What's A Zettabyte? I Don't Know, But It's Coming Soon

By Ted Schadler

What's a zettabyte? It's the same amount of information found on 500 billion DVDs or 75 full-length movies for every human on the planet. And a half a zettabyte, a mere 250 billion DVDs' worth, is the number of bits that Cisco expects to fly around the Internet every year in 2012.

The networking giant has created aVisual Networking Index, a detailed measurement of annual business and consumers Internet traffic. In a recent conversation with Cisco senior analyst Arielle Sumits, we learned that Cisco has used this index and a lot of detailed data to calculate that the public and private Internet will carry 6 times the amount of traffic in 2012 as it does today.

The big driver of that torrent is, of course, video. By 2012, Internet video alone will be almost 400 times the size of the entire US backbone in 2000. Add downloadable HD video, Telepresence, and Internet traffic to the television, and the volume of bits is staggering, even higher than the P2P traffic.

Wow, that's a lot of bits. But what does it really mean? I think it means three things for Information & Knowledge Management professionals:

• First, expect business video communications and collaboration to take off. Telepresence, HD video conferencing, and distance learning that support the needs of distributed teams will drive the adoption of business-led video. And in classic Tech Populist fashion, consumers masking as employees will drive the adoption of virtual worlds that facilitate business town meetings and employee-generated-content in a “YouTube for the enterprise” model (see the startup Veodia).
• Second, plan on mastering new video skills. If you’re like most I&KM Pros, your background is in messaging and IT, not video. But to thrive in a video-rich future, you will have to tap into the lingo and toolset of video networking and production: employee-generated content, frames per second, video tagging and search, video gateways, H.264, H.323, and distributed streaming architectures.
• Third, look for bandwidth price breaks as a free ride on the back of consumer demand. Most of the growth is in consumer, not business, traffic. And that means businesses will get a free ride on the backs of consumer demand. Telecommunications giants will provision their networks to meet global consumer demand, which is always a race to the price floor. That collective dark fiber will give businesses a bargaining chip on bandwidth pricing.

Disagree? Have other thoughts to share? Please post any comments below.

Quark Making A Dynamic Comeback?

By Sheri McLeish

Quark, Inc. has been undergoing a major strategic overhaul in the past two years. With its acquisition this month of In.Vision, the leading add-in to Microsoft Word for XML authoring, it appears poised to be taken seriously for enterprises wanting to empower their business units and be able to reuse content dynamically through a variety of channels.

Once the leading desktop publishing solution, Quark's star fell hard and fast as Adobe shattered its dominance with InDesign and its leading Creative Suite of products. In 2000, Quark's founder Tim Gill sold off his stake in the private company, and in subsequent dark years Quark looked to gain its footing in a dramatically changing publishing world. Off the radar and nearly forgotten, in 2006 Raymond Schiavone was brought in to serve as president and CEO. Schiavone, the former president and CEO of Arbortext, Inc. (which was acquired by PTC), brought to Quark a wealth of experience in XML-based authoring and publishing products – and a vision for a reinvented Quark.  He also brought his former colleagues over. Today's Quark executive team includes a CIO, Sr. VP of Corporate Marketing, and two Sr. VPs of Sales that did stints at Arbortext.

Always taken to task for its poor support and spotty integration capabilities, Quark has been trying to pull its support act together and opened up its platform and partnership approach. One of these strategic partners was In.Vision, a Microsoft Office Solution Builder grand prize winner. In.Vision's Xpress Author for Microsoft Word provided Quark with an easy-to-use authoring tool with XML capabilities. But Quark wants to bulk up and was hungry for more than a partnership. By purchasing the assets of In.Vision, Quark not only gains a leading XML authoring tool and related technologies, but a growing client base and existing partnerships and alliances.

