cms governance: aligning your people
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
You can lead a horse to water…
CMS governance: Aligning people for success
1Toronto | Ottawa | Calgary | Regina | New York
…but you can’t
make him drink
Aligning people for governance success
Thank you for coming! (social media next door)
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Amanda Shiga
• NLC: a professional services company with core competencies in online strategy, large-scale web implementations and online marketing
• WCM consultant (Reddot, Sitecore, Sharepoint)
• Web strategy and business analysis
• @amandashiga
• http://www.nonlinear.ca/blog
non~linear creations (Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Regina, New York)
What is (CMS) governance?
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Ask 20 people, get 20 answers.
1. A set of policies, roles, responsibilities and processes to guide, direct and control how your CMS is used to accomplish business goals
2. A set of workflows and permissions implemented in your CMS
3. The authoritative administrative structures that setpolicy and standards for Web product management
Don’t forget why you implemented a CMS in the first place!
Common reasons
1. To remove the IT bottleneck
2. To empower distributed content authors to manage their own content
3. To enforce standards across your web properties
4. To automate processes for greater efficiency
5. To manage web content as a proper digital asset and your website as a proper channel
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A thought experiment
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The Problem
Two different
departments have critical
events happening at the
same time and both want
to be on the homepage.
There’s not enough room.
Who decides what goes
on the homepage?
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The Problem
You are considering
changing the way you
label navigation on your
website.
Who is responsible for
looking at search
analytics to determine
the vocabulary your
visitors actually use?
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The Problem
There is a clear business
case for a new faceted
search engine.
It will benefit almost every
group that produces
content in the
organization.
What budget does it come
from? Who authorizes the
purchase?
10
The Problem
The number of online
registrations has
dropped by 25%.
(Increasing registrations
is a key objective of the
website)
Who reacts?
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The Problem
A series of untrue, near-
slanderous blog posts are
made about your
organization and
retweeted.
Who is responsible for
knowing this is
happening?
Who decides how to
respond?
What can we do?
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Today, I hope to …
1. Draw a bigger circle around WCM governance that goes beyond workflows and permissions
2. Provide you some helpful examples for aligning the right people in the right place(s)
3. Offer some suggestions for the tough questions
What happens if you don’t put “good” governance in
place?• Messy, uncontrolled growth of content
• Organizational conflict
• Poor adoption and resistance to change
• Operational inefficiency
• Loss of credibility
• Risk of litigation
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Typical governance FAIL
• No senior champion
• Project is an IT-driven initiative
• Web team has limited budget and power
• No consideration for change management
• No plan or vision
• Assuming the technology will handle everything
• Greatest barrier to success = politics
• Greatest key to success = senior champion
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What types of governance models exist?
• Decentralized (common in larger orgs)• No single owner
• Driven by policies and guidelines
• Organic growth, sometimes leading to site sprawl
• Centralized (common in smaller orgs)• Single owner/department
• Bureaucratic
• Highly controlled
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What types of governance models exist?
• Collaborative• Executive champion
• Steering committee / council
• Decentralized content ownership
• Centralized platform
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A collaborative WCM governance model for a large, distributed organization
