I don’t have the strength
To get up and take another shot
And my best friend, my doctor
Won’t even say what it is I’ve got
- JUST LIKE TOM THUMB’S BLUES

Gather round, children. Let me tell you about my Dad. He’s a wonderful, smart man. He taught me to play chess when I was 3. He is also an orthopaedic surgeon, which means he fixes broken bones and things. He comes from a long line of doctors, which I broke when I turned out to be a computer geek. He worked for many many many years in government hospitals until, about ten years ago, he moved from the operating theatre to the courtrooms, working in the medico-legal world.

Here is how it works. Someone gets injured somehow. In South Africa where I grew up, it is normally a car accident. South Africa has one of the worst road safety records in the world. It is often whiplash. Don’t ever get my Dad started on whiplash. Seriously.

Anyway, the insurance companies need to reimburse the victim for medical bills, loss of earnings, psychological trauma and other goodies. And this is where it gets tricky – you need to put a dollar (or ZAR) value onto all of this. It is complicated even more when some victims (either fraudulenty, subconsciously or due to lawyer’s pressure) fake or exaggerate their situations.

Which is where the experts come in. Both the insurance fund lawyer and the victim’s lawyer need to ensure that they have medical experts on their benches. And here is the cool bit. All the senior orthopods in South Africa know and respect one another. Most of them will represent both the patient or the insurance fund – they don’t play favourite.

So the two doctors will sit in the courtroom, recognise each other, and think to themselves “Oh look, they’ve got Doctor {insert name here} . He’s a good guy who knows his shit and will fairly represent the situation.” And, more often than not, they’ll quickly come to a fair and equitable agreement. The doctors normally don’t even open their mouths in court. They just sit there like finely tuned bullshit detectors and only get involved when the bullshit levels rise. However, if either side lacks a respected expert, things can drag on a whole lot longer and end in a mess. Of course this isn’t always the case but, as I understand it, it is pretty close.

So what? Well here is my point. I’ve recently been engaging a lot of third parties product and service vendors. And I’ve been really fortunate to work with people from these companies that really really know what they’re doing. And, they seem to think I know what I’m doing. Which has made the entire process quick, painless and fair. Both sides know what a fair day rate for consultants is. Both sides know which products are real and needed for the solution, and can smell snakeoil a mile away.

So, the moral of the story. When engaging third parties, make sure that you have someone on your team that knows the industry backwards, and make sure the third party knows that you know. Secondly, make sure that the third party has someone that knows their industry backwards and doesn’t just sprout hot air.

You’ll save yourself a fuckload of time and stress. Trust me. I’m a Doctor’s son.

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.”

Never bein’ able to separate the good from the bad,
Ooh, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it,
It’s makin’ me feel so sad.
- DEAD MAN, DEAD MAN

ACME Corporation have decided to launch a web presence to support their thriving cartoon supply business . They hire you as the brand new big technical cheese to realise their vision. And this vision, as usual, includes everything: Content Management, of course; Search so that you can find the products; a Community to provoke discussion about new product design; Digital Asset Management to store the images and blueprints of the products; Analytics to track down who is interesting in committing nefarious deeds; CRM to improve the way they deal with their prospects; and mapping software to track Road Runners. And something to glue these all together. So, Mr Big Cheese, what are you going to do: buy a single one-stop-shop product that does everything, or assemble together a set of best-of-breed products?

The ACME Corporation Web Site

What do the RFPs say customers want?

The majority of the CMS Vendor Selection RFPs that I see demand feature ticking around search, analytics, SoCo, DAM and all the rest. They ask for it all. These RFPs are geared towards procuring a single product that does everything. Most also all assume that the Content Management System will also be the delivery layer and ask for many delivery layer features. A pure-play decoupled CMS wouldn’t stand a chance. If the scoring was done purely on the features lists, a portal would often beat a CMS. The vendor presentations tend to focus more on the features of the canned demonstration site they all have than on the CMS back end.

What does the research say customers want?