While Quark's move won't send the competition scrambling (some may even be surprised it is still around), it is another step on the path toward providing a true solution for professional design and simplified XML authoring capabilities in a single integrated system. Quark's Dynamic Publishing Solution, combined with XML authoring and design, provide a system that will be of interest to content-heavy business units like marketing and sales. Of course, the catch here is that the integration isn't entirely seamless – yet. But given its recent measures to reinvent itself, Quark's pulse is quickening, and there is more than a glimmer of hope for a dynamic comeback.

To learn more about Forrester's take on dynamic publishing, please read "Drive Forward With Dynamic Publishing."

Microsoft Acquiring DATAllegro, Rebooting Data Warehousing Appliance Strategy, And Triggering Industry Consolidation

By James Kobielus

Microsoft's pending acquisition of DATAllegro is a smart move for both vendors. It's also a key triggering event for the data warehousing (DW) industry as a whole.

This deal sets the stage for what will surely be a period of rapid DW vendor consolidation. Over the coming year, Forrester expects incumbent enterprise DW (EDW) vendors--or those who aspire to that status--to acquire any of the growing number of DW appliance pure-plays on the market. We expect many EDW incumbents to acquire DW appliance pure-plays, both to scale and accelerate their existing solution portfolios, and also to address the growing midmarket for cost-effective modular solutions. Given that several DW appliance pure-plays (including DATAllegro, Greenplum, and Dataupia) boast low acquisition cost per usable terabyte, it stands to reason that incumbent EDW vendors acquire these vendors outright rather than attempt to hit those price-points through time- and resource-consuming modifications to their existing solution stacks. Look for Oracle, SAP, and HP, in particular, to make strategic acquisitions of the sort that Microsoft has just announced.

Over the past several years, the DW appliance--a pre-configured, pre-optimized bundle of hardware and software components--has become the predominant go-to-market approach among both established and start-up DW solution providers. However, the established EDW vendors have ramped up the appliance curve at different rates. In this regard, Microsoft has been relative laggard, especially compared with the more aggressive appliance strategies of IBM, Oracle, Teradata, Sybase, and others. Though Microsoft had heretofore made some tentative forays into DW appliances through partnerships with hardware vendors HP and Dell, the Redmond WA-based vendor hasn't yet put together a coherent go-to-market approach that addresses this important new marketplace theme.

The deal to acquire DATAllegro clearly demonstrates that Microsoft is serious about delivering an appliance-based SQL Server solution for DW and business intelligence (BI).

What the DATAllegro acquisition buys Microsoft is new visibility and credibility in the DW market. DATAllegro was one of the first-mover vendors in the DW appliance market, and, though it has largely been out-developed, out-marketed, and out-sold by Netezza in this segment, still has considerable mind share (though not much market share outside some high-end enterprise banner accounts).

Just as important, DATAllegro has a strong product (DATAllegro v3), robust technology (incorporating MPP/grid, query optimization, fast loading, mixed-query workload management tools), skilled engineering team (based in Aliso Viejo CA), and world-class hardware partnerships (including EMC, Dell, Cisco, and Bull).

What DATAllegro has most critically lacked, and Microsoft will provide in spades, is a worldwide sales, marketing, and support organization. As a small company, DATAllegro has relied to a great extent on its hardware, channel, and OEM partners to bring its appliances to market. As a privately held firm with limited resources, DATAllegro has been an engineering-driven vendor in a market segment rapidly evolving toward a solution and services focus. DATAllegro and other DW appliance vendors have been successful is gaining acceptance for this approach among Information and Knowledge Management (I&KM) professionals in large enterprises. Now the DW appliance pure-plays must move to the next maturity level, providing global service and support to the most demanding enterprise customers.

