Maximize Your AEM Implementation: 3 Key Factors in Running Your Website Effectively

Transcript

Thanks for that introduction. I’m excited to be here. For those of you that are in the session, please use the chat box on the side. I’ll be answering questions at the end. Hi, my name is Fred Faulkner and I’m a partner at ICF Next. We’re an Adobe Gold Solution Partner. I’ve been working with Adobe Experience Manager since, well, before it was actually called Adobe Experience Manager. When I was implementing our corporate website number of years ago at a past organization, we were the last people to purchase the last software, licensed software from Day Software before Adobe acquired it and became AEM. From that project, I was migrating from a legacy CMS with over 50 business units, 300 content authors, and I was responsible for making sure that they could actually use the website and create experiences for our members of our organization. What I learned from that implementation was that no organization has a single way of actually running a website. There’s lots of ways to do it. But to make sure that a website runs efficiently and you need to have a lot of set of business rules, maybe some processes, have some training and governance put in place. Without them, all that time, energy, and money will be really wasted and just go down the drain. If you don’t want to do that, you want to think about all the things that happen behind the scenes. That’s why today I’m passionate about the business side of running a website, and why it’s just as important as the colors, layouts, navigation, and the content that you actually publish. In this session, we’re going to talk about a few things. The different ways you could actually run a website and the models and their benefits, how to implement a governance model that can fit your organization, and how to continuously look at how to evolve your organization as it matures.

Now, if you’re like me, at one point in your life, you’ve played with a Lego set. One of the most amazing things about Lego is that with all those bricks, you can explore to your imagination’s end. But sometimes you want to build something specific, and sometimes you want to have something that’s consistent. That’s where the things like instruction books come in handy. You can build very specific outcomes.

Or even wall art. There’s just the name of a few of those types of things. So this is very similar to building a website in Adobe Experience Manager. If you give your creators all the bricks, or in Adobe’s world, components, they can create amazing experiences, but maybe sometimes not with the consistency or with the right colors or layouts, because if you’re just giving them all the components, they just have to let their imagination run wild. So you want to think about things that are going to actually keep them in line so your brand can stay on point. So some authors might be more advanced than others, you can give them more bricks, more leniency, more things to do so they can create great experiences for your brand. But sometimes you need to have those instructions. Those instructions for those that need to have something to build something very specific, and have those personalized experiences actually be created faster. So I want to talk about the builder book. The instructions, the guides to help your creators create, but to keep the brand consistent, clean, and will give the guidelines to help those authors, those content creators, the ability to create something within reason, but also push the envelope. A few opening things to get us started. You’re not always creating for just your external customers. I think it’s one of those things when you recreate a website, rebrand it, rebuild it, that you put a lot of research into the fact that, what is my end customer going to experience on our website? But just as important is your internal customers. Your internal audiences need to be able to create those experiences, and that’s why governance is super important. The usability of a webpage, it’s not just about browsing and navigation, or using a search box, or is the right tags put in place, and the content shows up right. It’s now also about what page layout is appropriate for this content. What kind of components are available to be used on this page? What components don’t you want to have available on this page so you can actually keep that brand consistency? What kind of workflows do you need to put in place? Is it something that needs to go through legal and compliance before it can get published, or is it something that can just be published right away? These are all things that you want to be thinking about as you start to think about governance and the rules of running your website.

So, I want to make a very specific point. The important part about running a website is all these aspects. It’s not just about the front-end side of stuff. So, you have a lot of decisions to make. Who’s going to help you make those decisions? Who’s going to keep all the policies in place? How do you request a functional change? Do you have a governing body? These are the things that I want to just kind of set up and tee up that we’re going to get into in this presentation. So, it’s not just about taxonomies. It’s not just about the brand colors. It’s not just about where the logo is. And it’s not just about when you create a microsite or a landing page for a campaign. It’s about all the things that kind of happen to make a website experience happen.

So, let’s get started. How do you actually have a management model for your website? And there’s lots of ways you can do and run a website. Here’s my biggest tip. Do not run it like the wild, wild west. That’s going to get you in a lot of trouble. So, let’s talk about a few ways.

You need to have a structure in place that allows your organization to not only publish content and create experiences, so brand standards are always going to be met. Your tone and voice is consistent. Data is being tracked more appropriately. Lots of things like that. So, there are two common factors, two common ways and models that you can actually consider when it comes to running your website. A centralized model and a decentralized model. Now, these are not the only ones that are disposable.

