You're so typical!

One of the very first "contentions" posted to this blog was entitled " Am I Typical?"  It's a common question about WCM technology and implementation choices that all customers face during design sessions.  Well, some 18 months later, we don't need to dance around the question much anymore.  The answer is clearly "yes" at least when it comes to the technology and implementation decisions.

It's no secret that these days, Web Content Management (WCM) has become a line of business application for "customer facing" content (that is, content that is going outside of your organization to your constituents).  The goal of WCM is to maximize customer communications and loyalty, improve the online experience, generate leads, subscriptions, registrations, and/or purchases.  

But part of this shift from WCM as pure IT platform for "getting the content chaos managed" to WCM-as-LOB-application where "business results are required" has had major implications for the design and implementation decisions associated with all content management projects.  All companies want to leverage WCM for competitive advantage online.  But here's the difference.   IT tends to think about differentiation in terms of features and functions - and the underlying design and technology that enable them.  The LOB thinks of differentiation in terms of brand, style, and creativity - in other words in terms of the actual content being used more than some new widgets used to deliver it.

And in many ways, this makes sense.  When you're reaching your customers, you want the online experience to be familiar, ubiquitous, something they've hopefully already used before seeing it on your site.  Sure, the occasional e-commerce business touts some "one click to buy" feature, but we all use "shopping carts" to buy things on line.  Even all these new "Web 2.0" social communications media have quickly digested down into a few common modes: blogs, wikis, and social networking tools such as LinkedIn or Facebook.

What this means for the future of WCM, and thus for Percussion Rhythmyx, is that ultimate technical flexibility is giving way to the desire for pre-packed "buy it" rather than "build it" capabilities. Shortly, you'll be hearing a lot more from Percussion about what we're doing about that.  But for the technologists out there, don't worry - the platform isn't going anywhere, just some of those endless meetings in front of a white board.