In recent months there has been persistent and largely erroneous talk about the death of web content management (WCM).
This discourse - largely the result of the desire of WCM vendors to position themselves as suites capable of being one-stop-shops for digital marketers - if nothing else, demonstrates how far WCM has come over the last few years. Indeed to the point where the central tenets of WCM themselves are considered commodities, where each vendor offers more-or-less an equal capability.
The real subtext to this whole thing is that the Autonomy brand in customers' minds was already pretty damaged," said Real Story Group's Tony Byrne. "If HP had gone out and talked to Autonomy customers [before the acquisition] they would have found unusually disgruntled customers even by enterprise standards."
"Autonomy was very good at concealing this through very aggressive PR and analyst relations," Byrne added. "There was a day of reckoning coming for them, and they found someone to take them off the table before that happened."
Some of Autonomy's technology is very old and in need of an overhaul, Byrne said. "It was HP's very difficult job when they acquired it to make a big R&D push and turn a lot of these platforms around. I think they hesitated a little, and this is another pretty big dent in things.
I recently read a very nicely written blog post by Theresa Regli at the Real Story Group where she suggested that content sets the scene and the expectations for the brand before people experience it. She writes very eloquently about how she had an expectation about Provence, the sights and the smells, well before she travelled there. This is the role content marketing plays in projecting who you are, and the quality of your service and products.
The fact that we are now recognizing Content Marketing as a business discipline (and have far more tools and data available) means we are also measuring our content marketing success – not just through revenue uplift or website clicks – but through brand sentiment and brand metrics that the big data of social enables us to tap into and are essential as we engage with our consumers across multiple channels.
Even before polls closed Tuesday, some observers were describing the Democrats' vaunted "ground game" -- a.k.a., get-out-the-vote, or GOTV -- as a victory for big data. Doubtless, the staff of both presidential candidates performed some deep analysis of large datasets. Having participated with my family in GOTV efforts for the past four quadrennial U.S. elections, I have a different take: The Obama re-election machine was really about small data.
As someone who evaluates marketing automation suites -- which try to funnel prospective customers automatically through a similar decision process in the digital world -- it also got me thinking that the current emphasis on sophisticated campaign design over sophisticated data management in that marketplace seems a bit misguided.
Cloud--more specifically SaaS--has had a big impact on Document Management and document-oriented collaboration, but not so much for Web Content and Experience Management (WCXM).
First, the rise of cloud file-sharing vendors is "out-SharePointing" Microsoft SharePoint: spreading virally within organizations outside of IT control in ways that are forcing enterprises to address some simple (but ubiquitous) file management use cases that SharePoint 2010 does not do well.
For WCXM, the native SaaS vendors have largely failed to live up their initial hype, but more and more large enterprises are turning to cloud-based delivery environments. The key here is whether the native WCXM software is readily "cloudable." Few vendor offerings do this seamlessly today.
During the conference I had the good fortune of listening to some great speakers and meeting some terrific professionals. Theresa Regli and the Real Story Group are doing an exhaustive coverage of globally available <a href="http://www.realstorygroup.com/Research/Channel/DAM/"><I>Digital & Media Asset Management Research</I></a> products. I have seen their sample reports and have compared them with the ones by Gartner and Forrester. Real Story Group’s report on DAM systems is the best in the world.
We provide buyers of technology with independent and expert advice on content technology. By independent we mean we don’t work for technology vendors ever, we don’t write papers for them, consult or advise to them, speak at their events. Nor do we accept expenses or favours in any form, we pay our own travel and expenses.Though vendors can and occassionaly do buy copies of our reports they cannot buy advisory hours or access to the analysts, hence the vast majority of our income comes from end users and that is how we want to keep it. So far it has been a successful business model and we continue to expand our reach.
The keynote speaker talked about immersive consumer experiences. The concept of these experiences is the idea of creating a multimedia experience that is better than the original. For example, the Van Gogh Alive exhibit immerses the user in Van Gogh’s work and in many ways provides a better experience than viewing these same works of art in a museum (where you may be viewing them through a crowd of people or behind glass or other barriers).
The Real Story group has recently issued an updated report on social networking and collaboration solutions. A very well documented and precise work that shows an understanding of the matter which is much higher than the average and allows us to get the real stakes before making one’s decision. It also help us to avoid a trap that’s very usual in this kind of document : with a very clear segmentation of a diversified market it does not compare things that can’t be compared and shows that all the solutions that one-size-fits-all products don’t address, in fact, the same needs.
The Real Story Group spares us of one more quadrant or matrix that despite of its popularity tries to make pears, apples and bananas fit into one single model and is often incomprehensible, confusing and misleading.
Many Indian companies still aren’t looking at full-fledged monitoring tools,” says Apoorv Durga, senior analyst at the Real Story Group, which identifies and evaluates social media tools to advise clients on finding the best fit. “Quite a few just use Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck to listen on the social web. Others use techniques such as Google Alerts.”