In fact, which one you choose really depends on a variety of factors that comes down to your organization. Things like budget. How many people can you actually employ to actually run a website? Employee skill set.

Locality. Think about, are you a national, a local, a regional, or maybe a global website? There are definitely ways of models that will support each of those. Think about your company culture. Other internal politics that kind of indicate how publishing content on your website might work or not work. And then even your organizational structure.

We’re going to talk about centralized and decentralized, but there’s federated, there’s hybrid. There’s going to be a model that you might come up with super unique to your organization. The point being is that you want to think about something that works. Also, the way you start with your management model might evolve and change over time as your company matures. We’ll get into a little bit of that too. A centralized team is a team that really addresses every aspect of what your organization of your website needs.

Of course, there’s nuances per organization, but essentially a centralized team is your one-stop shop. Think of them as your Lego maniacs. They know every Lego. They know how they all work together. They know how they can create content, create pages, edit content, publish something. They know how to make sure SEO is put in place. They’re going to know this system inside and out because this is what they do on day in and day out. They’re passionate about creating experiences.

Your centralized team could just be about website publishing, but they may also have resources that say, hey, I need graphics created. Now I have a graphics team that’s on this centralized team. How you make sure the SEO and others compliance standards are put in place. This centralized team benefits when you have this because they’re the ones that are experts. They are that centralized team that knows exactly what they’re doing together. The training needs to be hyper specific. You can hire very specific experts. They only need to know a few things to be able to do. But this is your centralized approach. You can get efficiencies this way. They know everything about it. They know what products integrate together. They know what things don’t integrate together. It allows also marketers to be able to do their job on a regular basis so they can focus on maybe their audiences, the campaigns, and the content. Some of the cons though is that you’re not their only customer. If you have multiple business units, you’re going to run into challenges in the sense of I need something published now, but you’re stuck in a queue. And how do you escalate? So there’s other nuances to actually having a centralized team because you’re not the only one. Maybe the people you work with on a regular basis are not exactly true. You might submit a ticket one time with getting content published and you work with one person. And then another time you work with an entirely different person. That can present challenges as far as just even like jive and flow and just even collaboration. So there’s nothing pros and cons. These are just a sampling of what those can be. There’s lots of other ones as well. But when you think about centralized models, think of it as one central core team, the Lego maniacs, the ones that are there that know the ins and outs of how the system works. And there it can gain a lot of efficiencies when you put it that way.

Now, you can also run a decentralized model, in which case you are big enough where you can actually have pods of content authors in different business units. They might have the budget to be able to say, I want to have my own content team in my business unit. We’re big enough. We don’t want to work in a centralized model. They’re responsible for everything. The content creation, publishing, edits, fixes, new creations. You have your own set of Lego maniacs in your department, in your division. And that’s great. You can get a lot of things done. You have more autonomy to be able to create information faster. You might be able to have faster business reviews and approvals. You can fix things because you’re not stuck in a queue. No one has to drop everything for a fire drill because one business unit has something going on that stops another business unit from getting something done. The cons is that you might actually have additional business processes you have to go through, depending on your industry. You might have compliance things you get checked through. So your publishing process might not be as simple from that perspective.

But decentralized models have come in handy. The other con, though, is that sometimes when you have not everyone’s created equal, some groups might have more advanced experiences on their part of the website. It might be a sub-brand is more advanced than another brand. Does that actually help your end customers at the end of the day? And this is where the balance comes into play. You have to have different training models and a lot of other things that happen behind the scenes when you want to try and keep all things as close to equal as possible in a decentralized world.

I think most organizations actually work in a hybrid where some business units are mature enough where they can actually have their own content creators. They can actually do in a decentralized model, but then they actually have a centralized team that supports the business units that doesn’t have that or doesn’t need to have a constant creator all the time. A couple of examples of that in a minute.

So, governance. Let’s talk about governance models for a second.

When I was growing up, the pirate set was introduced. Ah, yes, pirates. Scallywags in the sea who are out to do no good but pillage and plunder. However, even the pirates had a code and had a set of rules they followed.

