Your next WCM Project: Basic Questions
Autumn time is budget time. And as the web is becoming an increasingly strategic channel for most organizations, they are planning important investments in their web presence.
Web teams are currently figuring out which budgets to submit in order to realize their web initiatives for the years to come. Major elements in these budgets are typically the cost of state-of-the-art web content management software, the actual implementation cost by an integrator/consultancy firm and internal costs. During this phase, web teams are making a detailed elaboration of their WCM project.
- How can we offer personalization? How can we publish to mobile platforms?
- How can we integrate social media platforms?
- How can we incorporate rich media like video and podcasts?
- How can we integrate back-end platforms like ERP or CRM?
- How can we introduce cool functionality to our site?
As you can tell, all questions start with ‘HOW’. But ideally, web teams should take a few steps back before jumping to these ‘HOW’-questions: they should ask themselves ‘WHY’ and ‘WHERE’?
Let’s start with the question “WHY you need a web channel in the first place”? What are the business goals you want to achieve with it? Specify them for your business situation by adopting two bottom-line elements in every business case:
1. Increase revenue/sales through
- Increased conversion rates
- Entering new geographical markets
- New publication channels (e.g. Mobile)
- Personalization and target audience marketing
- Quicker time to market
2. Decrease costs through
- Faster and more efficient content publishing processes (e.g. vs paper)
- Self-service provisioning for your customers (e.g. support)
- Reduction of call center calls
The other question web teams should ask themselves is “WHERE is our organization NOW, when it comes to the web”? The team may have excellent and cutting-edge ideas about where they want to go with the web channel in the future, but depending on the maturity of the organization regarding content production, content management and web publishing, their plans might not be realistic or executable (remember the days of ‘1-to-1 personalization’, which looked great on paper but was a nightmare to put in practice?). So the team should really make an assessment of the current situation, develop concrete goals of where they want to go and develop a step by step plan on how they are going to get there.
Conclusion: as a web team, you should not forget to ask yourself some basic questions regarding your planned WCM project. This will avoid a tiresome detour into nifty technical and functional details instead of focusing on the actual business goals of the project.