know smells a little bit like horseshit.

Ye playboys and playgirls
Ain’t a-gonna run my world,
Not now or no other time
- PLAYBOYS AND PLAYGIRLS

Like many others, I use Twitter Search to listen to the word on the street in the areas about which I’m passionate. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of searches for “CMS“. In this case, however, the problem I have is that very few people are talking about the kind of CMS product in which I am interested. To illustrate this, have a look at the search for “CMS” using one of my favourite visualisers – the Twitter Stream Graph.

Twitter Visualiser for "CMS"

You probably can’t see the detail here (click the image to see the current stream), but it is clear that when most Twitter users say CMS, they mean WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!. There’s always a big PHP strand in there too.

So I panicked a bit. I know WordPress (from this blog, mainly). We very occasionally see Drupal in a vendor selection, and never see Joomla! at all. I’ve never been involved in an implementation with either. In fact, the technology team where I work is 45% .NET, 45% Java and 10% Misc. We tend to avoid PHP, Python, Perl and other scripting languages for various reasons which I won’t go in to here. So, are we really that out of touch?

I thought I’d dig around a bit more. I found the CMS Focus: CMS Report’s Top 30 Web Applications article and, of the 30, I’ve heard of about 60%. But we only implement 2 (SharePoint and Alfresco). That’s 7% of the top CMS products. Not very good.

So I tried the Open Jason 50 Content Management Systems list for a bit more choice. Of the 50, I’d only ever heard of about 10, most of which are blogging platforms (TypePad, MoveableType, Blogger and WordPress. Drupal and Joomla! are there. But this list is a year old, and the only new ones that have come onto my radar recently are Silverstripe (now available on the Microsoft Web Platform Installer) and GoodBarry. The rest have names like Moodle, Pligg, Triggit, Jogango and Weebly which just make me feel old . And we’ve never implemented any of these for a client, excluding simple blogs. So that is 0 / 50, or 0%. Things are going from bad to worse. Had a look at the 52 More Content Management Systems from the same source. Got a bit better there. Heard of maybe 20, and actually implemented three (Alfresco, eZ Publish and LifeRay).

I needed a more recent list, I think. Found 10 Promising Content Management Systems by Jacob Gube. Heard of 5, implemented 0. It’s getting desparate.

Fortunately, it seems, the clients that we work with don’t play in this space either. Just to reassure myself, I re-checked the list in my bible (that’s CMS Watch). Still good there. Of the 42 vendors covered, I’ve dealt with about 70% of them, and been on projects with about 50% of them.

Which brings me to my point. There are two worlds out there, in which the term CMS means something different. The Big Wide World, and My World.

To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.

I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.

Looking at it from the other side, it seems difficult for a product that is Java or Microsoft to make it into the Big Wide World. There are very few good open source Microsoft (which I don’t find surprising) and Java (which I do) CMS systems. The open source community has embraced the scripting languages. If anyone has a simple, easy to use, Java based CMS that they really like, I’d love to hear from them.

In my head, the two worlds are still quite far apart. My “web generation” is extremely uncomfortable even calling WordPress a Content Management System. But the scary thing is that I suspect that I’m probably completely wrong on this. The two worlds might collide sooner than I think. Or maybe they have already and I just didn’t see it happen.

P.S. Here are two great posts that highlight various super cool Twitter visualisers:

• 6 Unique Twitter Visualizations by Ben Parr
• 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe by Nathan Yau (a year old but still cool)

P.P.S. The Open Source CMS Market Survey by Ric Shreves gives a really good overview of the Open Source CMS market. I wish I’d read that before I wrote this blog entry.

You’ve been avoiding the main streets for a long, long while
The truth that I’m seeking is in your missing file
What’s your position, baby, what’s going on?
Why is the light in your eyes nearly gone?
- SOMETHING’S BURNING, BABY

Following on from the wonderfully entertaining “CMS Vendor Meme” (a.k.a. the “CMS Celebrity Deathmatch“), I’d like to drill slightly deeper into Item #9 – Dog Food. For the uninitiated, “Eating your own dogfood” means that the vendor uses their own software to run their own site. All of them do, according to the responses to the Vendor Meme so far, although not always on the very latest version.

So, do the vendors’ sites, written on technology which is sold as fully accessible and built by experts (at least, one hopes the vendor has experts), actually produce markup that validates? I guess the first question one has to ask is does it matter if a site is accessible. And the answer: Oh yes. For many many reasons which I’m not going to go into here. I understand that W3C validation ≠ Accessibility, but that is another discussion for another time too. Validation is still an important part.

