Mature Content Management

http://www.contentmanager.net/magazine/article_583_mature_content_management.html

The market for content management and content management systems (CMS) is still young and immature. Projects continue to fail to meet deadlines and budget, while vendors continue to add more useless features.

Using practical methods, you can greatly enhance your chances of a successful CMS implementation.

Work to define the terms content management and CMS, ensure purpose and ownership is clear and establish measurable success criteria.

Get vendors to commit to post-sales including deadlines. Go beyond contact to a sales executive and make it a requirement to establish relationships with at least product management and support.

Consultants needs to be able to both communicate with both IT and business users. Start small, keep it simple and avoid long project cycles. A good consultant will distinguish himself/herself by working hard to establish realistic business requirements.

The market will not become more mature by itself. Vendors will not magically hand over the driver role to users. Users need to claim the driver seat, and only by doing this, will content management leave the "Wild West" to become an established industry.

The Industry Today

In 2001 Forrester Research concluded that CMS offerings were "immature" . Today in 2004, content management is still a very young and immature market.

Most projects lack measurable success criteria and are driven entirely by the IT department, with lack of business focus as a result.

Content Management is a strategic business requirement and instead belongs in the business, typically in the marketing, sales, HR or communications department. Ownership, purpose and goals should be clear and driven by business users.

CMS is business software, which belongs in the IT department. Today many CMS projects do not have clear ownership, purpose and goals.

In a small country like Denmark, there are more than 80 active content management systems . This includes enterprise solutions, solutions for small and medium enterprises and open-source systems.

Another clear indicator of an immature market is the unclear definitions of content management and CMS. Spending time defining the terms may seem like an academic exercise, but only very few companies and organizations have clear-cut answers. Too often, the terms content management and CMS are confused. In addition, there are terms such as Web Content Management, Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Portal, which increasingly are mixed together.

It only gets worse when you involve vendors. Today the market is as open and consolidation-ready as ever. Some vendors define content management exclusively as managing content. Others include the delivery and deployment of content, the acquisition of content and in recent years even records management, digital asset management, search and taxonomies has also been included.

While most organizations today have experience with CMS , many disguise their initiatives as self-service or portal projects. Many organizations also still have their own homegrown CMS.

Unfortunately, vendors continue to add more features, instead of committing to post-sales and driving down implementation time. Business users require decision support from vendors, but only receive technical documentation or expensive external consultants.

Very few consulting companies build competences around content management. Management consultants do not want to worry about it and IT consultants are technical and vendor-oriented.

Finally, one clear sign of an immature industry: The academic world is so far absent from the scene.

The immature market

How to get the most out of an immature market

In any immature market, a basic set of ground principles can increase the probability of successful project implementations.

What could users specifically do to mature the 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.

Mature the market

What could consulting companies specifically do to mature the market?

Overall consulting companies needs to acknowledge content management as a discipline. It is tempting to focus on the delivery side, e.g. a shiny new Web site or new intranet, but the CMS inside, is the solution that will deliver long-term results.

The difference between content management and CMS is an important one. Consultants could mature the market by using clear terminology.

Creating realistic business requirements is where you start, when you want to work hard to reduce project cycles.

Traditionally consultants have been good at managing client relationships and expectations, consultants should take a step forward to insist on also keeping the vendor involved in the process.

Both management consultants and IT consultants would be wise not to underestimate content management. It is business critical, even though it might be disguised as a portal or self-service initiative.

Increasingly consultants should focus more on the business requirements, organizational impact, strategy and roadmap, and less on the technical requirements.

What could analysts specifically do to mature the market?

Compared with more mature markets analysts have so far done a poor job at developing solutions for content management. Some deliver reports, mostly mentioning only US vendors, or vendors willing to pay for inclusion.

Analysts could raise the bar by doing a better job at benchmarking the entire industry. Scorecards exist for other markets, and makes sense for content management. There is a market for high quality reports, in particular with information about market share.

Lately many CMS vendors have undertaken a series of acquisitions. Analysts have required vendors to deliver a complete end-to-end solution and as a result, CMS vendors have acquired several records management (RM) and digital asset management (DAM) companies.

With immature products that lacks ease of use and are hard to implement, this is a step in the wrong direction. Analysts could mature the market by not requiring vendors to offer their own RM and DAM solutions. Instead, analysts should focus more on successful implementation rates, quality of service and core content management competences.

What could academia specifically do to mature the market?

The market would mature faster if academic institutions were also involved.

Unfortunately, content management and CMS are almost entirely untapped fields from a research point of view.

Today business schools and universities may consider ERP or CRM more research ready, but as content management becomes increasingly business critical, academia needs to get started.

Many questions are unanswered and many academic papers are needed on content management and CMS.

Academia is a main talent pool for all other market actors. Increased academic focus on content management would in effect over the long-term raise the bar across the board.

Conclusion

The market has been driven by vendors and IT departments long enough. Maturing the industry will take years, while vendors and consulting companies will consolidate and projects will continue to fail.

Content management and CMS are often disguised in a personalization, portal or self-service initiative, but they should not be underestimated. The complexity requires resources, budget, patience, planning and proper attention.

Everybody involved needs to take steps to mature the industry. At the same time everybody stands to benefit from a more mature market.

Published: 09/2004
Author: Janus Boye

As a content management specialist, Janus Boye has created two enterprise content management start-ups during the last 2 years. In 2003, he created Boye IT, a content management consulting company.

© 1999-2008 | home | close window