And while there is a need for hard and fast rules, sometimes it’s just the need for some skylines, that’s for sure. It all depends on how you want to set up your governance model. So, let’s talk about a few things that actually you want to think about. So, one of the things you want to think about when it comes to governance is to not take it lightly. It’s easy to go overboard based on past experiences, especially if you’ve had something that gone wrong in the past. You’re going to want to put a lot of hard and fast rules in place to fix it in the future. And yes, while those rules are important, you definitely want to think about things that are going to give yourself the most flexibility. So, the first piece of advice is don’t over engineer your governance model. Think of it as something you need to have that gives you boundaries, gives you guidelines. Have the hard and fast rules in place you need to have, especially when it comes to things like legalities and compliance. If you need to have things that are accessible, make sure you’re following the accessibility rules. If you want to make sure that you’re in a highly regulated industry and you need to have all the compliance put in place to make sure you’re following the law, make sure you have those put in place. Otherwise, think about things as good guidelines that keeps yourself on brand. Let other business rules come into play. You don’t need to re-document everything inside your guidelines. But definitely have a set of rules in place that you can live with across the organization and grow over time. It’s sometimes easier to add new things in than it is to pull things out, surprisingly. But you want to make sure that you are thinking about the best intentions at first, than maybe the sticks by having things over engineered.

So, yes, keep it simple to start off with. Don’t over engineer it.

But communication is key. You want to think about things like your basic change management rules. So, how do you have your communication? Who’s your early adopters? Who are your champions? Trust your organization first. Don’t untrust them. The second thing you want to do is you want to lead with value. Now, not just value to what your end audiences might want to have, but value to your content authors so they can do their job. You want to be able to have them focus on things that they do best. The websites are channels. They’re tools. They’re tools to communicate with your audience. They’re tools to commit commerce. They’re tools for revenue. They’re tools for lots of things. Leading with value should be, how am I going to put a set of rules and governance in place that allows my teams to do their job with the least amount of speed bumps possible? And then give them an avenue to grow with that. And give them an avenue to ask for things to improve. And that’s when you need to have something like an oversight committee. I talked about this a little bit earlier. It’s easy to think that we’re going to create a set of rules and we’re going to publish this website, but then who actually gets to answer questions when I have a question around how the website should be run? And that’s where an oversight committee comes into play. It’s the buck stops here approach. They’re the ones that are going to look at the challenges that you’re having. And they’re the ones that can have a decision. They’re going to have a process in place that everyone agrees to. So you can actually have business decisions make on how you’re going to run your website. But they’re a team that represents all different parts of the organization. You don’t want to have it just run by IT, just run by developers, just run by marketing. You want to have representation from marketing, IT, legal, business units, everyone there to kind of have different perspectives to bring into play. And that’s really important to have. You want to make sure that business decisions are made with a process that everyone agrees upon so there’s no questions later. But those are things that we’re going to talk through as you actually grow and mature as an organization. And then lastly, one of the things you want to think about when it comes to governance is, again, when you’re thinking the themes of don’t over engineer, think about value, making sure you have a committee, is also thinking about things like measure and optimize.

So it’s easy in my experience, it’s easy for people to say like, oh yeah, I need, you know, Jim needs to have an access login to the account, or we need to have every business unit needs to have their own login. But what are the metrics that you’re going to keep yourself accountable to says like, hey, is this website running efficiently? And that’s not necessarily saying, oh, I’m looking at website metrics, like how many page views are coming or how many different segments are coming and all the marketing KPIs that we think about when it comes to how you run a website. I’m talking about things like, are you actually, is your asset repository growing too big? What’s your retention policies? The website shouldn’t just be a dumping ground for everything because everyone thinks that storage is infinite. What are the metrics that you’re putting in place to actually measure the success and health of a website that’s behind the scenes? And those are things you want to kind of continue to watch and monitor. The point here is that to keep a healthy website, you need to have KPIs that are more internally facing when it comes to running a website, not just the external facing, is the website being successful for your content and for your audiences? So let’s talk about a couple artifacts. Let’s dig into some of these principles just a little bit more. I mentioned this oversight committee. Like I mentioned, someone has to be in charge and it should be a diverse set of group. The website is too important of a channel for you to just be left alone once it’s published and hope for the best. You need someone to oversee it. So this is the group that’s going to set the guidelines. They’re going to set the rules. They’re the ones that are going to help manage the dispute between business units and when they want to get something done that doesn’t necessarily follow the rules, but it actually might be for a good reason. Then they’re going to establish what type of procedures people need to follow. And then, like I said, they’re going to have representation from all different parts of the organization. They should be meeting on a regular basis, at least quarterly, to make sure that they can actually look at updates what feature requests need to come out. They might help prioritize new enhancements for the website, but it’s a group where the buck stops with. And so oversight’s committee don’t underestimate the value they bring to the table when it comes to running a website. They’re not there in the day to day, but they’re the ones there to help make sure that it is being used and effectively published and effectively being managed at the end of the day. I would say something to definitely want to keep in mind. When I was implementing my website a number of years ago, I think one of my biggest challenges came down to this thing. The website guide or the guidelines per se. The organization I worked for, they were a legal organization. If you can only imagine how it is to run a website, imagine running it with a bunch of lawyers who all have opinions about how their website should be run and their different subset of that website. The guidelines were important. It helped set the tone of what the rules were, what some of the consequences might be, and how to give your content authors the book, the guide to build great experiences. So if you think about that Lego manual again, I’m going to create a Lego set. I’m going to create a piece of wall art. What are the step-by-step instructions? How are things published? What words to use? What not words to use? What are the other associated guides that you need to take into consideration, whether it be a brand book, a style guide, how your tone and voice and language is used on the website? These are all things that are integrated together, but the website is a manual that’s just as important as those policies and procedures as well. So the book is there to help every author understand what they can and can’t do, how they should and shouldn’t do different things. Make it an intranet site. It should be a living document. These are things that shouldn’t just be set in stone. So it’s really important, I think, to think about where you put your website guide. How do you look at it? How does this oversight committee review on a regular basis, at least annually, make sure it’s updated? But what are the guidelines for how you use components, how you do pages, how do you do publishing processes, definitions around terminology? These are all things that are kind of in this living document.

