Day three of training, and I really feel like today we started to really see the value of it. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been hearing about ATG since I started in June, but for many of the other developers, they weren’t sure what ATG had to offer that was so special. Today we looked at user profiling and scenarios, which seems to me to be the selling feature.

Simply, user behaviour can be tracked in their profile, and then content can be targeted based on that behaviour. If a user consistently looks at a given category of content, you can start making relevant suggestions. Scenarios can be of short or long duration, and can extend out to email campaigns and such.

Targeted content is big, but there are plenty of negative stories of “I bought a single baby book on amazon as a gift, and now I get baby-related suggestions all the time!” With ATG, you could set thresholds or time-sensitive rules to determine what would be inserted into ’slots’. You can also track if a user has already been served a particular promotion and the success thereof, to determine if they should be fed it again.

It sounds like fun stuff, I am the girl who thrives off books like “freakonomics” and “microtrends” and I think the idea of setting up these scenarios based on user behaviour (personas) is pretty appealing. We have some metrics guys at work who do their best to track user behaviour like click-throughs, but I feel as though this is really (I can’t believe I’m saying this…) Metrics2.0. We see the user behaviour, and we use it to personalize and improve on their experience (oh yeah, and serve important business needs).

I was explaining to a co-worker this evening, I think ATG is a bit of a hard-sell. It’s very tech-intensive (hence the three weeks of developer training we’re doing), but the real value seems to be for the strategy groups. I can see some definite benefits to the system from a business perspective, but it is up to the technical group to develop an architecture that supports these (potentially not-well-defined) goals.

In our course today, they recommended a role of “scenario manager” who would develop these various scenarios. Obviously I haven’t been through the business user training yet (and we didn’t even use the ATG Content Administration capabilities on the People’s Choice project), but from what I understand, developing these scenarios and rules can be quite technical. The communication of what is feasible technically and what is desired from a strategic point of view is essential.
Hmm… wow, and I’m just wanting to slide into a B.A. role, documenting and clarifying requirements. Isn’t that convenient?