Web analytics has evolved to become a serious business now. Gone are the days when web analytics was something you just added on to your application as an afterthought but today, it is considered a major feature that gets discussed up front in business circles when planning for a Web application and building a business case. What exactly is driving this tremendous change for Web analytics? To answer that we need to review the myriad business benefits you can get out of Web analytics provided you have planned and designed for it.

Web analytic tools can collect, analyze, measure and report on Internet data which will help in understanding user behavior and application usage. The data captured using other sources, like CRM tools, can only help inform reactive action and not proactive measures. For example, it is possible to identify how many users cancelled their subscriptions using tools like sales force, but not how many users will cancel. With Web analytics, customer usage patterns and associated pain points can be identified up front and that can help companies be proactive about those pain points and, hopefully, in the end game, retain those “at risk” subscriptions.  But, that is just one example out of many more “business benefits” you can expect to get out of using web analytics. (more…)

At some point in time, you will come across the need to select and implement a web content management (WCM) system. There is no single best WCM system that will meet all organizations’ needs. The WCM has to be selected based on your business goals and benefits you want to achieve from the system. With this context, how do you choose from the scores of available WCM systems in the market place?

Here are the steps and some best practices that we have used in selecting WCM system for our customers (more…)

In the last post we discussed issues faced by organizations while dealing with rapidly evolving media convergence. In this post we will try to highlight some exciting solutions to tackle the issues.

• Multi-Channel Publishing and Content Reuse: This is indeed the central theme of media convergence: organizations need to reuse the existing content and deliver the same across multiple media channels after content repurposing. Traditional content management systems (CMS) lack the ability to carry out multi-channel publishing since media like mobile or social media are relatively recent phenomenon. However using proper integration touch points organizations can get a start on this. Start small and gradually incorporate more channels to your content ecosystem. There are multiple mobile publishing systems in the market these days. After careful evaluation on features and interoperability with your traditional web CMS, integrate the two using standard APIs (application programming interface). Your web CMS will be the primary repository of content and its management whereas mobile CMS will allow you to repurpose the content with proper presentation layers based on device types. You can read more on publishing on mobile channel in this post. (more…)

Now that the US mid term elections are over, it is time to get back to work.  This week is Gartner’s ITxpo in Cannes, France.  Two weeks ago, they held the sister event in Orlando, Florida.  The Florida event was heavily attended, with some veterans comparing it to 1999 or 2000.  Any conference or event that can compare its attendance to any time pre 9/11 would be considered wildly successful.  Does that performance provide insight into IT pressures in the coming months?  Are these conferences accurate predictors of business climate?  And, if they are indicators of coming trends, what should IT personnel be looking for? (more…)

Compared to English, the rules for breaking up words into their base forms and modified forms are very different for Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Precision and recall are two of the parameters that determine search engine quality. A perfect precision score means every result retrieved by a search was relevant but it does not say if all relevant documents were retrieved. A perfect recall score means all relevant documents were retrieved but it does not say how many irrelevant documents were also retrieved.

Developing a search engine for Asian languages with 100% precision and recall is extremely challenging because of various orthography variants (more…)

One of the most rapid changes that are happening in the digital content sphere in the last few years is the explosive growth of new media delivery platforms like smart phones, tablet PCs and social networks. These newer content channels along with falling prices to access content (read falling rates of mobile services and device price) and an increasingly global business community present businesses with the unique challenge of serving up right content to the right people with the right context consistently across all the channels (e.g. print, Web, television, mobile and social). Organizations that traditionally served up content through channels like print or television suddenly are grappling with the challenges of sharing the same content however after repurposing to the new age media. As part of a two-post series on the changing issue of convergence of various media channels and how to tackle it, in this post we’ll discuss the typical content management related issues faced by organizations when multiple channels are involved. In the next post, we will focus on the solutions part. (more…)

Part One of this post discussed key steps taken in the inception phase of gathering requirements for a COTS package. Part two will discuss key steps taken in the second phase of the process; the implementation phase.

Implementation Phase

Requirement Strategy: As the name suggests, this phase will involve implementing the WCM package that we have already selected based on our inception phase effort. This particular phase can be broadly categorized into following activities. (more…)