An innovative approach to events: vendors get to pitch to live clients. Charlie Terry of Marketresearch.com and Barry Bealer of Really Strategies get to listen to vendor pitches from companies who have called on them acting as fictitious buyers. I'll spare you the details of the vendor pitches but will try to provide some key points. Todd Mickelsen of FAST Search and Transfer pitched their stability, their market momentum and their ability to exceed expectations. Key question posed by Barry: how do we get legacy programmers comfortable with this new technology? Todd focuses on connectors that make it easy to integrate content from legacy systems.

Jean-Paul Chevet of Nstein Technologies pitched from the position of a small company focused primarily on helping publishing companies to be successful in electronic publishing. Put together a portal for Wolters Kluwer that allows users to build a book with just the content that they need. Jean-Paul went into the details, emphasized that the "how" of creating content matters and managing time-to-market for a solution. Audience response: do you need to work with integrators to get these types of technologies? J-P: we have an in-house team, typical implementation 2-5 months with two developers.

Debby Richman outlined the pitch for Collarity, a 2-year old startup that enables improved content discovery through developing clustered communities of interest. A sliding widget on their search interface allows a user to indicate whether they want search results that match their personal profile as well as clustered tag clouds, related content suggestions. The goal is to build natural communities out of generic Web site traffic. They don't charge for the technology, they share in ad revenues.

I am getting second-day live blogging fade, so my apologies for the abbreviated entry. A clever concept for looking at the vendor evaluation process. Overall FAST, being a large incumbent, can come in and say that they solve everything - and in some instances perhaps they can - but the pitch gets bogged down in the usual I.T. box diagrams and doesn't get to business benefits quickly enough. The Nstein pitch is compelling in presenting benefits and payback as well as their real-world expertise with publishing, but needs to tune its implementation success stories. Collarity has a very interesting tool for improving the value of search results in context, but it seems to be the typical tool-as-a-product pitch that needs to focus more on spelling out what the problem is that's being solved up front.

Labels: Collarity, FAST, Nstein, SIIA Content Forum 2007, technology

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