“The way we have always thought about strategy is very centralised and top-down. That’s controlling and directive - and leads to very detailed strategic plans. We need to move towards something lighter, that is driven by shared-purpose.”
When I spoke to Boston-based Rachel Happe, I was naturally hoping she would elaborate on her memorable remark from 2018 on how control is for amateurs. As you can tell from the opening quote, what unfolded was not just a conversation about control and communities, but a fascinating perspective on its impact on business strategies, organisational structures and how we collaborate. Many executives are really struggling to be successful because organizational models are out of sync with the speed of information.
Rachel is the co-founder of The Community Roundtable and strongly believes in the power of community to enable human potential. She is our expert of the month.
Read moreAs a large, global and complex organisation working with consumer goods, how do you both consolidate your brand websites and make it easy to create new ones? In particular, when brand management is distributed globally and websites developed by different teams in different countries, things can quickly get both painstakingly expensive and, to put it mildly tricky to manage.
French-based global spirits company Pernod Ricard was facing exactly this challenge 2 years ago and looking for a content management system that they could use and scale to meet their requirements.
Read moreGoing agile at scale has been both buzz and reality in many large and complex organisations all over the world during the past decade. Whether you’re talking big or small scale, agile comes with many glorious promises.
We both recognise and advocate the benefits of agile. But in this post, we’ll also voice deep concern about what agile has become, and raise a few flags to be aware of, if you want to gain from the hard-earned learnings.
In our peer group meetings and conferences, we’ve heard about the agile reality several times. In a recent member conference call, Christina took a less travelled road within the topic of agile transformations: What's the dark side of our new organisational models, structures and ways of working? Specifically, she talked about how the industry maintains the “perpetual fantasies of the ivory towers and consultancy houses.”
Read moreWhat do I have to do to earn and deserve the key relationships that are going to get me where I want to go?
As one of the world’s leading authorities on the management of professional service firms, David Maister is among the top business thinkers in the world. His book on Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy is a must-read for strategic thinkers.
Relationships play a key role when it comes to knowledge sharing, as trust is one of the vital factors that makes knowledge sharing work. To paraphrase the classic book title, investing time in both relationships and knowledge sharing is obviously the right thing to do, yet not easy.
Read more“Let the content folks do their job”
In my conversation with Ottawa-based Mark Demeny from Optimizely, the conversation quickly turned to how we can best empower content creators and site builders. There’s still too much thinking required according to Mark and that’s from someone who’s spent his working life since the late ’90s on web systems and digital platforms.
On February 1st, less than 2 months ago, Mark left Contentful and joined Episerver on Feb 1. Just one week later, Episerver renamed to Optimizely and Mark’s responsibility as Director, Product Management turned from Episerver CMS to what is now called the Optimizely Content Cloud.
At Optimizely he is collaborating with many of his former colleagues from his 8 years at Sitecore and on his to-do-list for the coming months is updating the product architecture and integration to the rest of the Optimizely suite. Mark is our expert of the month.
Read moreThe shift to digital teams is here to stay, whether we stay remote or return to the office in a hybrid/mixed mode of work. And whilst digital teamworking tools, such as Microsoft Teams, allow us to continue working, we can easily focus on meetings and chat - not the elements that drive high performing and collaborative teams.
In a recent member call, UK-based collaboration expert Andrew Pope showed how his approach to designing blended teams has been adopted by a UK Government client.
We looked at how they found opportunities and set goals, what techniques were selected using a 'choose your own adventure' approach via online workshops and game cards and how they helped their workforce learn new skills to embrace digital teamworking, to fully utilise Microsoft Teams.
Read moreEnonic XP is an open-source web experience platform now in version 7.6. The focus is on next-level headless CMS, making it easy to build custom web solutions…..
To help our growing community of digital leaders make better technology decisions, we’ve just released a new and detailed review of Enonic.
The marketplace for digital experience platforms remains crowded and it can be hard to make sense of the many moving parts as a customer. Norwegian Enonic has been around for over 20 years and has managed to reinvent itself a few times.
Read more“Why does your business exist digitally?”
It sounds like a simple question, but to many, it is actually quite difficult to answer. In particular, in large and complex organisations, depending on who you speak to, you’ll often find quite different answers.