On the DATAllegro side, the Microsoft deal clearly indicates that it has hit its head on the pure-play glass ceiling and that its only chance of succeeding in the DW market is as the product group of an established, well-heeled vendor. Heretofore, DATAllegro has mostly been addressing the traditional high-end EDW market with its products, so absorption into enterprise-focused Microsoft won't radically disrupt that go-to-market strategy. DATAllegro has tried to establish itself by selling its appliances primarily as data-mart accelerators into the established accounts of EDW incumbents (Teradata, Oracle, IBM, etc.). However, it has largely failed at dislodging those incumbents from their core EDW accounts, and has seen all of those incumbents significantly ramp up their respective DW appliance product families, thereby neutralizing any differentiation DATAllegro could previously boast in that regard.

Where the pending Microsoft-DATAllegro combo is concerned, we're still talking futures. It's best that we keep expectations in check till the acquisition is complete and the vendors announce their roadmap in October at Microsoft's BI conference. They certainly have a lot of work ahead of them, and it's not without risk.

For starters, Microsoft will have its hands full re-architecting and re-optimizing DATAllegro's appliance platform to integrate fully with SQL Server 2008, replacing the open-source Ingres database at the heart of the acquired solution. Clearly, that migration to SQL Server may alienate a substantial portion of DATAllegro's existing customer base. It will also likely raise the price of the eventual SQL Server version of the DATAllegro appliance, since, it's safe to assume, customers will need to license Microsoft's DBMS when they purchase the appliance, rather than continue to use a "free" open-source DBMS.

Just as critical a concern, Microsoft will have to bend over backwards to reassure DATAllegro's existing customers that their investments are safe and that they'll continue to receive necessary updates, patches, and bugfixes in a timely fashion even as Microsoft essentially obsoletes the erstwhile Ingres-integrated appliance family.

Moreover, DW rivals will respond to this acquisition with avid FUD-mongering. If last year's Stratature acquisition is precedent, then it's likely that Microsoft will quickly freeze and/or cancel development of enhancements to DATAllegro's current, Ingres-based platform while it develops a Microsoft-centric successor platform for delivery in 2009 or later. Essentially, Microsoft will be rebooting DATAllegro completely on the Microsoft platform, thereby transforming DATAllegro customers' existing deployments into legacy investments.

EDW competitors will also actively point out the gaps in Microsoft's DW appliance portfolio, even after existing DATAllegro technology is fully integrated into SQL Server. What's still missing from Microsoft's high-end EDW product capability is a coherent go-to-market approach for appliance-based offerings. Most important, Microsoft needs to launch a targeted EDW-appliance product branding, packaging, and licensing approach similar to that which IBM rolled out with its InfoSphere Warehouse family. IBM has rolled out InfoSphere hardware classes for various customer sizes (InfoSphere's E, D, and C classes, addressing large-to-midmarket customer requirements) and InfoSphere software editions with different integrated solutions (e.g., some editions allow you to license Cognos BI, other editions include IBM's data quality tools, still other editions include Omnifind text mining). Also, Microsoft needs to integrate all of SQL Server (DBMS, IS, RS, AS) with the DATAllegro appliance, plus the recently acquired Zoomix data quality and Stratature master data management technology, to provide a comprehensive product stack (with functional add-ons) to address a full range of enterprise requirements. We're confident that Microsoft/DATAllegro will provide a more coherent EDW appliance roadmap, by the time of the Microsoft BI conference in beautiful, rain-drenched Seattle this fall.

Forrester expects Microsoft to take a year or so to leveraged the acquired technology into a fully fleshed out new full-function Microsoft-branded solution stack. But even before then, Microsoft should provide clear, convincing reassurances to DATAllegro customers that their investments are safe.

Likewise, Microsoft should reach out both to its own DW appliance-hardware partners (HP and Dell) and to DATAllegro's (Dell plus EMC, Bull, and Cisco) to clarify their ongoing engagement in the vendor's appliance product strategy going forward. In fact, we expect Microsoft/DATAllegro to ramp up their current hardware, channel, and OEM partnerships to deliver DW appliance solutions for a broader range of platforms, verticals, and geographies.

