Should a CMS be a bit more old fashioned?

I probably have this wrong, but I get the impression that many early CMS type applications were designed on the basis of a couple of people using it and shoving information into the right sized holes so that it looked okay in a web browser.

There is nothing wrong with that, but there is an argument to say that prior to the web, it never worked that way. Actually, it was far more flexible and maliable and how the system worked was a reflection of the type of information involved, and who wanted to manipulate that information. (I am using "information" rather than "data" because I think calling it data was where we go wrong in the first place!)

Here are a couple of pre-web examples:

The Family Scrapbook

I loved scrap books when I was a kid and lament the idea that they have fallen out of fashion. They normally started without any book what so ever, but probably some sort of container; a biscuit tin or shoe box. Photos, ticket stubs, brochures, theatre programmes, note on beer mats - the assortment of data was huge. At some point, a family member (mostly female, interestingly enough - and this maybe also important) would decide it needed to be put in some sort of book. The hunt was on. It could not be any sort of book, but had to be the right size and colour and durability; it had to fit the existing information, there was no way anything was going to be thrown away.

Once found, then the fun started. First all the information would need to be sorted out (its in a shoe box remember.) It would be put in date order, type, linked by memories, and so on. As part of this, other information kept by other family members would come out of the wood work. Slowly, an informal editorial process would evolve with the initiator probably in charge of the final product (that was what it had become) and others taking roles of varying importance from information gatherers, to writing additional notes and memories to those who just looked over the shoulders of others and said "you missed a bit."

This little family scrapbook had turned into an enterprise. At some point, it was sort of finished - at least the basic was complete. It was now readable and enjoyable. But families dont suddenly stop - the scrapbook would need to be maintained. This then became the job of a single person, and when they ran out of time, it was passed onto another, even over generations.

The Newspaper Office

Unlike families, newspapers have a hierarchy based on hundreds of years of experience. It is quite tribal in many way, though not a single tribe. Maybe a better way of looking at it as a series of villages that are loyal to a king.

Unlike many large companies, newspapers communicate both up and down the hierarchy. A journalist (surprisingly a long way down the food chain these) would find a story and pass it up to his or her editor. Up there in the clouds it would be decided whether this story was worth running with. That process would include passing memos back to the journalist to find out more. If it looked interesting, the journalist would be packed off (or sometimes it was passed to another) to do the rest of the leg work and get the story together. If it was not so interesting, then the original information was stored, just in case it was useful later (newspapers never throw things away).

Once the story was researched, the initial story was put together, typed in triplicate. The main copy was sent to the sub-editor, the second kept by the journalist to scribble on and a third left untouched for the archives. The sub-editor rarely accepted it as is. At this point he would make countless notes and send it back to the journalist for correction (sub-editors never rewrite only shout). The sub-editor would also contact the photo library to see what they had to support the story. If they needed more, the library would send a photographer to do the work. Notice here that we are jumping from village to village. The Sub has his own little village of journalists, but he does not have his own library - that is a village all of its own. He has to go and ask them.

At some point the story was sent upstairs via the internal messaging system (which had two legs and a challenging haircut) to editorial with all its various bits attached.  If the story was difficult, editorial would get Legal in to look at it and would decide whether to run with the final story or not. Also, editorial would often request further changes from the sub, who would pass that to the journalist (managing editors, or kings, do not talk to smelly hacks!)

At last, the story is good - it is solid, it has been checked, and off it goes to print. Well, sort of. Print is a village in its own right with its own set of requirements. Although it would be lovely if stories arrived ready for the press, they never do, and Print do some extra editing to make sure all the stories fit together and look good. Print is subservient, of course, to the King and they work together to get the final shape before it is sent to press - yet another village!

This all sounds horrendous - but in fact it works incredibly well. All the pieces fit together and the result is that the final printing press can handle any shape story, in any fashion because the procedure is incredibly flexible. It is the story that counts and it is the story that is the true king.

The Home Office

I think I first went self employed in the mid nineteen eighties. The company I was working for was taken over by a bit of a Mafia type (Sharon Osborne's daddy, Don Arden) and life become rather uncomfortable. THe long and the short of it was that I ended up in a small room in my house surrounded by ancient recording equipment, a phone, a fax machine (eventually), a small photocopier and a rusty filing cabinet that I picked up from the local dump. Oh, and an old but unused ledger for my accounts. No secretary, no teaboys getting my coffee, no maintenance man to keep things running - just me.

