Is SDL’s WCM (Tridion) new product “Smart Target” – smart enough?

SDL Tridion acquired eCommerce marketing company Fred Hopper (www.fredhopper.com) in January 2010. For the past year, SDL has been working on integrating Fred Hopper into it’s Web Content Management (WCM) system, better known as “Smart Target”.

With the release of Tridion 2011 this month, it is time for existing and new customers to get their hands on “Smart Target”. Not to mention clients will be happy to find improvements to performance and major enhancements in the GUI. Having worked with WCM systems for over 10 years, I am looking forward to this release and believe this product will maintain SDL Tridion’s leadership position in the WCM world.

The concept of “Smart Target” is ideal for all those WCM users who are looking for an out-of-box solution, which will enable marketers to push products and services to existing and new web customers.

To sum it up in a sentence, it is bringing the ‘Amazon model to authors and editors’, an exciting and scary proposition. Does this mean that what we view on websites will constantly change? Change is good as long as it’s not annoying or intrusive.

The technology behind the scenes can be based on information retrieved from the web browser, which means the content presented to us can be richer and somewhat personalized. However marketers, better known as authors or editors in the WCM system, will have to pace themselves and maintain self control to not inundate us with products and services we do not care about.

This change will heavily affect the SDL Tridion Functional Design and will require better detailed Business Requirements, Authorization, Workflow and Taxonomy Tree modules.

In the IT world, we tend to focus heavily on implementing our WCM systems from the technical side and then later focus on the functional side. We need to start adapting our methodology, especially if our WCM systems are starting to personalize content out-of-box for us. So don’t let go of your business analyst so fast. We will need them in the future to help us define our “Smart” applications.