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Mature Content Management
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. Read the next chapter | | | more |  |
09/2004, 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.
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