Two sides of my life nearly tripped me up - promotions and accounts. Doing the actual work was easy; I had been doing that for years.

Like any one man band I needed to organise and I needed things linked neatly together. Most of it revolved round my filing cabinet with an in-tray and an out-trary either side.

Every thing that came into my life - bills, phone messages, briefs, letters, faxes (eventually, still), companies selling to me, all went into the in-tray. This was the business version of the family shoe box. It was a mess, and it was meant to be. The sole purpose of the in-tray was to stop things getting lost; if anything that came inwards went to the same place, it may be hard to find, but at least you knew where to start.

From the in-tray, all this information was sorted into files. Self employed people always have way too many files, especially if they have been used to having a secretary, as I had. Learning that you only need one file for "services" and not separate files for electricity, gas, phone and so on, takes time. The filing cabinet was big enough to sectionalise, however, and I eventually got it right. The trick was that anything that would need actioning (hate that word), working on, should be in top draws, while archives that are used less often should be at the bottom. So, current clients, briefs, and bills were split up over the top two draws. Old clients, ancient, finished work and last years accounts went in the bottom. And so on.

From the filing cabinet, the next stop was the out-tray. Into here would go tapes (reel-to-reel) to be delivered, film spools, finished articles for posting, all the bits for my next brochure ready for the printers and so on, accounts to go to the accountant. 

The last stage was probably the most lumpy - distribution. Films would go on couriers. Tapes, sometimes courier, sometimes post (remember to wrap it in tin foil for going abroad). Some paperwork would go in the post box, some would go to the post office because it was large or needed something special. Yet other stuff, the brochure for instance, would be hand delivered to the printer so I could explain my mad notations on everything.

Actually, this was all rather a lot of fun. An enterprising local student who was having a gap year realised there were a lot of people like me around, and he started a local pick-up and delivery service for a few of us. He would collect in the morning and do all my locals and the post office bits. Saved me loads of time and cost very little.

The workflow was difficult to get right, but once I did, it worked out very well, and there were enough checks and balances do that I did not forget things - well, not too often at any rate!

The Company

Over the years I have worked on corporate communications for many companies, especially internal communications. For several years I worked with an amazing business writer called Jonathan Ellis on a special day held every year at Philips Electrical. For one day their entire workforce of some 250,000 employees downed tools and pens and tried to visualise themselves within the company framework. It was a clever idea, and although I don't think it actually made the company work better, it was one incredible study of how companies operate on a human level. Indeed, later on, Jonathan wrote an animated film for them called The Tree to demonstrate how the information flows up and down to the trunk and out to the branches and the roots where the clients and suppliers can be found. I wrote the music and it won a ton of awards.

So, the culture within a large organisation is very different from a small business or a family. All of these are tribal in the way they function, but they show up differing sides of a tribe. A large company, like a very large tribe, has to manufacture communication routes rather than rely on it being instinctive. This is for the very simple reason that the company is very big - it is not feasible that every part of this corporate tribe will know every other member and with companies the size of Philips, they are not even aware of the existence of much of the company outside of their immediate environment.

The purpose of Philips Day and the film was to show that how ever far apart people were and even though they spoke 45 different languages (we translated a lot for this job) and produced wildly different products, they were still all part of Philips the company - if nothing else, they were linked by the logo on their pay check. 

When the company first created a world wide computer network, there was the assumption that if you put up a few bullitin boards and wrote some nice articles and allowed people the freedom to comment and later to have their own sub-identity through a dedicated website where they could shout out about their existence to the rest of the company, that everyone would flock to it and the network would be possitively glowing with internal communication. 

In reality, people simply did not use it, not at that stage. Oh, they sent emails, and like document repositories, but they never talked with each other over it. Senior management felt they didn't have time, and general workers did not always have access.

But the real problem was that the tools they were being asked to use were created by the IT department who had not realised that these did not relate to what people did day by day. IT people have always been ahead of the game when it comes to using the latest communication techniques and much of the technology was very much related to what they did everyday as a job - it was a natural extension. But for someone who spent all day making light-bulbs in Bombay, it really did not light up their life, it was but another layer that they had to cope with.

That was some years ago, and most people, certainly in developed countries, know and understand all these tools, in fact, instinctively they probably have a better understanding of their cultural use than those who designed them!