Now, we talked about organization maturity a little bit earlier, and I want to jump into where this actually kind of comes into play. Whether it’s a centralized model or a decentralized model or some hybrid model, you want to actually look at something called the center of excellence. These are used a lot in organizations, and they should be used exactly the same way for your actual website. This is the stuff that’s going to happen day to day. I got a question. Who do I go to? Is there a forum I can ask? Maybe an email distribution list? These are other content authors. These are your peers. These are the ones that are all across your organization to help each other out and be able to share their best practices so you can get the greatest experiences out there for your customers. So having a center of excellence in your organization can help you mature faster as well. You’re basically self-training along the way, in addition to formal training you might have. But these are the people that are in it day in and day out. How do they help mature an organization faster because they have this peer group where they’re not being felt like they’re sending an email to a set of content authors that make them feel a little bit silly about why their question exists? These are people that are there to help each other and accelerate and share successes, share failures, share things that are actually working and not working because they all are going for the same outcome. As a channel, your website should be driving business. What are the things that other business units or other content authors are doing to help make that happen? Center of excellence is a great way of doing that, whether it be monthly meetings, email lists, distribution lists, web forums, whatever they might be, have a way for them to interact with each other. They’re going to grow and therefore your organization grows in maturity as well.

So talking about centers of excellence, let’s go about maturity and how do you actually grow with it.

So this is the everyone is awesome set at Lego, which I think is amazing. It’s a great set because everyone is awesome. Indeed, we all are. So what it means to come to building a website, you want to take every skill set and every level into your organization. Again, whether you’re using a centralized model, a decentralized model or a hybrid model, some other ones. The most important thing is that this is a channel that is seen 24-7, 365. I might be sleeping, someone’s going to be on the website. I might be up in the late at night, someone’s on the website. This is a channel that never sleeps. So making sure that your content authors can create content and produce content on your website and any of their skill sets will make your brand consistency as best possible. So keeping brand consistency in play, making the least amount of speed bumps, educating and maturing your organization as you go through. Let’s talk about a few examples.

I am a big fan of Star Wars. Now we’ve already been talking about Lego since the beginning of this presentation. So when I think about the millennium, my favorite set is the Millennium Falcon. So for this example, we’re now brand Millennium Falcon. We have a diverse set of content authors in our business units, and we need to ensure that they can stay on brand while allowing everyone to be able to publish content and create experiences. So let’s talk about how those experiences might happen.

This is the first example. It’s a basic set, least amount of pieces that are possible. And you still notice it’s on brand. That’s a Millennium Falcon. Seats one little Han Solo, has a few little pew pews on it, but it’s very easy to build and anyone can really do it. So in this example, maybe you have a content author in a business unit that maybe it’s a communications group. Their job is basically to maybe publish some blog posts, publish a press release. Well, as a content creator, I only go in maybe once in a while. Maybe my organization doesn’t publish this every day. So I might not remember all the rules. As a business unit or as a centralized team or even your management team, you might say, hey, how can I make this person’s job as easy as possible? Because they’re focused on a lot of other things.