Executive sponsor
Web steering team
Web team
Content
authors
The executive team/sponsor
Roles and responsibilities
1. Defining the overall strategy and priorities for the website.
2. Allocation of funds
3. Ensuring that the right people are in the right positions for online success
4. Reviewing and approving brand guidelines
5. Sets high-level policies
6. Acting as a the final authority for resolving conflicts
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A committed sponsor
• Doesn’t just sign the cheque
• Takes responsibility for the project
• Wants to see the project succeed
• Is fully informed and educated on the project
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Some tips
• The business case should sell itself
• Education is key
• Provide the sponsor with ongoing status and goal updates
• Do not hide shortcomings
• Consider quick wins to show immediate value and maintain support
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The web steering team
Advice:the Internet Strategy Forum (2009)
1. The role of internal online strategist has shifted: more than 60% of such positions are within two levels of the CEO
2. The importance of the internet is growing in many organizations – the introduction of senior executive roles responsible for online execution
3. Recommendation: Create a separate Internet strategic management function (do not force into IT or marketing as they exist)
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The web steering team
Roles and responsibilities1. Resolve questions of conflicting priorities based on
objectives set by ES
2. Brand enforcement - has power to deny proposals
3. Define internal and external content; create policies on content lifecycle
4. Coordinate activities, reducing duplication
5. Decide how best to address new regulatory or legislative requirements
6. Review metrics and using these to drive decisions
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The web steering team
Committees and membership1. Break down role into multiple committees
reporting to the WST
2. Members may be VP-level or middle management – ensure a decisions are made in an effective and timely manner
3. Members should represent a healthy cross-section of departments with an interest in the website
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The web team
Roles and responsibilities
1. Undertake ongoing analysis of user behaviour and report on this behaviour to ES and WST
2. Content approval, workflow and permissions decisions
3. Provide training and support to content creators
4. Monitor and tune the site search engine
5. Implement search engine optimization tactics
6. Staying on the “cutting edge” as appropriate
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Knowledge half-life
• The half life of knowledge in a given field is how long it takes for half of industry current expertise to become irrelevant or incorrect
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Industry Knowledge Half-Life
Mechanical Engineering 20 years
Medicine 10 years
Traditional Marketing 7 years
Internet Marketing 3 years
Social Media Marketing 1 year or less
Content contributors
Roles and responsibilities
1. Creation and editing of content
2. Entry of content into WCM
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A collaborative WCM governance model for a large, distributed organization
Executive sponsor
Web steering team
Web team
Content
authors
Competencies for online success
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Technology
Strategy & Direction
Social MediaOutreach
Content Creation
Education &
Mentoring
Map competency tasks to teams
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Web team Web Steering Team
Executive Team
External expertise
Technology
Support of daily operations
X
New technology deployments
X
Business analysis X
Put that all in place.
• When you develop your workflows and permission granularity, you will benefit from clarity and effective conflict resolution.
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What about Sharepoint?
Sharepoint…talk about polarizing
• Context: An internal collaboration tool
• A massive cultural change• In 2010, a status quo persists: shared drives, email and
Excel
• Behaviours are not easy to change
• The big idea: no development required
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Why do so many Sharepoint implementations fail?
• Lack of Sharepoint technology understanding
• Lack of executive sponsorship
• Lack of proper planning
• Lack of user engagement
• Deployed as a custom web application
• Lack of roadmap definition
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Sharepoint dream team
• The executive sponsor remains crucial
• The steering team takes on some different responsibilities• Selling Sharepoint to the organization and finding
evangelists
• Approving how Sharepoint is implemented
• Final approval or rejection for all aspects of Sharepoint
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The Sharepoint steering team
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Helpful tips
1. Representation from different departments; consider enthusiasts and volunteers
2. Reconstructed on a quarterly basis (fresh people)
3. Permanent members have more control and should represent different functions as well as departments
4. IT members should be business-savvy, and business members should be IT-savvy; all should know OOTB
5. Chairman should be executive level
The balancing act
• People like to know what to do – guide them
• Too much governance – lack of adoption
• Too little governance - chaos
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Other suggestions
• Create a Sharepoint pilot first• Create a positive buzz about the user experience
• Run the pilot for an influential business group
• Identify and reward individual evangelists
• Be careful of permissions• With Sharepoint, your architecture must be carefully
planned
• Permissions propagate/inherit in a specific way
• Again, the underlying system always has an impact37
Advice from the trenches
Advice from the trenches
• Align your people BEFORE your implementation starts!• Before technical planning
• Before information architecture
• Maybe even before web strategy
• If you’ve already got a mess on your hands…• All the more reason. Decision-making structure should
be crystal clear when wading through a mess. 39
Advice from the trenches
• Prepare people for governance sessions• Use your information architecture
• When in doubt, keep it simple.
• Educate people on CMS concepts: workflow, permissions, publication and other content-related processes.
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The Colouring Exercise
Homepage
About Us
History
Philosophy
Careers
Products
Widget
Doodad
Thingy
Press Room
Press Releases
Videos
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More advice from the trenches
• The web is a distinct and unique medium – provide content authors adequate training and consider adding a content strategist to your team• What is a content strategist?
