Losing sight of the Content in a Content Management System Page II

Support your authors

Provide your writers with a powerful, efficient, and easy-to-use authoring environment. Highlight this as a requirement during the initial product selection phase.

Authors should not be required to understand HTML, or any other technical information. The CMS must provide all the tools necessary to manage thousands of pages of content, published to different platforms and formats.

In a decentralised authoring approach, a large number of your staff will be using the CMS. This makes ease of use particularly important. Sufficient training will also need to be provided to all users.

Authoring support in CMS is often weak, so be prepared to spend extra effort setting this up.

Make it easy for authors to help your users

Avoid technology quick-fixes

Computers are stupid compared to humans. Be wary of salesmen promising 'silver bullet' solutions to content challenges.

Examples include automatic classification systems and 'natural language' search engines.

These are appealing due to their fixed purchase price, and 'set and forget' operation.

Evaluate these systems against your business needs, and ensure that the results they produce are meaningful and useful.

In the end, the money may instead be spent on a human who will do a better job for less cost.

Beyond implementation

When a CMS is purchased, there is a project to design, implement and deploy a solution. This is a short-term activity with clearly defined goals.

Just as important is what follows on from the project.

A permanent process must be put in place to ensure the continued accuracy and coverage of your content. This must be given resources, staff and time.

The CMS must become an everyday part of your business' activities. If this is not the case, it will languish the moment focus shifts to the next project.

The CMS will then become obsolete and be abandoned within 6–12 months.

(Users will not admire a CMS that delivers inaccurate and out-of-date information, however efficiently it does so.)

Practical processes

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The process of creating content is well-understood (there is even an Australian standard on it). Goals can be concrete and measurable.

Moreover, the process of content creation is perfectly suited to standard project management processes, such as design, scoping, deliverables and milestones.

If the skills don't exist within your organisation to manage the content creation process, obtain the services of a contractor or consultant. Demand from them the same level of professionalism and rigour you would of any other project manager.

A CMS project is in equal parts: technology, content & processes

Real benefits

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There are very tangible benefits to be gained by ensuring quality content. These can be defined, tracked and measured.

Benefits may include:

• Reduce legal accountability, by ensuring information given to customers is consistent and accurate.
• Reduce training costs.
• Improve call centre response times.
• Improve help desk efficiency.
• Eliminate printing and distribution costs.
• Improve staff productivity.
• Support process improvement, by accurately documenting current processes and issues.

Putting in place a CMS to manage content is admirable. Without keeping the focus on the content itself, however, your money will be wasted.

In order to meet business goals and objectives, it is critical to ensure that the information managed by the CMS is what your staff require.

Thankfully, this is not an impossible goal. By putting in place the right people, resources and processes, it is a straightforward exercise to guarantee that your CMS will meet your business needs.

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If you have any comments on this article, please send them to:
jamesr@steptwo.com.au