That already has predefined components on it. It’s going to have a title. It’s going to have a date. It’s going to have a rich text editor. Now that content author’s job is to just worry about copy and paste and format. And then they can go through the publishing process for reviews. That’s the easiest thing you can do as an organization to support a content author that is in the system as little as possible. Doesn’t have the super big skill set, but that’s also not their day to day job. So simple set on brand. Easy to do. That’s one way you can think about a lower end maturity.

Taking a next example is that now we have a little more of a complex set. This one takes a few hours to build, not a few minutes. It’s got more bells and whistles. You can open it up. You can see inside. You can see two people in the cockpit instead of just one. But yet it’s still a Millennium Falcon. This is probably where a lot of organizations sit, where you have this balance of complexity, but yet still simplicity in the sense that you know it’s on brand and you can still use it. You can have a lot of fun with this particular Millennium Falcon for sure. And that gives your content authors a little more flexibility to do things. They can actually create more. They have a little more flexibility with templates. They might have a little more open spaces where components are defined, but I’m expecting you as a content author to build each of those bricks in place to make this set work. But yet again, you still have a brand that you’re maintaining. So I think a lot of organizations are going to fall into this skill set level. But then we have one more at the same time. This is the biggest. This is the best. This is my favorite version of the Millennium Falcon. In fact, this might be where a good centralized model comes into play because you want to have this awesome set of a Millennium Falcon. So the only way you get this awesome set is when you have a centralized team that knows exactly what they’re doing. This set is the most expensive. It’s the most complex. It’s the biggest.

It takes 700 man hours just to build this specific one. This takes a Lego maniac to put together. This takes a Lego maniac to know how all the nuances work. This takes someone that actually is going to know how different things integrate together. So when you think about it from an AEM perspective, this is the team that you probably get the most flexibility because you want them to be the most creative. But they’re also the ones that know how to integrate AEM with Adobe Campaign, maybe Marketo, Analytics and Target. How are they going to create more personalized experiences? This one can change up. You can put different dish on the top. You can add different features. But this is going to be the most detailed, the most specific, but it’s also the most complex. These are the ones that you want to have the team that might lead the center of excellence using. This is the ones that have the most flexibility. They also probably get the most fun to play with it as well. But again, it is clearly on brand with being Millennium Falcon, the brand, because it is the most complex and you have the most important people running it. So by giving this open-ended aspect, you’re pushing the envelope, you’re getting integrations, stuff with your website, but you also have the most trained and skilled people actually using it. So three simple examples of where you can say, hey, I can define a set of templates. I can define a set of layouts for those that might not be as mature and using my website and being able to create content. I can also give more flexibility where I can say, hey, layouts are more open, but I’m going to tell what components you can and can’t do. But I want you to use your imagination to create experiences. That’s your middle one. And then you have your most advanced set here where the world is their oyster, but it’s also the most trained and trusted team to be able to create experiences on your website and still maintain the brand. So as your organization matures, as your center of excellence continues to educate and get your content authors feeling more comfortable, you now have a maturity model that you can progress through to support your brand and keeping it consistent, but still creating experiences that are fun to be around. So as you can see, building a website is not easy. The aspects of every Lego brick and how you can have them at your disposal, but putting them together in the right set of pieces in the right way to create experiences that matter, to get experiences that are helpful, to get experiences that drive revenue for your organization sometimes needs an instruction manual. And when you have those instruction manuals and with the right training and the right governance, that gives your content authors the confidence they can to build experiences that matter that drives actual results and you avoid horrible customer experiences. If you ignore these governance models, if you ignore having guidelines or related artifacts, who knows what’s going to happen? And you might have spent hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on a website redesign and then within three months, people are looking at you going, why does this look like a bunch of not working out well for us? So governance is an important factor. So by focusing on your internal audiences, just as much as your external audiences, you’re ensuring that you can create the best customer experiences possible. Now go build some amazing experiences with your Lego set, your website, put the bricks together in ways that can stay on brand, but push the envelope for your content and customer experiences. Go establish a center of excellence to help your organization grow and mature. Now let’s head over to that chat box and let’s go answer some questions.

