Web content management software vendors are constantly working to differentiate themselves in the crowded marketplace. For buyers, one of the less helpful ways is when they introduce new terms to replace existing ones. At the moment the current buzzword is "experience management". Does this mean you now need to convince management about yet another term?
No, experience management is really just new marketing talk by proprietary and expensive vendors for a content management system. Experience management has been mentioned on and off for the past decade or so and is currently pushed strongly by several CMS vendors such as Day (soon Adobe), FatWire, Sitecore and Vignette (now Open Text). The problem with experience management, sometimes called web experience management or customer experience management, is that it really just describes the standard requirements for a system to power a website in 2010.
Experience management certainly describes nothing that you should not be able to expect from a Web CMS. Different vendors have put different angles on the buzzword, but I've yet to see a buyer who had a budget specifically for experience management or have issued a request for proposal for an experience management system. User experience covers most of it and is an established field and a recognized industry term, so why not use that instead?
A recent example of how the term has been used is from the Adobe acquisition of Day to quote Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Enterprise Solutions, Adobe:
Adobe’s acquisition of Day represents a key milestone in our efforts toward delivering best-in-class customer experience management solutions to enterprises and governments worldwide
In an industry plagued by too many failed projects, we don't need new confusing terms to replace ones we already have. Every so often a discussion occurs among industry pundits around whether we need to change terms, mostly in attempts to get senior management to realize what they are missing out on. A recent example: It was suggested in 2009 to deprecate the term "intranet" as it carried to much "dead weight" . Terms such as personalisation and portal have also been hot or declared dead from time to time.
To my surprise, the term web experience management has actually made it onto Wikipedia. A quick look at the history page, reveals that the page was created by a FatWire employee. Perhaps no surprise, that the references on the page link to FatWire articles on the AIIM and KM World sites. Also, a search on Google for web experience management brings up Vignette, FatWire and Sitecore right after the Wikipedia page.
Vendors will always be pushing their own agenda and not necessarily in a language you understand. If you as a customer want to fix web content management, ask your vendor to use terms that you understand and generally focus more on executing projects and delivering quality software and less on coming up with new marketing terms.
As always, let me know if you agree or disagree. You can also add a comment on the "experience management" Wikipedia page, which I think has more industry impact and many more readers than this blog.
The new term Experience Management, represents an inflection point in the web.
At Ektron We believe there have been 4 major inflection points in the history of the web which represent some of the key milestones that drive investment in the web space
1st-generation websites were Informational with businesses taking their brochures and getting them online as quickly as possible and out of that emerged the challenge of the webmaster bottleneck where companies had their webmaster be the only person to publish content to the web. Ektron was one of the first companies to allow people within the organization (other than the webmaster) to own content themselves.
Then companies started creating applications on their website bringing us to the 2nd major inflection point called transactional. This is when companies like airlines and banks realized that instead of a customer calling you on the phone they could book their ticket over the web. You really started to see those transactional sites emerge in the early part of the decade. Companies were taking their legacy applications and making them web applications so these were heavy-duty IT-driven web projects. This is also where companies started to look at 1-to-1 personalization – Amazon created a personal recommendation engine – but this had a massive cost and a lot of effort associated with it.
3rd step up was the evolution from websites being primarily IT-driven to marketing driven, so we call this Persuasive. This is where companies realize the best way to retain their customers is through the web and you start seeing the growth of search marketing and search engine optimization, landing pages, multivariate testing, content targeting and overall the recognition that your website needed to become a persuasive channel for your customers.
4th inflection point which is where we’re at now is Contextual where it’s not just enough to build a persuasive experience but that persuasive experience should be driven by context. The context of an individual site visitor (where they are in the buying process, where they’re located, etc). Experiences are now mobile, your web experience is not tied to a browser on a desktop, people are on the road and still look at the web. The reason we’re at this inflection point today is that the visitor expectation has changed. We’ve recognized that today’s visitor is more social, tech-savvy, engaged with the brands of companies they do business with. Web experience needs to be contextual meaning it needs to be social, personal and mobile. At Ektron we refer to this as Marketing and social Optimization, but it can be described as Experience Management.
Sometimes marketers get carried away with definitions and jargon that can be somewhat self-serving. At the same time, advances in technologies, business practices and consumption (not necessarily in that order) create change (complexity) and opportunities to think and communicate in new, simplified ways. Take Google, iPhone and Twitter as examples. These three sources of innovation and integration have changed how people and businesses function – including new terminology becoming mainstream in a short period of time.
Bill makes some good points about inflection points. Adding to his perspective, Sitecore believes experience management transcends “web” and it’s now about managing target audience experiences across a wide variety of channels and expectations — consistently and seamlessly. With the web as a source of innovation, real-time communications and transactions, we’re focusing on integrated business outcomes for customers and partners instead of focusing exclusively on tools. This is a natural evolution in any software market and, of course, the space tends to accelerate change – which keeps things interesting for everyone.
As a side note and given the graphic posted above, “Lost in Translation” is a memorable film about the main characters finding meaning in an unfamiliar world at given points in their lives. Our industry is undergoing signficant changes at a rapid pace right now. We’re all for any language that makes it easier for customers, partners and developers to be more succesful.
Hi Janus, you have a point. Of course it is jargon, and any good CMS platform should have the same capabilities as a web experience solution.
But it also represents a new way of thinking about the expanded role of content management. At Ingeniux we have adopted the Experience positioning because we felt it best represented our total solution of web CMS, content delivery, and community software.