XXXHTML by Rob Cottingham

I know that it isn’t always easy to make complex site that validate. Where I work, sites should always validate when they’re launched – it is part of the User Acceptance Criteria. However, we are guilty of back-sliding when sites are in support /maintenance mode, and editors break things when abusing Rich Text Editors. Shock, horror – there are still a lot of CMS products that allow editors to enter broken markup.

WordPress do a pretty good job. This blog validates at the time of writing, no thanks to me. Admittedly, I did have to fix the FeedBurner RSS link which left the closing slash from the img tag, but that wasn’t WordPress’s fault.

I digress. I thought I’d test the home pages of a few major commercial Web CMS vendors – those listed as Enterprise or Upper Tier in the latest CMS Watch Web CMS Report. I tested the vendor home page, which may not be CMS related at all, especially for the big boys. The results are tabulated below. The numbers below were generated on 18 March between 21:00 and 23:00 GMT using the W3C HTML Validator. I didn’t check the CSS or Feeds, just the markup. Both encoding and doctype were left on “Detect Automatically”. I didn’t look into the details of the errors. The ones with a large number of errors might actually only be a few errors that are repeated, or have knock-on effects.

The nice surprise mentioned in the title is IBM. Big Blue really does care about standards, and maybe Java is going to safe place should the SUN deal materialise. Hats off to Fatwire, Day and Percussion who get really close and clearly try to ensure the markup is good. The other 9 out of 13, however, don’t look so promising.

So, what am I saying? I am not for a second implying that the products that do badly in the above are “not accessible”. I just think the question we always see in an CMS Selection RFP is incorrect. Asking about an accessible editing interface (which comes out of the box) makes sense. Asking about an accessible front end (which is different for every implementation) makes no sense at all.

So, instead, the question on the RFP should be “Does your CMS allow the developer full control over the markup. If not, please specify where?” Now, it is highly unlikely that any product can answer an unequivocal “yes” to this. For example, every .NET based product mandates that a FORM tag containing the VIEWSTATE exists. However, this does not cause a problem.

But as we add products into the solution, we hit more restrictions. Portals are notoriosuly bad at giving control. I promised myself I wouldn’t rant about Portals for Public Facing Sites here, so I won’t. Many AJAX libraries (e.g. some JavaServer Faces implementations and ASP.NET AJAX nee ATLAS) give you very little control at all. JavaScript libraries are normally pretty good.

I believe the problem in most of the examples in the table above could be rooted in one of:

• The technology makes valid markup impossible – I think this could probably be worked around in many cases. But sometimes you simply can’t get around the bad markup you’re given.
• Nobody knew it mattered – Ignorance isn’t an excuse any more.
• Someone decided it wasn’t important – this doesn’t need further comment. Give them some concrete shoes and send them for a swim.
• There isn’t time and/or budget to ensure it validates – in some cases it is more expensive to create a validating, progressively enhanced site. However, in many cases I believe it is cheaper to do it properly.
• The front end team lacked the skill - This I can believe. Hopefully this improves with time. Many server side developers aren’t any good at client side work. I know I fall into this camp. When I was coding, CSS didn’t exist, HTML still had TABLES in it and the BLINK tag was cool. I’m not allowed anywhere near the front end code where I work. We have professionals for that.
• Showing off with fancy client side technologies - There are far too many sites that use Flash/AIR/Silverlight for no good reason, without providing an accessible fallback. Now this won’t affect the W3C validation, but it annoys the hell out of me. Use these technologies where they are needed, not for the sake of it.

I’m sure there are other reasons I’ve missed out, and I’d love to hear about them. I believe the responsibility for convincing management of the importance of doing things properly lies with us, the technologists. And if they seem not to care too much about accessibility, play the Increased Revenue cards (SEO, multi-device target market, maintainable code, integration with as yet unknown services, working on IE8 and other future browsers, etc) instead.

And once again, nice one IBM for winning the Home Page test. I apologise for my behaviour in some meetings in the past about the markup from WebSphere Portal. But let’s not get complacent – it would be nice if you could make the deeper pages in the site validate too.

UPDATE: Does anyone have the energy to publish a similar test for the mid-range and Open Source vendors? I might do it in a week or three if no-one else does it first.