I Could Not Care Less What System You Use

This essay by Jeffrey Veen on why content management fails is right on the money. I will not repeat his main points, but I just want to make some quick comments.

I cannot count the number of times that I have engaged in conversations about the merits of various content managements systems. Does it matter? Perhap it matters, but what matters more is to plan how you are going to manage content in the enterprise. Planning includes defining process and workflow, and determining how to staff positions on a content management team. Planning may even invlove defining what you mean by content. For example, there could by FAQs, press releases, internal news, internal blogs, training materials, policies and procedures, staff directories, on-line threaded discussions and so on.

In the begining, it does not matter which system you use. It matters that you can plan the work and establish a budget. Then, choose the system while mapping it to your budget and needs. I have seen many content management projects fail because they were too open-ended, or because they were incorrectly defined. I was once involved in a major initiative by a large fortune 100 company that spent tens of millions of dollars and got nowhere.

Sometimes, I talk to developers who are working on projects that they call ‘implementations’: as in, we are implementing a content management solution using Hummingbird. I will often press these developers to explain the problem they are trying to solve. After all, how can you say that you are implementing a solution if you cannot state the problem? The developers will often say that they need a system that can retrieve both formatted and unformatted content. They will also pepper the discussion with all the right catch phrases and acronyms: XML, faceted metadata, fulltext indexing, and many others.

However, it is obvious to me that the developers are solving their own problems first. It is MY problem as a developer to find a way to search both structured and unstructured content, but users do not care. The user wants to find a press release, a biographical reference or a piece of correspondence. When these gigantic content management projects launch, the users do not like them, or they feel intimidated by them, or they find themselves without the team structures and processes to use the solution. The project fails, and the developers blame the users.

So, ok – I ended up repeating Jeffrey Veen’s main points. I couldn’t help myself.

NOTE: To be fair, there are cases when large organizations, like the Provincial government of Ontario, tries to provide a solution for extremely large groups of users in multiple business units. Sometimes, the idea is: build it and they will come. A lot of good thinking goes into these projects, but I cannot help but thinking that the task is too big. Time will tell. Personally, I do not think one size fits all.