Also remember, as a vendor the “jargon” is not only for customers, but also for employees and partners as a message about our shift in focus and customer expectations. You cannot underestimate the value in communicating that shift.
Historically CMS applications have focused on managing content, but often lose sight of managing the actual website and “web experience.” Publishing and managing a web page is a commodity. Helping customers optimize the website to generate more leads and sales, build a community or deliver engaging member services delivers real value – and rightly is where the focus is today.
So call it Web CMS or Experience Management, the fact is that expectations have changed. While the term inflection point to me is a little strong, 80% of the projects we work on now have marketing automation requirements, community, or another set of requirements beyond core content management.
I think the challenge is that most customers today do not know what Web Experience Management means. You are right about that. But they do have requirements that fall under the experience banner. If nothing else it is a great starting point for discussing project goals and how a modern CMS can support them.
So while the focus should remain on good projects and good software, there is value is communicating a broader set of content management capabilities. The Experience moniker is one way of bringing focus to that discussion – and has value beyond hype for customers and vendors alike.
Janus, thanks for putting your thoughts.
Here are my thoughts…
At SpadeWorx we assist our customers with Web Experience Management, through which we enable Web CMS and Social Context Optimization employing our home grown “User Centered Software Engineering™ and User eXperience Engineering™ methodologies to enhance User Experience and Productivity. We firmly believe that “Right Web Experience” of the end-users is of paramount importance for Enterprises and ISVs to focus on to leverage maximum business benefits.
Let’s also keep in mind that WCM itself was (and perhaps still is according to some circles) a meaningless moniker!! As a developer, I liken this discussion to the thread circa 2005 when “AJAX” was decried as meaningless jargon– but at the end of the day, in spite of its lack of specificity, it did give everyone a label to use to describe (as Bill Rogers put it) the shift that was happening at that time.
Any good software vendor is looking to turn a conversation from technology nuts and bolts to a broader business discussion.
What are you trying to achieve with this project? Why is it important to you that you have X, Y or Z? This helps tailor the right offering and form a good business ‘partnership’ between the customer and the supplier.
I think the concept of “Web Experience” actually captures why companies build a public-facing web site quite well. Jargon it may be… but it strikes me as useful in lifting CMS buyers’ eyes from the WebDAVs and the CMISes to the WHYS and WHOS.
Great post Janus. Is *web experience* an interchangeable term with *user experience* or UX? The value UX is well established. But a given CMS product cannot inherently deliver MORE web experience than its competitor.
Isn’t it ironic that the first comment on an article about weaselwords is in fact an example of how vendors use weaselwords just to impress without saying anything meaningful?
“At Ektron We believe there have been 4 major inflection points in the history of the web which represent some of the key milestones that drive investment in the web space”
1. You believe? Ok, let me know when you have facts okay?
2. Inflection? don’t even know what that is, is it kind of like that movie Inception? Because that rocked!
3. So the ‘inflection points’ represent key milestones… so there are just 4 milestones then? And some other milestones that were not key milestones, right? Just regular milestones then?
4. Milestones that drive investment… if that’s how it works, than surely Ektron could use some more ‘inflection points’ to ‘drive investment’… That’s a bit obvious mr. Rogers. Trying to set the agenda up for milestones to generate Ektron sales are you?
5. Investment in the web space… is that the same space that contains the blogosphere? If so, can I buy a quadrant?
Seriously, come back to earth and talk normal man.
I tend to agree with @Andrew Roberts from Ephox on this one. From a consultant / integrator perspective, I like to think about what these terms mean to my clients and how they will (or won’t) affect my client’s expectations and decisions.
In this case, I think WEM is a fine term to describe a subset of features available in many WCM products.
But it’s just that – a term coined to describe feature sets that already existed in several vendor products – not a game changer.
In my opinion any messaging that focuses conversation about web content management on the achievement of bsusiness value is worth our attention. In the final assessment, technology is deployed successfully when it can show some demonstrable ROI. The use of ‘web experience’ messaging is a proxy for a more detailed conversation about the contribution to the bottom line that investment in the web should make.
Findability, customer journey planning, SEO and social networking, accessibility, metadata management and many other elements, that go far beyond the implementation of a CMS, all play a part in the web experience. I think it is therefore important that vendors show how their technology contributes to a better web experience (and is thereby translated into improved ROI, through better visitor conversion) rather than just adopting blindly yet another TLA (three letter acronym).
After all, if CMS vendors can’t agree on how their products help manage a better web experience what hope is there for the customer?
Great post! Hopefully more influential people in the industry, like yourself, are willing and brave enough to voice their opinion on WEM, no matter if they are in favour or not.
I published a blog post earlier today (http://www.webnodes.com/wem-marketing-buzzword-or-wcm-2-0), inspired by this post, and it discusses our position with regard to WEM.
I came across this post only recently, so I am quite late to comment.
However, while Mr. Boye is certainly right to bash vendor jargon in general, I believe web experience management is worth a closer look. The reason for that belief is that it’s got potential.
“Experience” as in brand experience is generally a term closer to the conversational nature of communication, than the asset-thinking behind “content”. Finally online communication is much more about the whole package of contents, UX and interaction between the people on both sides of the screen, than about contents alone.
From that point of view, “CMS” nowadays seems more out of touch than “WEM” to me. Consequently I think it’s time to reclaim Web Experience Management from the aforementioned vendors and use it to the best of it’s explanatory potential.
Note: I wrote a somewhat related article on the matter in German two days after Mr. Boye’s post back in August 2010, but unaware of it’s existence.
http://t3n.de/news/web-experience-management-eigene-website-facebook-276909/