However, they still have issues when what they are being asked to use adds that wretched extra layer again. Good modern company communications must not be outside of the company culture, as so many IT systems are, but embedded at its root. I used to call it the water-cooler culture. If any social communication tool you invent cannot at least partway replace a group of people hanging around the water cooler, then it will never do its job to the level it should.

People within companies communicate in short sentences - you can see this in evidence by how much more is achieved by sticking a post-it note on someone's briefcase that says "thanks for your hard work" compared to sitting round for hours in the conference room having a team-building chat. The throwaway remark, the easy bob of the head, these are the stuff that huge corporations have been built on for two hundred years, and long before that if you consider the huge corporations of earlier eras - Monarchies we called them!

Unlike the editors office, or the one man band, or the small company, or the family, trapping and controlling this information is almost impossible - but not quite. 

Companies are, by necessity, compartmentalised and these far smaller areas of the company are much more familiar - quite literally. Where Philips day worked was because it did, to a certain extent, make everyone feel like they might belong to the whole. Where it worked much better, however, was that each small family unit, one factory, one branch, one legal department, would work through their day together. It actually reinforced the localisms of the company and that, despite the lack of intent, was a good thing.

So, the true corporation, however it is in theory constructed, will always fragment into more manageable sized tribes. As long as the Bosses can recognise this and treat each small tribe differently according to their makeup and needs, they will in the day have a whole - a whole made or parts. And that is all a company is.

The Next big CMS Thing

The way a content management system needs to be constructed in the future needs to meet with a lot of needs in a log of different ways. I have been impressed with what Google have done with Google Apps. I know many people in the industry do not like it, but it presses some pretty good buttons with users. The reason is familiarity. Google have recognised that peoples lives are so stuffed with IT that they get really annoyed if they have to learn something from scratch. They want to plug into the new whatever-it-is and say, oh, I know how to do this. And they know that because it contains big buttons that say things like Open, Edit, Save, Send, Smile, Delete. 

When I speak to a client about using a CMS I get two reactions - "Oh, it can do everything I want," and "I haven't time to learn that much." These are not contradictory, they are the same thing. The very reason that they haven't time is that is does EVERYTHING!

A content management system needs to be all about workflow and reacting to how people think and organise rather than asking them to think in the same way as a designer. To achieve this, the very core of the CMS needs to be broken down into building blocks that can be assembled to define the shape of application that people want. To a greater extent, of course, most CMSs already do this, but not necessarily in a very friendly way.

If I am running a news service I want complete control over the content that other people are contributing, not just on a publish or not publish basis, but on an ongoing basis throughout the creation. I want to see that their note taking is good, I want to know that they are collecting evidence (not always published) and authorities to facts (newspapers often do more of this than is realised when you read the article - their legal departments insist on it), I want to be able to commisions other authors to work on a piece instead of or as well as the original author, and so on and so forth. I require a lot of bricks in my process.

If, however, I am a one man band (which I am) I dont want all of that and I certainly dont want it tripping me up when I am trying to get information stored and possibly published. However, I may still want to collect notes, store bits of stray information that I can use later and so on. (I write blogs, from time to time, and I still keep my note taking elsewhere because the blog system isn't designed to keep stray information very well - the shoe box is still better!)

If I am a family I probably want just a touch of what the newsroom has, but in a less formal way. I certainly probably dont need to output to a printer, and I dont have a legal department and my kids seem to bury me in photos from their phones, but I do want a way of collecting all this data together in one place and then outputting it in exactly the way I want without having to employ a developer to rewrite the system.

Can this be done?

Of course it can. In Joomla, for instance, there is a good templating system that allows you to bend the CMS to your needs look wise and with the various CCK style components out there, building blocks can be created for nailing stuff together - so the idea of a System Template is already partly there in bits. But it could go a lot further.

I would love to see a highly flexible system that can address all the above needs and then variations of it be stored as System Templates. Such a system template would basically specify which elements of the modular system are going to be used, which interface is needed, which bits of the permission system and, I suppose, even if this is going to be the little version or the huge enterprise version.

So, a core system that can be just about anything. I suppose there is an argument that those things already exist - they are called opperating systems, and certainly frame works like Drupal certainly attempt to go that direction, but they still lack the friendliness or perhaps the accomadation of not only supplying the needs of a particular industry or person or family, but doing it in such a way that is completely familiar to them and their environment.

Many idealists have pointed out that if you want the ultimate children's toy, you get a child to develop it (even if an engineer then works out how to manufacture it.)

There, now how about that for waffle!

Joss