Corporate Twitter (cartoon)

Cartoon of office workers discussing and editing a tweet projected on the wall.

Familiar?

Source. Via Spaghetti Testing.

Discuss this: 2 comments - read or reply

Fantasy CMS for government

Glass of water in the sunlight

The good doctor’s brilliant piece on the tyranny of content management systems has spurred me on to write this post I’ve been contemplating for a while, about my own frustrations with WCMS software and what an ideal platform for government websites might be capable of right out of the box.

Having been close to the requirements spec, procurement, implementation and testing of a couple of CMS-based websites in government in recent years, and used a dozen or so CMSs before that, I am consistently astonished by the (to my mind) fundamental things some of the big name platforms struggle to do, and the lack of features to help organisations manage website content as opposed to just publish it. And I feel that if any industry needs to innovate, it’s this one.

A quick blog search suggests I’m not alone. Even their free pens get a ribbing.

The best of breed tools have considerable strengths, of course, and it’s not fair to expect them to be all things to all men nor automate everything. But if the amount of bespoke modding by customers with common needs can be kept to a minimum that’s got to be good, right? There’s a lively discussion over on David’s post about ways to do just that through consistent schemas for government content, better interoperability, clearer client specification and even open sourcing a government-ready platform. So in that vein, what would a perfect gov CMS need to do?

I’ve started this list on uservoice of the stuff I’d like to see any platform capable of doing from the off. It’s a mix of crushed hopes of yesterday and starry-eyed dreams for tomorrow. (There’s prizes if you can tell them apart).

Feel free to chuck more ideas on there, vote them up or down, tell me why I’m wrong and what software can do it all already. I’ve learnt a lot from your comments on similar posts in the past.

Here’s my personal top five as a taster:

See the full starter list of 35 ideas here and please do comment, vote and add your own.

The stakes are pretty high, if you ask me, with the reputations of individual digital teams and the profession as a whole at the mercy of what their chosen system will let them do. (“That cool thing you saw on that website you like? Sorry boss, we can’t do that with our CMS.”) Vendors should be mindful of the power they yield, for as long as they still yield it.

Image credit: zaveqna

Discuss this: 10 comments - read or reply

Found/interesting: 28 Dec to 5 Feb

Look what I found interesting:

Discuss this: 1 comment - read or reply

Notes from the 3rd annual UK government unconference (#ukgc10)

This is just a quick one to send you over here, to the team BIS tumblog Alistair set up, where I liveblogged my notes from two sessions at Govcamp 2010 today (alongside posts from @alistairreid and @lesteph). Namely:

It was a great day, and a packed schedule, in the awesome venue that is Google UK – lending just the right kind of innovative atmosphere.

Open data was a dominant theme this year, and I dipped in and out of several interesting discussions, not least of all Richard Stirling from the Cabinet Office talking about the launch of data.gov.uk, merely 2 days after it went live to huge acclaim.

Inevitably I missed (and am about to miss – there’s a few sessions to go as I post this and head home to prior engagements) loads of good stuff. I am depending on good write-ups from others – especially the sessions on what digital means for the future of press officers, personal blogging, and defending digital innovation in a climate of cuts. I’ll add links here as I find them.

Meanwhile the Twitter stream is still going strong.

Updates:

Updates II:

Updates III:

Discuss this: 4 comments - read or reply

The perfect page…

A lot of my focus at work lately has been about how we publish to the web – who’s doing it, with what tools, and to what standard.

While the boss is focusing on what goes up when and how to make it more engaging, I’m mainly working on three things:

Underpinning all three of these, I’ve been working in my spare time on a checklist of quality criteria for web pages.  (You know me, I love a good document).  Feel free to grab it in PDF or Excel if you’re interested in taking a look:

I’ve got my doubts about its practical application day to day, so I thought I’d share it here and get your feedback. It builds on work I did at my last place, owes a teensy bit to the much meatier Directgov equivalent, and has had some input from the guys in my team. But it’s also only a draft, was written outside work hours and is in no way an official publication from my employer, OK?

Here’s what I’m trying to achieve with this, if it flies:

So what say you? Useful or likely to be ignored? Too detailed or not detailed enough?

Discuss this: 9 comments - read or reply

What’s on my iPhone? (Or: Appy new year)

(This is a lazier than usual post for a lazy New Year’s Day. Normal service will resume when the year is in full swing…)

I don’t know about you, but I can’t so much as glance at someone else’s iPhone without wanting to grab it and have a nose at what applications they’ve installed. So for any fellow members of Appaholics Anonymous who read this blog, here’s what’s cluttering up my iPhone* on the dawn of the new decade:

Social web apps

Productivity apps

News/content apps

Travel and location apps

Music

Telly & film

Shopping

Reference

Games

These are the keepers at the moment:

Toddlertainment

Tried and tested on my two year old:

Hmm, that’s a much longer list than it seems just from flicking through the screens on my phone.

And yet… with over 100,000 apps in the app store and counting I’m bound to be missing some gems. Personal recommendation counts for a lot against those odds, so I hope you’ve found my list useful and would really love to hear your suggestions too.

(H)appy new year and here’s to the next ten years of jaw-dropping advances in web and mobile technology. I’m rubbish at predictions but feel pretty confident in saying all this stuff will probably just look like Pong in comparison to what we’ll be using in 2020. (And my son will be better at using it than me).

*other smart phones are available. Hold your tongues, Android fans, I’m not an Apple fanboy.

Discuss this: 9 comments - read or reply

Found/interesting: 9 Nov to 24 Dec

I haven’t done one of these bookmark posts in a while, and I’m some way off posting anything new here. So here’s a look at what I found interesting enough to bookmark recently.

Discuss this: 1 comment - read or reply

How to read minds and influence people

Derren Brown doing something odd with his eyebrows

Knowing what your customers are thinking is the first step towards making them happy. But how do you know what’s in their heads (without being Derren Brown)?

I’m some way closer to being able to read my website users’ minds than I was this time last week – thanks to two unrelated events which turned out (maybe supernaturally?) to be related after all.

The first was Gerry McGovern’s masterclass on web management. An inspiring, often amusing rallying call to public sector web managers to manage their sites properly: by identifying the top tasks users come to the site to do, and testing and re-testing those tasks continually to improve user satisfaction.

That’s a crude summary of a packed day’s course which has left a big impression on me. (If you get the chance, go). Among the many points which hit home were these:

(*Incidentally, writing this just reminded me of a visit to WHSmiths last Saturday – a non-virtual example of this customer service sin: chaotic, frustrating, and probably not long for this world).

At the second event, a meeting at Google, I heard about some incredibly useful tools for finding the right words which will help me put some of McGovern’s ideas into action. Most of these were new to me and might be to you too:

These tools are all free, enormously powerful and allow you to do seriously useful things beyond just buying up keywords for SEM. Like, just for starters:

Now shouldn’t you be crossing my palm with silver or something? I accept chocolate coins.

Discuss this: 2 comments - read or reply