Intranet Journal
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Content Managers Have a Community of Practice
Michael Pastore and Laura Walker
6/21/2005
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With increased business focus on efficiency, transparency, and compliance, the content management discipline has significantly expanded in the past few years.
Addressing all of the content, processes, and workflows involved in organizing, categorizing, and structuring information resources so that they can be stored, published, and reused in multiple ways, the term content management is inclusive of structured content, multichannel (print/Web) content publishing, and transactional or business process content.
Founded in 2004, Content Management Professionals (CM Pros) — which has grown from a founding group of 30 content management experts to more than 375 members worldwide — provides information, expertise, and support to content management professionals and the organizations they serve. Through peer-to-peer interchange, the collaborative development of best practices, a series of educational events, and definitive knowledge resources such as a content management glossary and resource library, CM Pros fosters a better public understanding of this critically important discipline.
"Readily accessible and well-structured information is a critical success factor in every contemporary business context," says CM Professionals President Ann Rockley, founder of The Rockley Group and author of Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy. "CM Pros embraces all types of content management professionals — from content authors and modelers to technologists and project directors — and focuses on an overarching mission to advance content management excellence."
Until CM Pros was launched in 2004, the discipline had been dominated by vendors of content management systems. Content management practitioners — who increasingly have significant roles in content management projects — now have a forum to share best practices. "As content management has grown, it has become apparent that there are large numbers of practitioners solving problems on their own without the benefit of learning from others what has worked and what hasn't," says Frank Gilbane, publisher of the Gilbane Report, the popular newsletter covering content management technologies. "You can get some of this from existing industry events, but a permanent, continually collaborating community serves a much bigger need. And that's why CM Pros was formed."
Signaling the organization's increasing relevance and activities, the CM Pros Board of Directors announced in May the appointment of its Management Committee. Chartered with tactical day-to-day responsibility for achieving the organization's goals, the committee ensures the delivery and expansion of member value and promotes the valuable contributions the organization makes to content management excellence. Also in May, the organization hired Laura Walker — who led OASIS to the forefront of e-business standards — as its executive director; a position previously held on an interim basis by Bob Doyle, one of the organization's founders. By elevating the visibility of the organization and overseeing implementation of the Board's strategic plan, Walker's mission is to fuel member growth.
Members of CM Pros share and promote best practices by interacting through a variety of means including the CM Pros Web site, members-only and public mailing lists, industry events and CM Pros own bi-annual/bi-continental Summits.
The CM Pros Web Site
Offering a plethora of members-only and public information, the CM Pros Web site (www.cmprofessionals.org) is well on its way to becoming an invaluable information resource for the community. It features articles, member profiles, the CM Pros member directory, and membership information, as well as an evolving resource library including best practices.
CM Pros Mailing Lists
With lively debate on such topics as content management standards, skills matrix, metadata, controlled vocabularies, indexing and taxonomies, CM Pros mailing lists offer peer-to-peer brainstorming and knowledge transfer.
Any individual interested in content management is welcome to enroll in the public mailing lists hosted by CM Pros, including: cms@lists.cmprofessionals.org for discussions about content management systems technology; contentmanagers@lists.cmprofessionals.org, which is intended for use by content managers; policies-procedures@lists.cmprofessionals.org, which is focused on the feasibility of employing a content management system to manage enterprise policies and procedures; and cms-pr@lists.cmprofessionals.org, which is a list of over 400 content management-friendly media contacts.
The individuals who make the $50 commitment to CM Pros membership are eligible to enroll in CM Pros members-only mailing lists, including: cmpros@lists.cmprofessionals.org for discussions about content management practices; cmpros-org@lists.cmprofessionals.org for discussions about the CM Pros organization, and jobs@lists.cmprofessionals.org to which nonmembers may post jobs but only CM Pros members may subscribe.
CM Pros Summit
The CM Pros Spring Summit 2005 was held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in conjunction with the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies. The one-day event provided an open, interactive format in which participants got acquainted and exchanged ideas. Rockley, opened with her "Content Management: A Profession, Not Just a Technology" keynote. After a session in which the many CM Pros members in attendance introduced themselves, participants discussed many aspects of the strategy and practice of content management during four tracks of roundtable discussions and workgroup sessions, including "The Human Factor in Content Management" (Rahel Bailie), "Successful Taxonomy Projects" (Seth Earley), "Effective Governance Models to Support Enterprise Content Strategies" (Shuli Goodman), "Enterprise CM Posters and CMS Markup Language" (Erik Hartman), "Making the CM Business Case" (Rockley), and "Content Management Networking" (Mira Wooten). The Summit ended with an open meeting of the CM Pros Board of Directors.
The next two CM Pros Summits are scheduled for fall 2005: one in November in Boston and the other in October in Amsterdam.
Industry Events
Last month, several CM Pros members — including Theresa Regli, principal consultant at Molecular, Inc. and CM Pros' new director of knowledge resources — presented at the AIIM ON DEMAND 2005 Conference and Expo in Philadelphia. More than 20,000 visitors from 49 countries and six continents, 300 members of the press, 350 speakers, and 400 vendors gathered on the topic of Enterprise Content Management and Printing On Demand.
Rockley and Gilbane entertained a discussion intriguingly entitled "How sweet are the ECM Suites?" and — together with her Allstate Insurance colleague — CM Pros Marketing Director Patricia Kelley demonstrated Allstate's content reuse models.
Future Plans
Scheduled to launch in August 2005, CM Pros will host a series of Webinars — online educational events — that will deliver high-value information on various aspects of the content management discipline. Just one component of its comprehensive education and outreach program, CM Pros Webinars will be facilitated by subject matter experts and will be followed by an interactive Q&A session. The first of the series will discuss on open source technologies in the broader digital content management space. Future CM Pros Webinars will address not just technology but also best practices, and will be open to anyone, including non-members.
In addition to the Fall 2005 CM Pros Summits, other future plans for the organization include a quarterly CM Pros newsletter, the publishing of CM Pros-branded Best Practices, and a significant expansion of the CM Pros Resource Library.
Membership
Membership in CM Pros is open to any individual involved in the content management profession. It provides the opportunity to work alongside the industry's most influential experts. CM Pros members share information and gain insight via the members-only e-mail lists, stay current with inside information available only in the members-only sections of the Web site, gain credibility with the media and the marketplace, receive recognition as an active supporter of CM excellence, attend members-only events including CM Pros Summits, and can take advantage of member discounts at selected industry conferences.
For more information, see www.cmprofessionals.org or contact Executive Director Laura Walker at director@cmprofessionals.org or (704) 231-3338.
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