Nstein's New 3S Boosts WCM Maturity

My first foray into Web content management (WCM) was back in early 1995 when we built a system to manage the content of two daily newspapers – including more than $100 million in Classified advertizing. We cobbled together a series of flat files with a nasty grey background that tiled. It wasn’t pretty but it served our needs at the time.

My second round at Web content management was in 1996 – when we realized that despite using HTML includes, trying to update the look and feel of two daily newspapers was improbable – and bordering on impossible – without putting everything into a database. Further, we were thwarted from our secondary goal of slicing and dicing content from our papers and our six radio stations into new “topic areas.” It was a manual laborer’s nightmare. Intrigued by CNET’s flexibility and ability to scale with large data sets, in early 1997, we became a beta site for Vignette’s StoryServer, which was a commercial product of CNET’s prototypical (and revolutionary!) WCM. (StoryServer is largely recognized as the first “real” WCM.) With it we could create new templates and indicate which stories would flow onto those templates. And when my company was bought by Gannett 6 months later, we had a fine infrastructure upon which to move the other three New Jersey papers. Later, long after I left, Gannett’s New Jersey papers were moved onto yet another platform – ostensibly to centralize many of the Gannett papers across the nation.

In his research, Forrester’s Stephen Powers did a fine job outlining this type of WCM evolution in his "Web Content Management  Maturity Model,” looking at the four different stages that companies fall into when it comes to addressing Web needs – from the Basic “just get it up there” stage to the Engagement stage. In this last plateau, executives (versus IT) sponsor building a framework that impacts marketing, business, IT and all business goals.

Of the 261 enterprise executives surveyed by Powers and his team, most companies fell in between the second, “Tactical,” and the third, “Enterprise,” stages. The challenge for Information and Knowledge Management (I and KM) professionals is that they “miss opportunities to treat WCM as critical plumbing rather than as an application silo, and they fail to see how WCM fits in to a broader persuasive content architecture,” writes Powers.

And while Powers rightly suggests these professionals use his guidelines to determine where they are on the Maturity scale to drive conversations internally it is also an initiative fraught with political landmines unless one happens to be working for enlightened despots!

There is another way. Nstein Technologies, which has been on the forefront of developing semantic analysis solutions for over a decade, has just launched its 3S platform. 3S allows Web content from disparate sites, of varying levels of maturity, to be automatically semantically annotated – and then “mashed” together so it can be sliced and diced into new topic pages. That static sister site that focuses only on carpeting now can easily be mashed together with content from another WCM that focuses on furnishings. The result – a richer engagement for your audience to be sure, but also the ability for business owners to create new, highly targeted sites that are subsets of the amalgamation of the two (or more) sites. Nstein smartly made the management of these microsites easy. Simply create a query and marry it to a theme – or template. It’s that simple. Nstein also allows the management of ad banners so you can promote products or services specific to this mashed up content.

Understanding where you are on the WCM maturity model is without a doubt important. But if management’s "maturity model" is lacking, Nstein’s 3S helps bridge these WCM stages quickly and painlessly.