Thomas Falconer of Source Media, a veteran of engineering online transformations for traditional publishers, reflected on how IT people are very comfortable with social media technologies and other leading capabilities in ways that editorial is still beginning to adopt. SourceMedia has launched its first born-on-the-web publication called AdvisorMax for financial advisors, which has triple the growth of print corollaries. The ability to make good design choices in this new product was backed up by audience research that reflected which features and content were most important to their target audience. [NOTE: the default URL for AdvisorMax defaults over to a secure connection, important detail for security-conscious financial professionals.] Make sure you come to IT with metrics to measure success and clear requirements.

Ken Hoffman of Standard & Poor's takes content from S&P's ratings process and repurposes it for a wide variety of products and platforms for financially-oriented markets. Ken outlined the traditional development cycle - requirements gathering, have business analysts build specifications, review them with the IT group, iterate for new requirements, pass off to IT, iterate, and then launch. This leads oftentimes to the classic problems of misinterpretation, extended development, compromises to meet deadlines, missed market opportunities and "we'll put it in the next version" syndrome. Taking IT skill sets into account is a key factor in all of this, as well as their ability to provide realistic estimates based on technologies that are new to them. The need for a new product for financial advisors prodded them to use a wide range of product technologies. The solution: everyone was in the same room from "day one," which resulted in a working prototype in 3 months, a radical reduction in their development cycle. One IT person said it would take 8 years, another 22 - they are no longer with the firm.

Ben Telling of Hanley Wood reports to their CIO and is responsible for publishing systems and bespoke software development. "We're pretty much ripping out everything," with new content management, enterprise CRM. HW has 26 on-time projects and one failure - handing it off to tech is not the way to do it. Management may not understand a vision and they turn it into what they think that they need to get the job done - which means that they may envision an underengineered product. Business analysts get creative and add their own visions, and technology adds their own "special sauce." The result is expensive, failing projects that can't be supported. Poor vision definition, no drill down on needs, no clear business ownership, a lot of handing it over the wall. Must meet regularly with technology leadership and speak daily, constant communication and feedback, regular senior management updates, a cross-functional oversight team.

The problems - and solutions - that come from working with IT reflect the problems that come in publishing in general from dated command-and-control structures. These more collaborative approaches to IT projects reflect the more collaborative environment that is helping publishing in general succeed.

Labels: ABM, Best Practices, content management, Digital Velocity, events, technology