Business Engineering
Emerging Trends
SystemicLogic News FeedGeneral Research News : Conquer the Information Chaos with Content Management Systems (CMS)
Why do we need CMS now?
“We are drowning in information and thirsting for knowledge.” John Naisbitt, Megatrends 2000.
In the past decade advances in ICTs have resulted in an explosion in the generation of both structured and unstructured information. The prime driver of content management and the development of content management applications has been the quest by Information Age companies to streamline information assets in order to gain enterprise knowledge needed to realise business goals. This is because for contemporary institutions, content management systems (CMS) offer the promise of optimal solutions for holistically creating and managing enterprise content and mostly for organising, interpreting and integrating content for reuse. There has been an urgency to identify and implement solutions that enable organisations to rationalise their chaotic information terrain, to gain competitiveness and business agility through effective administration of the information resources. However, given the hype surrounding CMS, the increasing vendor market consolidation and the penetration of Open Source alternatives in the market, selecting the right system and successfully implementing a CMS project can be Mammoth tasks for IT managers. SystemicLogic's experience in a number of CMS projects for large corporate organisations has proven right the reality of this challenge. Some clients, for example those using Microsft Sharepoint have expressed discontent with the solution. The million dollar question is: Do we blame the software or implementors or both? If so, how can large entities make the right CMS choice (whether proprietary or Open Source) and at the same time ensure CMS projects deliver real value to business and not only to IT?
Implementation: Cant we begin with an 'end in mind'?
While there are several best-practice checklists for implementing CMS out there, SystemicLogic's experience in both Open Source and proprietary products, indicate that many clients are failing to successfully deploy CMS. Firstly, a majority of implementors rarely begin by envisioning the end goal of their projects. They lack a vision of the bigger picture and can not explicitly identify key business values that must be attained after closing their CMS projects. There is need to ensure that CMS is used as “a means to an end' by implementing it as part of a broader information and knowledge management strategy. Secondly, there is little realisation of the complexity of content management among clients. CMS projects transcend various facets of the information management discipline (data, records, document, knowledge management). Thus certain issues such as usability, data and information architecture needs to be taken into account before considering purchasing off-the-shelf solutions. In addition, the integrative nature of content management require a careful and detailed study of how CMS will merge with many business processes and how it will interface with other information systems such as document and records management. SystemicLogic has noted that conducting an in depth organisational self introspection to understands content management needs, defining the future business direction, building a strong business case for the project as well as understanding CMS issues, are key to successful implementation.
CMS Selection: Do we need to clear hype to make right choices?
Absolutely!There is a big confusion about the functionalities that characterise CMS and about the differences with less performing products such as web content management systems, document and records management systems and enterprise content management systems. More often than not the crux of the matter is the confused nomenclature and the ever growing list of acronyms within the information management discipline. Not every IT manager understands the metamorphosis of information elements from data to information, to content and through to knowledge and enterprise wisdom not to mention the intrinsic difference between the terms. This affects solution selection decisions.
Distinguishing between these terms is the starting point in getting functionalities of CMS straight. It is fundamental in ensuring you match particular content management needs and the appropriate CMS solution or a set of CMS applications. This strategically helps minimise the major CMS project risk: misalignment of content management requirements with unsuitable products. Moreover, increasing numbers and diversity of both proprietary and Open Source products exacerbates the complexity of the software selection and roll out puzzle. Thus high client dissatisfaction from selecting the wrong systems and serendiptious happiness resulting from stumbling across the right application, are two most common situations likely to face IT project managers. CMS knowledge arms organisations to appropriately respond to risks that may cause project failure, for example, confusing the CMS project and the broader website project, ignorance of content management issues, assumptions CMS products, or failure to distinguish between requirements and selection criteria.The vendor market: Do we know what to look for in CMS?
A number of Open Source products have also penetrated this technology area which is increasingly becoming mission-critical for current knowledge-based organizations. However, the market is replete with products that offer individual content management components. Some vendors who have even capitalised on the hype and are claiming to offer CMS when in actual fact some do not provide basic end-to-end content management processes, making life difficult for would-be CMS clients. True CMS have to support all the phases of content creation, management, presentation and distribution, content control and content individualisation. These life cycle phases include collection , management and publication processes.
EMC (Documentum), Vignette (V7) and Microsoft Office SharePoint are some of the leading proprietary software (Gartner, 2008). However, The Open Source CMS Award 2008 also identified Drupal and Joomla! as Open Source leaders (while Plone, dotCMS and DotNetNuke are maturing.SystemicLogic has compared different systems in the Open Source category relative to each other based on how well they match particular clients' requirements. The study indicated that some solutions like Alfresco, XOOPS and Typo3 are becoming mature enough to warrant implementation within an enterprise IT infrastructure framework. It recommended that for CMS implementors, it is ideal to evaluate community based and commercial based Open Source solutions along side commercial alternatives as part of a tender process. Evidence of the growing maturity of Alternative Source products point to the fact that it would be no surprise to find that some may prove to be the best CMS solutions for sizeable organisations.
However, the cross-cutting nature of content management means that solutions offering a full content life cycle management are gaining the lead as more companies are better understanding the concept and are focusing on whole-of-enterprise integration of information management capabilities.Establishing companies are beginning to consider end-to-end solutions as compared to partial CMS solutions. Needless this does not provide a hard and fast rule in selecting nor implementing the systems. Choosing the bigger software is not always the better. The better is to seek first to understand the particular content management problems to be solved and then seek to be understood by CMS vendors. Depending on the as-is environment, an organisation might prefer to select a couple of best-of-the-crop systems and apply a federated implementation approach. In some cases it might be prompted to chose one or two applications to avoid duplication of effort if existing solutions perform similar content management functions.
Winding It Up
There is no doubt selecting CMS required more than basic software selection acumen. Understanding and defining specific content management requirements, knowing content management concepts and specific business drivers of CMS project, and an intelligent survey of the content management software market can place IT managers at a vantage point to derive desired return on investment in CMS.
Watch this space for the next Open Source feature on Form Solutions.
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