The research doesn’t agree completely with this. The recent eConsultancy CMS Survey showed that more customers want best-of-breed suppliers over a one-stop shop, especially for companies with more than 100 employees.

What is the strategy of the vendors?

Well, they all seem to heading towards the one-stop-shop solution. Sure, they’ll release new features to their core product. But more and more, they seem to be differentiating by moving into other areas. CMS vendors, in particular, are packaging in social/collaboration software, search software, shopping baskets and payment modules, basic DAM and the kitchen sink. Everyone is producing their own Analytics and MVT software. For example, SiteCore recently announced their Online Marketing Suite and EPiServer called with their Marketing Arena . Seeing as most of these features really sit at the delivery layer, not the content management layer, the number of pure decoupled CMS vendors is on the decline. There is a huge amount of M&A activity at the high end of the market as everyone tries to cover all the bases.

So, the strategy of the vendors seems to be on diversification. Gut feeling would imply that finding a niche, or focussing on improving the core CMS would be front of mind. Not so, they’re all playing “RFP feature ticking”. They all bang on about being “open” and supporting open standards, while at the same time singing about their proprietary, tight integration between their newly aquired products. For example, a typical conversation:

Me: So, Mr Vendor X, why do you think we’d use your new Analytics|Search|Community product over the one we currently use?
Vendor: Because our one has a ‘much deeper integration with our product’ and ‘understands our product’  better.

There are problems with this as I see it, some of which include:

• everyone is building monoliths
• as parts of the system become obsolete, and it becomes harder to take advantage of unexpected future goodies
• you really are at the mercy of a single vendor

What does the future hold?

I would have expected the fact that standards are improving to mean that we’d have more focussed best-of-breed vendors that allow you to plug their product in to any CMS – the nice Lego-block style architecture diagram. However, currently it looks like we’re heading the other way, which really depresses me. We might even be buying the Google CMS Appliance before long.

If it continues at this rate, our friends at CMS Watch might need to consolidate all their lovely reports into the “Web In A Box” report quite soon …

There’s kissing in the valley,
Thieving in the alley,
Fighting every inch of the way.
Trying to be tender
With somebody I remember
In a night that’s always brighter’n the day.
- SEVEN DAYS

Picture the scene

You work for a big organisation. You’ve initiated a new major WCM project. You’ve got your board approval, you’ve had your budget signed off, and you’ve a vague idea of what you want:  a friendly CMS, a decent Search Engine, something to handle User Generated Content and some kick-ass Analytics. You’ve got a team of pragmatic-developer-ninjas waiting in the wings to integrate them beautifully. You’re in a good place. Time to procure some products. That should be easy. Let’s start with a cartoon which I made using the wonderful Project Cartoon.

You don't want this to happen, do you?

How Many Tenders?

So you need WCMS, Search, UGC and Analytics. We’re going to call these The Four Pillars for today. First question: How many RFIs/RFPs do you issue? Just the one so that a single vendor (or consortium) supplies all of the products? Or how about a single one with “Lots” allowing vendors to only respond to part of it? Or, on the other extreme, a separate RFP for each product? Some of you won’t have this choice as it is dictated by your procurement rules, but let’s pretend you do.

While each product certainly covers a Separate Concern of the site, the reality is that there will be a lot of integrating to do. The world doesn’t have mature enough standards to allow you to switch them in and out like the proverbial Lego blocks. The products will also certainly have large functionality overlaps. If you go for separate RFPs or split it into Lots, it is exceptionally important that you explicitly list the integration points between them. I’d suggest that WCMS and Search probably have the most integration points and should get special attention. User Generated Content/Social products often have widly different architectures and so should also get a lot of focus. They won’t all slot neatly into your solution in the same way. On the other hand, the major Analytics products all have the same basic architecture and so is, in my opinion, the one that is easiest to tender for in isolation. Because I am nice and want to help you all, I plan to write a followup blog post listing the most common integration points soon.