Thank you, Fred. That was amazing. You had me hooked from the very first Lego analogy. I have to tell you, we’re a very big Lego household over here. I actually asked my husband this morning to make sure that I would have a Millennium Falcon Lego ready for this session. So the big one was too big. So we get this guy. That’s awesome. Yeah, we do. We have some great questions from the audience. And just a reminder, by the way, this is live. We have Fred here as an expert. So use this time wisely, ask those questions. So if you have a question, drop them right now into chat. And I’m going to start with a question that did come in from Karen that says, in your experience, how long does it take to implement and operationalize the governance principles in a larger organization? So what’s typically the biggest blocker of a successful implementation? That’s a great question. And I wish I could say that there’s a definitive timeline for every organization. Obviously, you mentioned big organization. I think there’s some strategies you can put in place, but think back to your basic change management principles. This is something that is new. If you don’t have guidelines in place today, it’s going to take some effort. It could be six months. It could be a year. It could be strategically done in chunks and phases as well. I really want to lean back into the ideas of your champions, your early adopters, but you also need to have top-down approach too. The wild, wild west of website management is still very common in today’s world.

Having leadership, understand that this is a channel that needs to be managed effectively. Support that there are guidelines and rules, but then again, come back to the basic change management rules. If you have a oversight committee, they’re your starting point. They’re like the buck stops here approach. But then you want to have, who’s the groups that are most mature? Who are the ones that are going to do the cool things within the guidelines and the governance models that have other parts of the business going, hey, I want to see that. I want to do that. Why can’t we do that? There’s a little bit of that bottom-up approach, but I think change management is where it comes. Now, as far as challenges are concerned, that could run the gamut. And I think, again, when it comes back to any large organization, think of the same challenges when you run any big initiative. You’ve got politics. You have just I’m not going to do things. You have rogue groups that are off. They probably have domains on GoDaddy you don’t even know about that are running microsites. It’s going to take, I think, just politics, just other competing priorities like, hey, I get what you want me to do, but quite frankly, this is a bigger priority for me. So I’m not going to put it on the top of my list of things to pay attention to. And then even to the sense that like, hey, I have a crisis. I need to do this now. I don’t have time to adopt and follow all these guidelines. And so there’s always going to be that kind of evolution of how the adoption happens. What are the speed bumps? But I think politics is one of the biggest ones. I think priority is another. And then honestly comes down to then demonstrating and showing the benefits. You want people to want to follow guidelines. You want them to see the benefit of why following the guidelines or having a participating in the Center of Excellence benefits the business at the same time. So those are some of the things that I think you should keep in mind. The definitive timeline, there is no definitive timeline. I think every organization is going to be different. If you’re global, think regional first. You might even think departmental first. If it’s a little bit more of a medium or smaller organization, those timelines can shrink down. It kind of really depends on your company culture as well. Like how attuned are you to following these types of business processes and rules and guidelines in place? And are you typically something that happens all the time or is it more of a struggle for anything? So I would put it in the same category of timeline as any of the big business process you’re putting in place. You’re going to want to follow those practices, but also you can think those timelines in the same kind of general sense. Yeah, I think with governance too, it’s really easy to over-rotate. I think you mentioned this in your presentation. It’s just you want to be careful that you’re kind of staging in some of those governance, but you don’t go so far that also if somebody doesn’t follow governance and you’ve put such strict rules in place, do you, as the person kind of overseeing the governance, do you even have the time to be able to manage all of that? So when you over-rotate, it can be hard for you as well. There’s a quick story behind that. The organization I mentioned that I had kind of done this big process with, it was also very autonomous before. And these different business units felt that they could do, they had their own webmasters, their own kind of independent creators, and they had to follow some stuff with their guidelines. But I remember there was a point where someone was clearly breaking the rules. I mean, they’re just blatantly not. And you kind of go down and you have a conversation and it got heated at one point. And there’s another time I’ve had to like shut off a person’s authorization to actually create content and be like, hey, you signed a document that says I’m going to follow these I’m going to make sure that we’re following, but you’re still breaking these rules. And you don’t want to throw sticks at people, you know, but sometimes you got to like, for the sake of the bigger brand, sometimes things have to kind of go in place. You’re much better putting off carrots instead, where there’s a business benefit that comes off and flipping it the other way around. But those conversations and some of those times, those actions are not fun to deal with at all. I like the idea of kind of staging it in so you don’t get to that point. Exactly. Exactly. And in that particular case, that’s exactly what happened. It was like, we probably didn’t roll out the governance the best we can.