This is the approach that Oracle (not a hardware vendor in its own right) has taken in its Oracle Optimized Warehouse initiative, and it is consistent with both Microsoft's and DATAllegro's go-to-market strategies. A partner-centric approach such as these offers customers a choice of server and storage providers. As such, it distinguishes Oracle and Microsoft/DATAllegro from those vendors--such as Teradata, IBM, and Netezza--who offer only a single hardware platform option underlying their DW appliances.

Also, the ability to change-out the underlying hardware layer helps DW appliance vendors to run their solutions on low-cost, best-of-breed commodity servers and storage components.

And that will be a key differentiator for Microsoft/DATAllegro and other vendors in the rapidly commoditizing DW appliance market. 

Blogging At Work Is Like Choosing Which Tie To Wear

By Gil Yehuda

I had a conversation with a client the other day about Blogging at work. The question came up, as it often does, how to ensure that employees blog appropriately at work. We spoke about corporate policies regarding appropriate use of the intranet, discussing if they really make an impact on behavior, or if they only exist as leverage when it comes time to take action.

It occurred to me that there is a simple analogy that all professionals can relate to, which brings clarity to the issue: How do you determine what to wear to work?

At every company I have ever worked in (with the exception of Forrester, ironic), there was an explicit policy about dress code. In some organizations, men are expected to show up in a pressed shirt, perhaps a tie and jacket. In others, the code is more lax, but denim jeans are verboten. Of course, men have it much easier, we have fewer choices and they all work pretty well for us. In my last company, a memo forbidding open-toe shoes angered many women in my team, including my boss, who loved her shoe collection. Why forbid open-toe shoes? Perhaps it could lead to sandals – or, heaven forefend – crocs!   Crocs in the workplace – oh my word, that could be terrible!

Dress-code is a real issue for the upwardly mobile professional. We learn early on to dress for the job we want; or the corollary – to follow our management’s lead when it comes to dressing to work. Your uniform declares your membership to a group. Are you wearing a suit, scrubs, or a lab coat? Or a ripped t-shirt and baseball cap?

Dress codes are not something you can blissfully ignore and boldly violate. According to Linda Wong, partner at Wong Fleming, a law firm specializing in employment law, "Reasonable dress code policies usually hold up in court." (Business Week)

Now what happens when someone inadvertently comes to work dressed improperly? Perhaps the sandals or shorts send an overly casual message, perhaps the cut of the clothing sends a message that would be best delivered outside the workplace, like in a single’s bar. Typically, the office can survive this judgment gaffe. And usually, the most appropriate action would be a direct but friendly guidance from a manager. Ignoring it leads to a bigger problem – others might follow the behavior. Leading to – crocs at work! Oy vey.

Blogging at work is quite similar in this regard. We express ourselves in how we dress and what we say; and others form an opinion about us. Much like a dress code policy, you should articulate a blogging policy. It sets down what you want others to know and do. And indeed, after the memo about open-toe shoes – behavior did change. Was the change a direct result of the policy? I’m not sure. I suspect that people follow the lead of those they admire. Covered toes became the norm from the top of the management chain on down. The policy may have simply made this explicit and unambiguous.

Aside from a statement of policy, you actually set the dress code in your company by example, and others will follow it. Those who don’t are given gentle corrective guidance. We survive the drama, it is not a big problem for most organization. We don’t ban clothing for fear that someone will wear the wrong clothing to work.

And therefore, you can set the preferred blogging practice by example by having your thought-leaders blog. Employees will follow successful patterns of behavior. Correct blogging gaffes with gentle guidance (you might have to remove a few blog posts from the server). A well-written policy can really help clarify expectations, but great examples take the message even farther. If you want to be really cool – blog about the blogging policy. (I just did.)

If you want to explore this topic some more – check out my recent report on internal blogging and register for my upcoming teleconference.

And They Lived Happily Ever After. Not!

By Boris Evelson

When Business Objects got acquired by SAP earlier this year, it made a statement that it plans to continue to remain an open, heterogeneous BI vendor, treating all partners equally. Apparently, all partners are not created equal – and, as we suspected and long predicted, this Business Objects strategy does not extend to its own parent.