In my recent conversation with Toronto-based Blair Roebuck, she shared her challenge of looking behind the numbers, finding the compromise between different views and opinions, yet only one website
According to Blair, every website has a purpose. If you are in B2B, it might be showing your authority or it might be all about lead generation. The trick is, that we are being measured on different outcomes and conversion doesn’t necessarily mean checking out in an e-commerce flow. Long story short: We’re often not measuring against the right metrics
Read moreIt’s no news that marketers and content editors want control over non-web experiences. Preston So from Oracle describes the current situation in the marketplace as “an uneasy alliance between personas” and last year he made a popular call for A New Grand Compromise In Content Management as he shared some of the current problems with headless CMS.
Earlier this month, he returned and hosted a member conference call with his latest thinking. He covered what he considers the fundamental problem facing content management today: “Not all CMS personas are treated equal anymore” and went on to talk about how this impacts us all on the journey from CMS to DXP (digital experience platforms).
Read moreDid you get your job by playing safe? According to Florida-based community expert Tim McDonald, we are too often focused on the end result and programmed to always have a plan. Then there’s the element of fear and what might happen if we move away from what is expected.
In our recent member conference call, Tim talked about how by letting the world feel your heartbeat, you inspire others to share theirs. A deeply touching conversation about the difference between telling a story and making an impact, on fear, and Tim’s very personal story.
Read moreTracking down imagery for campaigns can be quite time-consuming and it’s a real challenge in many organisations with photos, videos and other material spread out across different systems.
In our recent member conference call, London-based digital asset management (DAM) expert Theresa Regli shared her insights on the topic and opened her talk by getting to the core of the problem:
When re-use or re-purposing doesn’t happen, more money gets spend on re-creation.
With a focus on DAM for the last 15 years, Theresa advises marketing leaders and DAM project leads on digital strategy, data design, and MarTech stack product selection. In our call, she shared from her recent work on DAM and integration points, specifically to the MarTech ecosystem.
Read moreIt seems only fitting that in my conversation with Vancouver-based Melissa Breker, she brings up the famous George Bernard Shaw quote on the problem with communication. The quote has never been more relevant in these times as we are dealing with the pandemic and fighting misinformation and it is also very fitting for the career path taken by Melissa.
As you probably know, it’s often an illusion that communication actually occurred. In recent years, Melissa has transitioned from almost a decade of content strategy work to being a change leader. Her focus is now even more on clarity and how to actually ensure successful implementation of change.
Melissa is also a Boye conference speaker and our expert first expert of the month in 2021. At her recent Aarhus conference appearance, she spoke about a few gaps that you need to know, but let’s first go back about a decade to understand Melissa’s background.
Read moreHeadless CMS has seen a growing popularity in the past years, mostly driven by developers and customers unsatisfied with their existing digital platforms.
While it is often sold on the premise of many advantages to developers, business users tend to struggle to make the shift to a new paradigm. In a recent CMS Expert session, Petr Palas from Kentico took a look at the most common reasons why headless CMS adoption fails and how to overcome them.
Read moreWe don’t do breaking news, but instead we try to share insights from our members and extended network of friends, and at least once a year, we look at the stats to see which posts really made an impact.
We actually managed to do 63 blog posts this year, which is up from 40 in 2019. Is that a good thing on a crowded World Wide Web? We think so, in particular given that it’s been a year with less in-person meetings and far fewer conferences. This means that it’s been harder to get to the unique lessons learned from practitioners and experts alike.
A big thank you to everyone who’s found the time to contribute. It makes a huge difference and it’s what keeps us going. Picking just five posts it unfair, but this is the season of lists and reflection, so here you go.
Read moreWhile the pandemic has hit each industry and country differently, few are more hit than those relying on tourism. In particular those in destinations further away than a drive or train ride.
For our final member call in 2020, we looked to the home country of Santa Claus and heard from Stine Selmer Andersen at Visit Greenland.
Using her work with destination development and sustainability, Stine Selmer Andersen dived into the new reality and trends of tourism and gave a behind-the-scenes look into what you do, when you drive tourism to a country, which is practically impossible for foreigners to visit.
In other words, a different angle on customer experience, digital business development and the new normal.
Read more