Some of the stuff that I talked about are really important. Like having a center of excellence is great, but if they’re not meeting on a regular basis or they don’t have that kind of constant communication, like any internal project working group, it just fizzles out. And so you expect things to happen, but then they don’t because there’s no one really kind of taking the charge and owning that moving forward. So I think that’s an important aspect of the centers of excellence and even guideline implementation as well. Like having regular touch bases, making sure people understand, asking what can be changed, what’s a friction point, what’s not working with the guidelines and how do you change that? It’s just like any other internal working group. You want to have that kind of process put in place.

It’s actually, it’s a good lead in to, we did get a center of excellence question. It came in through email though. And it says, when you were talking about centers of excellence, do you have any advice for how to roll out those types of suggestions to an organization? Yeah. Centers of excellence is really takes my experience at centers of excellence that really comes down to it starts organically anyways. So there’s already a band within or set a team or colleagues inside an organization that are already talking to each other. Hey, Hey Jim, how did you do that? That web form or, you know, Hey Jane, how did you get that, that, you know, that, you know, font to look that way or that, you know, page created so quickly. And they have their tips and best practices, especially as people that are much more organized and much more skilled. And then they’re, they’re helping someone kind of pull them along or giving advice and counsel. So having a company culture of already collaboration goes a super long way. Then you’re just kind of formalizing it a little bit, but you really, I found centers of excellence takes a person who’s willing to take that on their shoulders. I’ve set of people that are willing to take that on their shoulders and say, we know this can benefit the organization. We want everyone to be successful. And so back to the kind of the older, the point I was making at the end, when you focus internally, internal collaboration leads to greater customer experience on the outside. And the centers of excellence is an easy way to kind of identify that. So I guess rolling out is identify your champions. Who’s the most smart. Who are the smart people in the room that are already the skilled knowledge workers and how do you encourage them? And it might be some formal ways you encourage and reward them for taking on the center of excellence position or leadership role. It might just happen naturally, but I think, you know, you got to find the champions and then those that are willing to, and giving them relief to pull people up and having them, you know, helping them out instead of saying, I got a day job. I don’t have time to help you make it something that is part of their job that gives them that relief and can actually then help accelerate. So I hope that kind of answers the really kind of champions, give them relief in their job, make it something they can do. And then, you know, you want to find the people that are willing to help and it’s just there by their nature and a collaborative work environment is always super helpful as well. That’s great. No, it’s good advice. It’s a nice way to elevate folks as well that are kind of looking for a way to get carrots, throw them carrots, right? Hey, we’re going to reward you in some other way. It might be monetary, it might be another benefit. It could be, you know, some internal employee reward program, like, you know, give them something, but that’s the type of stuff you want to find those champions. Those champions are gold at the end of the day for you.

We had another question that came in from chat. This is from Katrin. It says, are there any Adobe solutions to keep and run a website guide? It’s a great question. A knowledge-based solution or something similar? Yeah, you know, that’s a great question. You know, in an ideal scenario, you have something like a wiki. Unfortunately, Experience Manager doesn’t have that kind of functionality. You could have an internal facing intranet that is, you know, it’s a published document. You could have, I mean, honestly, it’s probably something more like SharePoint is probably an easier place to kind of put stuff. But if any intranet site is there, I mean, it’s really just an internal facing document, whether it’s a web, web focus, which I actually encourage because that can evolve and you’re not republishing version one and version two in a Word doc, but it could go something as simple as that. And it’s in some internal knowledge base that you have inside, you know, again, an intranet or shared workspace could be Microsoft Teams or Slack or some other kind of place. So unfortunately, like I said, wikis are the easiest way to do it, but those are not, you know, it could be something like Atlassian and Jira, like they have, you know, kind of the confluence, I should say confluence is a great space to kind of put stuff, but AM doesn’t quite support it at this point in time. So a little more of a challenge there. It’s also probably keeping in mind, use whatever you know the recipients of that document will use. Exactly. Organization, everything lives in SharePoint. Don’t reinvent the wheel and spin up a new tool. Leverage what you’ve got if they’re already in work front or forever. A hundred percent. Yes. A hundred percent. Agree.