Well, the cat's finally out of the bag. Efforts are already underway at SAP to improve the existing connectivity between Business Objects products and SAP applications. The improved connectivity that may result from these efforts will be very much optimized for Business Objects products only. SAP states that "SAP customers who instead decide to move forward with non-SAP third party BI tools will not benefit from these types of improvements and enhancements."

I am not singling SAP out. Oracle and IBM are also working hard on tight integration between their own BI products, applications, servers, middleware, etc such as automatic configuration, shared security and metadata, SSO, embedded BI, and undoubtedly many others.  And we already know Microsoft's position here: Microsoft BI only runs on Microsoft Windows servers, requires Visual Studio for IDE, and does not integrate out-of-the-box with portals other than SharePoint.

While all four vendors claim a win-win scenario – tight integration within their own environment, while maintaining and continuing to improve their open architecture standards – one can't have the cake and eat it, too. Or, as they say in my old country, you can't be at two weddings at the same time. Imagine a typical scenario of a customer running SAP and Oracle ERP applications, while using IBM InfoSphere stack, and trying to standardize on SharePoint for Intranet portal, ECM and collaboration. Each vendor will claim that their BI tool works best in their own environment, while only providing "open" connectivity and integration with the others. How will that customer make the BI tool choice? Based on whether more source data and business rules exist in Oracle or SAP ERP apps? Based on building a DB2 data warehouse and betting on better integration at the DBMS level? Or will that customer decide that Information Workspace is the ultimate vehicle for all office apps, including BI, and therefore placing a bet on tight integration with SharePoint?

Wow. Long live the app/stack king! Death to the democracy and open BI partnership ecosystem! If we extrapolate what we already see happening in this market segment, it's not difficult to predict that IBM is probably working hard on acquiring an apps vendor (Lawson? Infor?), and SAP on acquiring a DBMS technology (a DW appliance vendor?). How long will it be before a large, heterogeneous, complex enterprise could really run on a single apps/stack? How many new BI customers do these vendors hope to win by claiming better integration within their own environment, while how many customers are they prepared to loose to their competitors who will be making the the same claims, but within their own stack?

I don't know, so I want to find out. In the next few weeks Forrester plans to run a BI survey, where in addition to exploring other hot and burning BI issues, we'll pose the following question:

“If your ERP (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft) or DBMS (Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) vendor offers better integration (connectivity, security, metadata, etc) options for their own Business Intelligence tool, would you consider switching to that tool, even if you currently use a 3rd party BI tool:

• Already use and prefer BI tools from my ERP/DBMS vendor. Not an issue.
• Yes, tighter integration is important to me, I will consider switching.
• I will switch anyway, because I prefer dealing with a single vendor. Tighter integration is icing on the cake for me.
• No, I will not switch because:
• - Have many different ERP / DBMS systems, need an open, generic 3rd party BI tool
• - I am too committed, too invested into my current 3rd party BI tool it will probably be hard to justify a major migration
• - I am concerned with too much dependency on a single vendor
• Don’t know / don’t care / other (please comment)”

What's your prediction on how the market will react? Please post questions and suggestions to this blog, and we'll do our best to incorporate them into our upcoming survey.

Open Text Makes A DAM SaaS-y Move

By Stephen Powers

I'll give you five seconds to recover from your pun-induced groaning [5...4...3...2...1] Now, on to the news: Open Text announced late last week that it has acquired eMotion, a software-as-a-service digital asset management (DAM) product, from Corbis. Open Text plans to rebrand eMotion as Artesia on Demand for Marketing, complementing its full-featured, installed Artesia DAM product.