While there is nothing wrong in using these basic solutions, paid (and often expensive) tools are adding on more capabilities, many of which are hard to argue with.
"Email is not going away. The reports of its demise are vastly exaggerated. We may not often realize, but email is like the Swiss Army knife: a multipurpose tool. We use it for communication, collaboration, as a personal file repository, as a calendaring tool, as a marketing tool, as a customer support tool and in so many other ways. Many things that email does, social networks are not mature enough to do. They're not scalable enough, they're not simple enough."
"The organizations I've seen that have been successful focus a lot on very specific business applications that they insert into a business process. And they let people know the value of them. So, it could be social Q&A, which we know can be very useful in mergers and acquisitions. It could be innovation management [what people used to call "ideation"], which is particularly useful in expanding the scope of your research and development outside of your R&D group. It could be around effective knowledge base management, which seems workaday and boring, but in cases like CRM [customer relationship management] can be very important. It could be expertise location, which we know from case studies of very large multinational professional firms can dramatically improve responsiveness to client requests."
Irina Guseva, senior analyst with Olney, Md.-based Real Story Group, will tell you that rumors of WCMs becoming outdated are hugely exaggerated.
"The past few years have been evolutionary for WCM technology. Unlike ECM, which remains mostly static, status quo is not something I see in the WCM industry, which continues to evolve under the notion of experience management," says Guseva, who prefers the term "web content and experience management" or WCXM. "Today, it's no longer just about managing pages on your web site, as it was at the beginning of WCM in the 1990s. It's also about managing the experience-both online and offline-for your customers across all channels, including web, mobile and social."
Deciding what type of DAM vendor to partner with is an important decision -- almost as important as the technology itself, Guseva said.
Some things to consider carefully when picking a DAM vendor include their approach to support, maintenance and licensing and even their geographic location. For example, Guseva said, a company in the U.S. might think twice about purchasing technology from a vendor located in, say, in New Zealand.
The vendor's ability to integrate its systems with existing frameworks -- such as .Net or Java -- is also critical.
Apoorv Durga, an analyst with the Real Story Group, sees the money in a similar manner, helping Box to expand into new areas. "This funding gives them a lot of additional cash to spend on research and development, as well as sales and marketing to differentiate themselves in the crowded cloud-based file sharing and collaboration market place," he said.
Durga added, "I think Box has ambitions far beyond the simple scenario they've targeted so far. It wants to be a more platform-oriented vendor aiming to provide a broader range of enterprise capabilities--a transition that may not be very easy." I think he's right.
My colleague Apoorv Durga pointed me to an interesting paragraph in a Microsoft SharePoint Team blog post entitled The New SharePoint. To quote:
Use SharePoint as an out-of-box application whenever possible - We designed the new SharePoint UI to be clean, simple and fast and work great out-of-box. We encourage you not to modify it which could add complexity, performance and upgradeability and to focus your energy on working with users and groups to understand how to use SharePoint to improve productivity and collaboration and identifying and promoting best practices in your organization.
This is laudable advice from Redmond, and mimics what many other observers (including Real Story Group) have been counseling for five years.
At last week's Enterprise 2.0 conference, The Real Story Group's Tony Byrne wondered if the Yammer acquisition meant Microsoft was recognizing that SharePoint can't keep pace with the advance of social software as well as a cloud service like Yammer--even though the cloud version of SharePoint in Office365 was supposed to close that gap.
Native mobile apps also provide better functionality for transaction tasks such as banking, processing-heavy applications that require a lot of images, and anything that requires access to device-specific features, such as the camera, said Apoorv Durga, a senior analyst for Real Story Group, a buyers advocacy group based in Olney, MD.
With Web apps, on the other hand, IT can make its own rules on its own servers and add login credentials to increase security. Organizations with mobile workers need to create downloading policies, Durga said, but restricting certain native apps might not jibe with users -- especially if the device in question is a personal device, rather than a company-provided one.
“As enterprise social collaboration efforts mature, enterprises increasingly seek to put these new capabilities "in the flow" of colleagues' daily work. Yet, most tools assume that social networking and collaboration will reside in a separate "place," often a siloed application that notifies you of new activity via yet another set of e-mail alerts.

 A growing number of vendors are seeking to address a new architecture that posits social and collaboration services as a "layer" that can be applied to diverse workstreams within the enterprise. Of course, social-as-a-service is much easier said than done. This session, led by a noted industry analyst, will offer a practical review of vision versus reality in this important area.”
According to Tony Byrne, analyst and founder of Real Story Group, ECM maturity really isn't about technology, it's about operations. While enterprises do have to consider "vendor end of lifecycle," the real issue is "operational maturity, and institutional maturity and how much do you actually take advantage of the tools in front of you," Byrne said.
When self-assessing ECM maturity, enterprises should consider their business expertise around ECM, and how well they've organized information and spread the process to all corners of an organization. Often times, the technology presented by vendors is far out in front of organization's capability to use it.