• Rachel Lovinger: A content strategist is a [role] with specialized focus on using words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences.
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How to encourage adoption
• Engage evangelists and spread the word
• Training – people fear the unknown
• Support structure
• Involve users as early as possible
• People will change if the change is worthwhile
• Restrict as much as possible, within reason
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Act it out
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Workshop – 20 minutes duration
1. Select some small object to represent a piece of content
2. Choose individuals or teams to represent ownership within the website
3. Act out a process from start to end, including all approval steps and exchanges of information
4. Repeat until your point is made
Sketch it out
Visual is powerful
1. Creating simple pictures is an incredibly powerful way to discover ideas and solve problems
2. Get everyone up to the whiteboard!
3. Very effective in sessions where team members sketched out their ideal homepage
45Credit: Dan Roam
Use some persuasion
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Human Behaviour 101
1. One of the best ways to get people to do something? Turn it into a game and add some competition. We just can’t resist.
2. 50 insights into human behaviour that can be applied not only to web design, but also to business processes.
3. Getmentalnotes.com (Stephen Anderson)
The $100 Game
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Activity: Around 20 minutes
1. You are provided with a list of priorities and $100 to ‘spend’.
2. Distribute the money across the priorities according to how important those features.
3. Explain and defend why you have divided your money in this way.
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The Problem
You are considering
changing the way you
label navigation on your
website.
Who is responsible for
looking at search
analytics to determine
the vocabulary your
visitors actually use?
A good answer
• The web team is responsible for monitoring analytics and reporting findings to the web steering team.
49
50
The Problem
Two different
departments have critical
events happening at the
same time and both want
to be on the homepage.
There’s not enough room.
Who makes this decision?
A good answer
• The web steering team makes the call.• Does not need to be escalated to the executive team
unless absolutely necessary
51
52
The Problem
There is a clear business
case for a new faceted
search engine.
It will benefit almost every
group that produces
content in the
organization.
What budget does it come
from? Who authorizes the
purchase?
A good answer
• The executive team makes the funding decision and allocates budget as required.
53
54
The Problem
The number of online
registrations has
dropped by 25%.
(Increasing registrations
is a key objective of the
website)
Who reacts?
A good answer
• The executive team pays attention to this and imposes an appropriate strategy and reaction chain through the steering and web teams
55
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The Problem
A series of untrue, near-
slanderous blog posts are
made about your
organization and
retweeted.
Who is responsible for
knowing this is
happening?
Who decides how to
respond?
A good answer
• Marketing and/or communications might take responsibility for this• Social media monitoring
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Evalu
ati
on
Netw
ork
Pip
elin
e
MonitoringUpon discovering a comment about the initiative, first determine the channel:
Social Media Response MatrixCreated by non~linear creations, December 2009
Active Channels- Twitter
- YouTube- Flickr
Neutral Channels
- Blogs- Open Forums
Closed Channels- Facebook- MySpace
- Closed Forums
Is this person in your network?
(Twitter follower, YouTube subscriber,
Flickr contact)
Check their stream. Do they post a lot
about related topics?
Invite them to connect
Y
N
Y
N
Actio
ns
Monitor(See Notes)
Is comment positive / neutral?
Let Stand(See Notes)
Concur, Add or Thank(See Notes)
Fix(See Notes)
Reach Out(See Notes)
Is it something you can respond to?
Is the comment off-topic for them or clearly just meant to
antagonize?
Is it a rage piece? Are they venting or ranting without a
cohesive argument?
Is there a factual error? Is the comment misguided but
rational?
Does the commenter have a specific concern or issue that
can be addressed?
Is it something you can otherwise respond to?
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
YN
N
N
N
N
N
N
Takeaways
• Invest in people alignment• It’s worth the time, effort and expense
• There are good and effective ways to structure everyone and everything for online success
• Form teams spanning traditional silos• IT should not drive CMS initiatives
• Treat Sharepoint as unique• Governance with some special tweaks
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Thank you!
Amanda Shiga
CMS consultant
Web strategy and business analysis
@amandashiga
http://www.nonlinear.ca/blog
non~linear creations
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