This move into SaaS DAM is a smart move by Open Text. The installed version of Artesia has a reputation as one of the top DAM solutions out there, but its functionality and price tag may be daunting for those organizations just starting to dip their toes into the DAM waters. Some enterprises don't have the need for some of the high-end functionality - management of broadcast-quality video, for example - that "Classic Artesia" offers. Instead, many enterprises exploring DAM want to use it to manage rich media assets for use in the online channel.

In addition, marketers are now driving some of the demand for DAM, and they're not excited about waiting in the IT queue for another installed content management implementation. While other components of ECM (like Web content management) may need customizations that don't lend always themselves to the SaaS model, marketing requirements for DAM tend to be more a bit more straightforward: repository, workflow, search, metadata, permissions, and hooks into delivery mechanisms.

Now, Open Text has a DAM solution that can meet mid-level needs, and customers who want SaaS - without worrying about the stability of some of the niche DAM vendors - get the benefit of the relative stability of Open Text. Plus, this acquisition has the possibility of being an effective answer to North Plains' recent release of a SaaS version of its TeleScope product. Time will tell how much tinkering Open Text needs to do with its new acquisition, but this is a good first step into the SaaS world.

OLAP's Cube Is Crumbling Around The Edges

By James Kobielus

BI is essentially a set of best practices for building models to answer business questions. However, today's BI best practices may be suboptimal for many enterprises' decision-support requirements.

For most users, BI is a journey that's been modeled and mapped out in advance by others, following a well-marked path through vast data sets. Data models, which must often be pre-built by specialists, generate or shape the design of such key BI artifacts as queries, reports, and dashboards. Essentially, every BI application is some data modeler's prediction of the types of questions that users will want to ask of the underlying data marts. Sometimes, those predictions are little more than an educated guess -- and are not always on the mark.

BI's most ubiquitous data-modeling approach is the online analytical processing (OLAP) data structure known as a "cube." The OLAP cube -- essentially a denormalized relational database -- sits at the heart of most BI data marts. OLAP cubes, usually implemented as multidimensional "star" or "snowflake" schemas, allow large recordsets to be quickly and efficiently summarized, sorted, queried, and analyzed. However, no matter how well designed the dimensional data models within any particular cube, users eventually outgrow these constraints and demand the ability to drill down, up, and across tabular recordsets in ways not built into the underlying data structures.

The chief disadvantage of multidimensional OLAP cubes is their inflexibility. Cubes are built by pre-joining relational data tables into fixed, subject-specific structures. One way of getting around these constraints is the approach known as relational OLAP, which retains the underlying normalized relational storage approach while speeding multidimensional query access through "projections." However, relational OLAP also suffers from the need for explicit, upfront modeling of relationships within and among the underlying tabular data structures.

From the average end user's point of view, all of this is mere plumbing -- invisible and boring -- until it prevents them from obtaining the new query tools, structured reports, and dashboards needed to do their jobs. One unfortunate consequence of OLAP cubes' inflexibility is that requests for new BI applications inevitably wind up in a backlog of IT projects that can take weeks or months to deliver. What might seem a trivial thing to the end user -- such as adding a new field or new calculation to an existing report -- might represent a time-consuming technical exercise for the data modeling professional. Behind the scenes, this simple decision-support request might, beyond the front-end BI tweaks, also require remodeling of the data mart's OLAP star schema, re-indexing of the data warehouse, revision of extract transform load (ETL) scripts, and retrieval of data from different transactional applications.

No one expects the OLAP cube to vanish completely from the BI landscape, but its role in many decision-support environments has been declining over the past several years. Increasingly, vendors are emphasizing new approaches that, when examined in a broader context, appear to be loosening OLAP's lockhold on mainstream BI and data warehousing. The emerging paradigm for ad-hoc, flexible, multi-dimensional, user-driven decision support includes the following important approaches:

