Newspapers and Magazines Need Content Agility

Next week, I will be speaking at the Mark Logic Digital Publishing Summit on the topic Achieving Content Agility in a Web 2.0 Environment. The timing is impeccable as the NY Times Mourns Old Media Decline covering layoffs at Time and Gannett among other cutbacks in newspapers and magazines. Business Exchange has topics on Newspaper Revenue, Newspaper Companies and the Magazine Industry covering the doom and gloom while Web 2.o and Social Networking are relatively optimistic.

I believe content agility was coined by Mark Logic a company that sells an industry leading XML content server. You can see a key presentation from them on Making Web Content Agile or flip through Harold Ratner's presentation on Agile Publishing. Content agility speaks to the speed and flexibility in creating content, elements of content delivery, applications that allow users to develop communities around content, publishing content to multiple devices and the ability to repurpose content. It touches on content analytics, search, translation, and monetization.

Back in 1996, I joined AdOne Classified Network and led the development of its SaaS (back then, we were an Application Service Provider or ASP) to move newspaper classifieds onto the internet in a searchable, browsable application. In 1998 we launched our first tool to allow consumers to place and pay for classifieds online. By 2000, we had only a handful of newspapers using the tool while Craigslist was winning the classified wars and expanding to nine US cities. Clearly, this digital transformation was not agile enough for newspapers. By 2005 I was off doing other startups including TripConnect, a web 2.0 travel social networking site. Newspapers struggled to hold on to their classified ad revenue. Gannett's classified revenue was down 28.5% this quarter.

Technology and streamlining editorial and delivey processes play a significant role in achieving content agility. First and second generation Content Management Systems are failing in this area. XML, search, and dynamic delivery are all key ingredients to content agility, but are still not sufficient. Monetizing content can no longer be an afterthought and needs to be leading elements of the editorial and technology strategy.

These are my thoughts as I work on the presentation. More to come.

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Agile Development as a Driver to Orginizational Change

I gave a short talk today to a group of VPs and CIOs on the nature of Agile. In a true startup, it's very easy for the team to adopt agile. But in an enterprise, agile development is a relatively new software lifecycle. Only recently, maybe the last few years has the agile community established best practices and methodologies that can apply to development performed in larger companies.

In enterprises, it's usually the technology department and more specifically, individuals on the software team that push to an agile lifecycle. They may even pilot agile on a small project or with a small team. But if the process is successful, it will quickly force other groups or functions to adopt their processes.

The net result: over a period of time, successful agile teams and delivery will encourage other organizational changes especially with teams and functions that directly interface with the software development teams.

First, consider the greater IT organization. QA will be the first team affected especially if the agile team adopts Test Driven Development (TDD). In order for the agile team to deliver releasable software at the end of an iteration, QA must find ways to integrate their testing into the agile lifecycle.

Other IT teams may not be so agile. A good example are infrastructure teams that have purchasing and implementation steps that can't easily align to agile deliveries.

Here's another issue. Security teams and other enterprise functions will often impose requirements onto the software team. These teams need to understand how and when to specifify these requirements and need to work with a new role, a Product Owner, to get changes prioritized.

Then there are the business teams and in particular Product Management. Will Product Management move from requirements docs to writing user stories? Or will stories be an IT responsibility? How will product managers handle the need to develop a more transparent prioritization process? Will they be accessible to the software teams?

Are these good changes? Most often yes. It brings IT into alignment with the Business. It establishes more efficient end to end product delivery. It gets multidisciplinary teams to be more efficient and innovative.

But remember, change isn't easy.

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