Question from Greg. First off says, thank you, Fred. Do you have or do you think or have you seen a, and it says WKND. That’s weekend. Yeah. Weekend tutorial. Yeah. Okay. Approach for AM content authors. Is that something you can help? Oh, is that something that can help with AEM authoring guidelines and governance? So WKND is a great tool. So for those of you who don’t know, if you’re on AM as a cloud service or AM 6.5, Adobe created this micro site, I guess you could say like a starter site called WKND. They have a couple other ones that are out there, but WKND is the most common one. I love WKND at the end of the day because WKND is the about a vanilla out of the box, you know, flip it in and think of it like a WordPress theme. You kind of like drop it in and you have all your, your out of the box components, what they call core components are available. Some basic templates are set up permissions. It’s a great starter site. I actually use as a great training tool. I would love you to leverage WKND as an internal space of saying, okay, we’re going to create our own little training program. Can you do the following? You can battle test your own templates this way. Give people some playgrounds to work with. WKND is a fantastic site. Especially with content authors. I mean, WKND is focused, especially AM as a cloud service, but WKND is focused on the content author. I love giving demos from via WKND. It gives me a way to stay up on what’s going on because always updated as well. But you know, it gives so much flexibility. It really is. It can be the big Lego ship or like you’re building everything with stacking your components, thinking much more an atomic level, but it also gives you the ability to kind of really practice on, all right, I’m going to create a new template. Let’s monkey around with it over here before we actually bake it into our theme and our design for our website. So I would use it as a, you know, say a way you could use WKND is if you are an administrator of the website and you wanted to test a content author, whether they’re proficient enough to get to the next level of permissions, you might have different roles, right? We thought of our different Millennium Falcons. So there’s the easy one, the medium one, the big one. So say someone wants to be graduating from the easy one to the medium one. You want to give them a set of tasks that prove out they could do it. WKND is a perfect example of how you could do that internally, whether you’re not going to break the site, you’re not putting them on a stage site or a dev site or anything else you’re doing. WKND is a fantastic tool to do that with, assuming you’re using a lot of the out of the box components and thinking about building stuff together.

That’s amazing. We still have a few more minutes. So I have a couple of questions that have come in over email, but just one more reminder. If you have questions, clearly Fred knows what he’s talking about. Utilize this time. This time is here for you. If you have questions, we still have time. The next question though that came in was around maturity. How do you approach growing the maturity of an organization’s use of Adobe Experience Manager? That’s a great question. Especially because you want to have this ability to mature and grow and build the better Millennium Falcon.

A couple of ways I think about it. One is you could go as far as saying I’m going to create my own set of training tools and training models against my specific website, which is fantastic. Maybe you have a group inside your center of excellence that is going to take on some of that charge. I also really encourage and surprisingly, not a lot of people use this as much, but there’s the Adobe Experience League. The Experience League has a bunch of training and it’s based on things like Weekend and other tutorials. And while I don’t necessarily feel that every content author has to be certified in AEM in any way, shape, or form, their tutorials and basics of how to use AEM is a fantastic resource to use as well. I would do a combination of a few things. One is leverage your internal centers of excellence. Leverage your smart people that are doing, that are in the tool the most. Can they create a set of tutorials to give your authors an ability to just mature? Two, I would definitely use Experience League. And three, if you want to go to the further extent of actually creating your own training modules beyond the centers of excellence and doing that, that’s just your third option, I would say. And then the fourth really comes down to is there’s a bunch of user groups that are out there too. AEM, learn from your peers in the industry at the same time. And so Adobe has launched a number of AEM user groups that are regionally based. So look for those, participate in those, ask questions to peers and other companies that are out there as well. And you might be able to find new ideas from other networks, other companies that are in your same industry that are doing some fun things. You’ll be surprised on how much people are willing to share out there in the world. And the user groups are a great facility to do that at the same time. So those are some ideas for you.

It’s amazing. Honestly, when I talk to customers, I tell them all roads lead to Experience League, Don’t reinvent the wheel. Obviously, there are some times when you need to hyper specific training or tutorials for your organization, but look on Experience League first, because if you can get a leg up there, even just to build from or a piece of that puzzle is already there, just leverage again, learning from your peers, leverage that as much as you can. Take Experience League training and then modify it for yourself, right? Because you’re always going to have your special implementations going to be nuanced. So yeah, definitely start with Experience League and go from there. Great suggestion. Amazing. We are unfortunately out of time. I know that you and I could probably continue to chat forever, but truly, thank you for being here. Thank you for taking the time and thank you for being such a great partner with Adobe. We appreciate you. Thank you so much. It was great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks again.