• Automated discovery and normalization of dispersed, heterogeneous data sets through a pervasive metadata layer
• Semantic virtualization middleware, which supports on-demand, logically integrated viewing and query of data from heterogeneous, distributed data sources without need for a data warehouse or any other centralized persistence node
• On-the-fly report, query, and dashboard creation, which relies on dynamic aggregation of data, organization of that data within relevant hierarchies, and presentation of metrics that have been customized to the user or session context
• Interactive data visualization tools, which enable user-driven exploration of the full native dimensionality of heterogeneous data sets, thereby eliminating the need for manual modeling and transformation of data to a common schema
• Guided analytics tools, which support user-driven, ad-hoc creation of sharable, extensible models containing data, visualization, and navigation models for customizable decision-support scenarios
• Inverted indexing storage engines, which support more flexible, on-the-fly assembly of structured data in response to ad-hoc queries than is possible with traditional row-based or column-based data warehousing persistence layers
• Distributed in-memory processing, which enables continuous delivery of intelligence being extracted in real-time from millions of rows of data that originates in myriad, distributed data sources

Unfortunately, this new decision-support paradigm has no pithy name or coherent best practices. If we were call it the "post-OLAP" paradigm, that would give the false impression that OLAP cubes are obsolete, when in fact they are simply being virtualized and embedded within a more flexible Web 2.0 and SOA framework. We could call this the new “hypercube” paradigm, but that might give the mathematical purists among us a case of indigestion. Boris Evelson's "BI workspaces" is a good, non-geeky name for this new wave.

Whatever we choose to call this new era, look around you. It has already arrived. We can see this trend in the growing adoption of all of these constituent approaches in production BI environments everywhere. However, to date, few enterprises have combined these post-OLAP approaches in a coherent BI architectural framework.

But that day is rapidly coming to mainstream BI and data warehousing environments everywhere. OLAP's hard-and-fast, cube-based approach is slowly but surely dissolving in this new era of more flexible, user-centric decision support.

Steve, You've Never Looked Better

By Stephen Powers

Earlier this week, if you happened to read any of my research on our site, you might have been scratching your head at my "new" photo, as seen below:

You might have asked yourself, "What has happened to one of my favorite Forrester analysts?" Was it the result of a) a face lift; b) gender reassignment surgery; c) successful prayers to the patron saint of the un-photogenic (when a good friend first saw my original photo last year, she asked in her typical blunt fashion, "Why do you look so puffy and awful?")

Actually, what happened was: a bug in a recent code release for our Web content management system resulted in my colleague Lisa Pierce's photo displaying on my documents, instead of my own. OK - not exactly an earthshaking problem (and Lisa is much more photogenic than I am). But it was kind of a glaring error, and the ribbing I had to take from my colleagues wasn't exactly a bonus, either. And because of the timing of the error, "the new me" was on our site for almost 24 hours.

So, I thought I'd take the opportunity to put on my practitioner's hat (the one I wore for 15 years before joining Forrester) and remind everyone of some basics for publishing Web content:

• Technology is no substitute for QA. It doesn't matter how good your WCM technology is, there is no substitution for good, old-fashioned quality assurance. Many enterprises, particularly those that have implemented complex Web site customer experiences, now treat their WCM code and content releases similar to traditional software releases, bundling changes together and doing a full cycle of QA on a separate server (this is where your vendor's multistage deployment support takes on added significance).

• Avoid, if possible, late-day code releases. Some organizations have high-volume publishing needs, and can't avoid late-day code releases. But others don't have this requirement, and publish anyway, leading to costly after-hours or weekend support calls. Enterprises with successful WCM projects understand the need for disciplined release schedules and set expectations accordingly.

• Don't forget the documentation. Documentation tends to get the short shrift in a WCM project, but remember that good documentation leads to fewer support calls. And make sure that you have clearly documented a bug reporting and escalation plan so that when critical errors do occur (and they inevitably will), members of your organization know how to report them.

It's easy to forget the fundamentals when in the midst of major content deployments or code fixes. Being disciplined requires effort, but it can be well worth it. At the very least, it can help you avoid or shorten the length of mix-ups, like my temporary gender change this week.