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Mature Content Management
How to get the most out of an immature market
Before involving external resources, ensure you have established clear ownership and purpose. Understand that content management and CMS is a process and not just a project. A mature user will build a "competency centre" or "centre of excellence" to reduce time-to-market and anchor the initiative in the organization. The competency centre will work to identify what content types exist in the organization and understand their lifecycle from creation to archiving/deletion. In addition, the centre will create a set of shared best practices for content management and CMS. Content management KPI's (key performance indicators) helps define and measure progress. They must be quantifiable and reflect critical success factors. Consider the connection between what you measure and your content management initiative. Ensure they are truly connected! Whether you are doing CMS for the first time, or migrating from one CMS to another, you need to formulate a vision and strategy for CMS. Senior management needs to sign-off and be involved. Without this, the entire process will be a challenge. When you select a content management system, look beyond the initial product demonstration. Formulate strong requirements for ease of use and try it out before you make your decision. Talk to references and get vendors to commit to post-sales. Do not buy a product without a post-sales plan from the vendor. Later in the process, do not try to go in production without alerting your vendor. Once in production ensure the keep the relationship to the CMS vendor. It is difficult to "ask the right questions early", so establish regular progress meetings with your vendor. If you work with a consulting company for technical and product-specific knowledge, require that the vendor certify your consultants. What could vendors specifically do to mature the market? Vendors play an important role and can raise the bar by delivering solutions that are significantly easier to use, easier to administer, easier to implement, easier to learn and easier to re-learn. Ease of use is more important than new functionality, support for another operating system or support for another database. Focusing on usability means dramatically challenging the clumsy super user interface common in most content management systems today. Today user experience experts are used by vendors to create compelling sample sites for demo purposes. Redeploy the user experience experts to re-create the editorial part of your CMS. In the process, reconsider the terminology in your CMS. If you have invented your own terms, replace them by standard industry terminology. Stop forcing customers to learn your vocabulary to get the most of your CMS. In addition vendors need to take post-sales serious and work to ensure successful implementations. Products approach content management differently and it is the responsibility of the vendor to provide best practices and decision support for the implementation. If you work through partners create a partner certification and training program. While technically strong, many vendors are weak in documentation. It is tempting to save money on documentation, while continuing to release new versions of the CMS. Resist the temptation and value high quality documentation.
09/2004, Janus Boye
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