Alex around the World

I am talking about my own experience.In November 2002, our organization moved from a static HTML website to a taylor-made Content Management System (cms). At that time, the basic idea was simply to help the Web Unit speed up the web content publishing process, by allowing them to focus on the content of a page, the system taking care of the design through templates. The new cms also had other purposes, such as:

• Use a common, corporate look and feel for all sub-sites of our organization (more than 30) in addition to the main website;
• Ensure that the content of the website has been cleared (in terms of internal policy), edited in English and translated into French and Spanish (we have a multilingual website) through an internal workflow.

Technically, the cms is in fact a web content management system and a document management system. It is used to create and publish web pages and also as the main repository of official publications and meeting documents. It is important to say that our organization is active in three areas:

1. Intergovernmental meetings (output: meeting documents);
2. Research and Analysis (output: publications and reports);
3. Technical assistance (output: webpages and reports).

At the beginning, we all thought the cms was going to make everyone’s life easier, not only for the Web Unit, the main user of the system, but also for all staff involved in web content creation and updates.In the facts, it’s another story.After a bit more than 3 years of use, we are still facing some major problems in terms of workflow. We did not manage to implement a fully working and thus open the system to the web authors. In other words, the web pages are still being maintained and updated by the 5 staff Web Unit, which is not only creating a bottleneck but also frustrating the users that have been excluded from the process: the web authors.There are many reasons to that:

• lack of web culture within our organization: not everyone understands how the web can help you disseminate your information;
• system not adapted to our current needs: we need a simple and working workflow;
• some internal conflicts concering major issues: to what administrative entity should the Web Unit belong to? How many people should be working for the web? do we have a clear web strategy?

Although these reasons are crucial when you implement a cms, I will not discuss them here for the moment. Instead, my intention was to ask the following question: when we talk about implementing a tool that helps users to publish web content that needs to go through different steps, do you think that “workflow is the wrong metaphor?”A few weeks ago, I read a a paper entitled “Is workflow the wrong metaphor?“, by James Robertson, of Step Two Design. His main argument was that while workflow is an central component of cms, they often fail in most organizations. The main purpose of a workflow is to help organizations publish information that went through a precise review and approval process.The problem is that usually these workflows fail to reflect the complexity of an organization, leading to a “considerable gap between the vision communicated in cms tenders, and the reality of implementation. Eventually, the organization will only use basic, linear workflows, instead of complex ones. Robertson’s idea is the following: instead of seing the web publishing problem as a content management, with workflows, a solution might be to see this issue as a task management, where instead of having rules as in workflows, a user could “assign a task related to a specific piece of content to another staff member”. Examples of requests are:

• review the content
• update the content
• add additional details

Depending on the task, it will trigger either a direct publishing or a longer linear workflow. In other words, steps to be performed on the content will depend on what needs to be done on it. This would allow a wider range of options / workflows, instead of providing only long, non-flexible workflows.I found Robertson’s idea quite new, and it also shows that there’s a new paradigm being built around the issue of actual use of content management systems. A necessary paradigm, because my experienc taught me that, even if you have a perfect system or tool, it’s not guarantee for your system to be 100% efficient. Human factor and existing working habits are also to be taken into consideration when adopting a cms. I might be even more important than the technical side.

The organization I work for trying to set up some sort of editorial board whose main task would be to identify internal news items and plan their publication on the organizational website’s main page.Until now, we’ve been using an excel sheet to centralize information about when a news item should be posted on the home page and when it should be removed. It’s a rather “manual” way of doing and it’s becoming more and more difficult to keep the calendar up-to-date and share the information efficiently. Read the rest of this entry �

Wordpress 2.0 has finally been released. If you haven’t heard about this free publishing system or want to know a bit more about version 2.0, see the following links:

• Wordpress – About section
• Post on Asymptomatic.net
• Post on TechCrunch
• Post on AmosWong
• Post on OnlineMarketingBlog
• 5 little things I like about Wordpress 2.0 — cre8d design blog

Since I installed it, everything seems to work fine, except some themes, but no big deal.

I just landed on an article about webdesign and its future role.The web is an ever changing world. A few years ago, we had a clear definition of the different people involved in website creation: for example an HTML coder, a JavaScript developer, a graphic designer and a project manager acting as a link between the client and the development team. Sometimes you just had one single person wearing all these hats.This was when you only had websites with static web pages, easy to maintain and update.Then came Content Management Systems (CMS), with the possibility to create thousands of pages in a click, all looking the same. And along came the separation between content and layout or design. New roles had to be defined: ASP or PHP programmers, SQL or MySQL database administrators, content managers, information architects, user experience experts, and web-oriented graphic designers.This is what the current situation is, at least how I see it from my (own little) experience. In the past few months, since the appearance of blogs and wikis, things are a bit different (again…).In their article about Web 2.0, Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter explain that we moved from sites containing their own information (cnn.com, adobe.com or microsoft.com) to a new type of websites, “a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways”. (I recommend you to read their article, because it also describes six trends that characterize Web 2.0 for designers.)

The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.

I am quite new in the web design – web development profession. In fact, I don’t know how I really fit in this ever changing world. Let me explain why.I don’t work in the private sector, but in an international organization, so everything goes a little bit slower than in private companies as far as web development is concerned. In my organization, we recently moved to a content management system (since November 2002), and we’re just starting to implement complex workflows and procedures to help users to post their content. It’s not an easy task, believe me. There’s a huge gap between developers, information architects, or simply web literates and content providers, with little or no knowledge of what the web can be used for. Because of that, it is almost impossible to follow the latest developments in web design and how people interact on the Internet or disseminate their content through this media.I’m not saying that we should slow down this Web 2.0 evolution, I’m just trying to point out the fact that some industries or sectors have a slower pace. The web is an ever changing world, and each of us has its own pace.