Challenges of Content Management
This examines the challenges of content management and the reasons why the extraordinary promise of Content Management technologies is not being met.
Failure rates
What we have here is a failure to communicate:
- "Numerous Gartner clients had not achieved the full benefit or return on investment (ROI) from their investments [in content management systems]."
The Gartner Group
- "Only 27% of CMS users are satisfied with how they were currently using their system and almost one-third have so many problems they are building another system from scratch."
Jupiter Research
- "As few as 10 percent to 15 percent of implementations have a smooth introduction that delivers the anticipated benefits."
A. Blanton Godfrey, Chairman and CEO of the Juran Institute
- "Very rarely are there instances when it's the technology system itself—the actual software—that fails."
Jim Shepherd, Senior Vice President,
AMR Research
- "Systems Implementation isn't about the software. It's easy to put a new system in place. The hard part is changing the business processes of the people who will use the system."
Ben Worthen, CIO Magazine
Reasons for failure
Failure rarely lies with the technology and can generally be found within the other 2 components of a content management system:
- the people who develop and use the content, and
- the content itself.
The people must change how they think about content and abandon conventional writing. They must stop writing documents and start developing content.
The content must be significantly rethought paragraphs of prose written in a variety of styles and ranging over a number of topics cannot be effectively tagged, stored, and reused.
Spaghetti Analogy
Paragraphs of prose are like plates of spaghetti, all the topics are intertwined
on one plate, making it impossible to separate one from the other. You gotta
eat the whole thing!
How it fails
This is an illustration of how content management fails.
How it works
This is an illustration of how content management works.
Conclusion: Content is the missing link
The missing link in content management is, amazingly enough, the content!
- The content is not properly structured for use by technology and users.
- People developing the content are not trained in how to structure content for the technology and users.