If each product is being selected in isolation, you need to be extremely careful. You could follow the selection and evaluation criteria by the book and end up with four products that are each “best of breed” and match your requirements wonderfully. But throw them into the same architecture diagram and they behave like four cats on heat. On the other hand, if you go for one process to select all the products, you could end up with a monster that you don’t really understand and that would need to be replaced in its entirety should one part of it become obsolete. I think its a fairly safe bet that you’d want to replace at least one of the Four Pillars within the next 2 or 3 years. You need to make very sure that this doesn’t mean you need to replace the other three. Finally, make sure your developer-ninjas have input into the selection criteria. You don’t want your team of C# developers to all have to rush to a COBOL training course.

Give a budget range. Seriously.

Janus Boye started a discussion about this on his blog entry CMS Selection: Reveal budget in the RFP? I’ll repeat the comment I left on his blog:

I’ve seen 2 RFPs in the last few months in which client didn’t specify a range and got something like this (I’m paraphrasing, of course):

2000 Ford Taurus SES – $2,482
1993 Toyota Camry LE – $3,582
2008 Lexus LS 600h L – $99,995
2002 Hyundai Sonata GLS – $4,300

They wanted to buy the Lexus, but their procurement was having none of it. They had to extend the RFP to attract more responses that allowed a “like for like” comparison. If think they’ve even had to go back to the Ford, Toyota and Hyundia salesman and ask them what they could do for more money … If the RFP had given a range (say $75,000 – $150,000) they’d have saved themselves a load of time and effort.

Also, if you have a weighted scoring matrix, make your selection criteria transparent so vendors allocate an appropriate amount of time to each section. Procurement like a fair fight. If they don’t think it’s fair, they might throw the whole thing back in your face.

Other Procurement Gotchas

The whole process can take a lot longer than you think. Many of the RFPs we respond to are extremely clear that they will never, under any circumstances, extend the deadline for submission. However, many of these delay the announced decision dates by weeks or even months. That’s not really fair now, is it. Give yourself enough time. Remember, the longer your RFP, the longer you’ll need to read and evaluate the submissions. In addition to procurement, include your legal department early too. Dotting i’s and crossing t’s isn’t as quick as it sounds.

Some clients I deal with have to go to procurement for everything. It seems a pity to go through a massive process to by a $99 Web Server Plugin. Make sure you know the thresholds so you can start the process in good time. I recently suggested to a client going through this that they buy all five options rather than going through procurement to select one. I was sort of joking and it probably isn’t legal, but the sad truth is that would be cheaper and all the vendors would be happy.

Something else I’ve seen a couple of times recently revolves around cross-country procurement. The rules in different countries are often different and, if you plan to use the software in multiple regions, you might need to go through “global procurement” or some equivalent. I still don’t really understand how to define when software is “used” (and so needs to be procured) in a region. If I have a server farm in country A and country B each hosting their respective country sites, then I’ll probably need to procure for both. But what if I have a single farm serving all coumtry sites? Or what if the whole shebang is *aaS hosted out of the Cayman islands? Bearing in mind you probably won’t know the architecture of the product when you issue the tender, it is even more important you understand the procurement rules.

Another gotcha I’ve seen a few times recently – falling foul of procurement’s “we’ve already got a Global Enterprise Unlimited Uberlicense for product X so best you used that instead”. Dilbert explains this better than I ever could:

Finally, make sure you cover license costs for development, staging and pre-production environments. And think about disaster recovery licenses and maintenance fees. Sometimes this isn’t as easy as it sounds as you haven’t procured all the products so probably don’t know your architecture yet. For example, having an Active-Active DR environment often means very different license costs from an Active-Passive.

My advice: involve procurement in the process early to ensure you understand the process. Although procurement exists to ensure you negotiate a good deal (which is great) in a fair, ethical manner (which is even more important) you need to make sure you don’t get hammered by a process that screws your plans or timelines. You’d be surprised how often software procurement is on the critical path and delays a project.