All things digital

Two important things happened today. Bnp Paribas fortis launched hello bank and one of our customers, the province of flemish brabant approved their daisy project. What's the relationship between these two and digital ? Read further, I'll make my point.

First of all, I'm very proud of the team of developers, administrators, business analysts and search experts that worked at a tremendous pace to launch Hello bank! today. It's the first mobile first bank in Europe ! This proves that bank2.0, social banking and mobile banking is not something for the future, not even the near future, but it's happening today.
On the other hand I want to congratulate Bnp Paribas Fortis, and no not because it's politically correct to congratulate a customer (let's face it's not politacally correct anymore to talk highly of banks). They did it ! They dared to innovate, they dared to start something they already had, a bank, a mobile banking app. They chose to disrupt.

Back to the other part of my story, daisy. Daisy is a project we are starting for the province of flemish brabant. It's intended to get the decision making process in the province more digital. You can't imagine how complex a decision making process can be in such an institution where elected people get to present new projects for the province and vote on them. But, the evolution there is get rid of all paper and evolve towards a digital local government.

This can only mean one thing ! The world is changing, the world is going digital ! Let's face it, if banks and governments are changing, surely the world must be changing.
Customers are embracing the digital reality much faster than any of us expected. Tablets are responsible for a huge earthquake in the analog world. Tablets (and not laptop's a couple of years ago) let all people access the information they want when they want.
I'm sure we haven't seen the end of this. Google glasses, Apple TV, 3D printing, NFC, it's all having a high impact on our daily lives.

Welcome to the future.

the trouble with portals...

The trouble with portals is that everyone seems to have forgotten what the purpose of a portal is. They used to be called Enterprise Information Portals or Knowledge portals. To me portals are entry-points to other information sources. It's up to the organisation to decide whether they want to represent these aggregated sources as a portal or a plain search result (hey, why not). To be able to do this portal need a number of technical capabilities :

• first they need to visualize the information
   (a portal with portlets)
• next, you need a security infrastructure to connect to all information sources with the same credentials (single sign-on and identity management)
• of course, you would need some social capabilities (who doesn't nowadays)
• fourth, a portal is the starting point for business processes, so connections to bpm and erp with task lists would be appropriate
• and last but not least, some content management functionality

Does this mean a portal can replace a WCM, I don't think so. Could it replace a DMS, no, not really

So, why is it then, that customers are talking about portal software when they really need a good wcm. It's not because a website should have a concept of a portal (e.g. entry point towards all info on gov in belgium) that it should be made with portal software. Personalisation used to be an argument for looking at portal software, but that's not the case anymore. There's good Web Engagement Software in the market that solves the problem of personalisation without the need for a portal software

When is a good time to look at portal software ? If you're looking at integrating applications, giving a front-end for your BPM solution to your users or simply create an intra/extranet. When looking at  the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals (what a name) we can see that IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are leading together with Liferay which is an opensource Portal software. To my knowledge one of the few Quadrants where an Open Source Software is leading.

A content management platform for digital campaigns

Back in the early years of 2000 we believed content to be king. A content management platform needed to be a central repository where all content resided in. It had to be one single platform where you had assets, HTML content, word documents, you name it. I don't think any of our customers realized this tour de force.

5 years ago people realized you needed different systems to do this. That's where dam, wcm and ecm began to live a seperate live within organisations. It was obvious that your intranet had not the same needs as your website and it all was different from managing scanned documents.

Now, in 2013, we live in an age where it's not about content but about the customer, the employee, the visitor. Sure, content is still king, but this phrase got a new meaning. Content became a way to attract people, to interact with people. Content changed it's face, it's no longer that long piece of html text. It changed in video, tweets, posts and still large chunks of html text. But compared to the early days, it's not relevant anymore to have it in one single repository. Today it's important to attract, engage and measure. 

Is it really important to have a tweet from two years ago ?

Do you really need a website with thousands of pages of text ?

No, I don't think so. What you need is to be on different channels, you need to be present on twitter, facebook, linkedin and everything else. You need to have content on all of this places. But the time-to-live of this content is short, fractions of what it used to be.

Therefore you need a separate platform for your digital campaigns. A platform that can engage with your customers. A platform that can measure what the impact is of content on your visitors, followers, etc...

And maybe a platform that is loosely coupled with your web content management system for your website. We see customers struggling with their WCM that is linked to their transactional systems (e-commerce, homebanking, ...). These are business-critical systems. And the agility of these systems is way below zero, which is normal. But CMO's and CDO's need a system next to that where they can interact with their customer or prospect. They need ways to publish content and track content on mobile, social and other platforms. The time to market here is of huge importance. So don't try to have it all in one system. Let them go in seperate directions and maybe, in the near future, it will all come together, because you would like to know what the impact is of a tweet on your e-commerce revenue.