October 2007 - Posts

• Portland CMS Myth Roundtable

  We decided it was time to take this CMS Myth show on the road.  We gathered 35 marketing, business and IT professionals at the historic Benson Hotel in Portland Oregon last week to discuss the myth over lunch.   We filled the 35 slots within a few days of announcing the event.  I suspected it could be for the free lunch (which was spectacular), but the discussion at the event even topped the fajitas.  Folks were engaged, interested and invested in figuring out how to make CMS work in their organization.  It validated the void in the marketplace for these frank discussion on the treacherous gap between CMS expectation and reality.   David and myself did a 50 minute presentation on the CMS Myth and highlighted six core challenges (and opportunities) to successfully deploying a CMS. Aside from a Colorado Rockies fan razzing me about my Red Sox affiliation (last laugh: me), we had some interesting questions from the audience. They included: What exactly is enterprise content management? How does knowledge management and web content management intersect? What role does search play in CMS? How do I integrate social media with my CMS? What is the right internal organizational structure to support our CMS and website? Special thanks to Steve Gehlen and the Internet Strategy Forum for helping to co-promote the event. As we get rolling with the blog, we’re hoping to take this show on the road to other cities. E-mail me if you’d like to see it in a venue near you (lunch is on us).   Posted Oct 30 2007, 04:15 PM by Jeff with no comments Filed under: Events

• Content Management is Hard

  Let’s get this out of the way early – Content Management implementations are hard.   While CMS vendors may rightly claim the user interface for the WYSIWYG tool is a breeze, actually implementing a content management system across your site requires a wide variety of skills and an overall organizational commitment that stretches far beyond technology.   Not understanding the full project scope sinks too many folks before the project even begins. It’s a game of expectation setting, right?  If you’ve already gone for budget approval based on the cost of the software and don’t understand the total cost of the implementation (internal and external), you’ll need to cut corners, or go back to the well for more funding. Neither of which are great situations.   So, while CMS technology today is much easier to work with thanks to rich feature sets and more flexible APIs (and lower price points!), the role of the website in your organization is complex. And the process to plan, design, develop and maintain that website is even more complex.   We’ll be exploring exactly what that means in this blog.  I’m looking forward to the conversation. Posted Oct 29 2007, 02:33 PM by Jeff with no comments

• The Origins of ‘The CMS Myth’

  The spark for The CMS Myth occurred in April 2007, at dinner with ISITE Design interactive agency colleagues at a San Francisco content management conference.  Our notes hit familiar themes: CMS vendors were pitching; consultants were advocating. And many real users were venting frustrations about CMS complexity; poor interfaces; organizational disorder; strategic failures; projects on hold – certainly not new feedback to us, having delivered hundreds of CMS-driven websites over the past 10 years. Our conversation kept coming back to key questions:  If CMS technology (now 10+ years on) promises to make life easier for people and organizations using the web, then why is there still so much angst out there? What factors make CMS-centric website projects successful, and what habits and practices put content management projects (and related web strategies) in peril? One of us at the table used the phrase “the CMS myth” – describing a gulf that exists between vendor promises and user reality – and we left determined to establish and drive a market conversation we saw as lacking, but absolutely necessary.   Our initial Myth foray, an article in May for ISITE Insight, prompted an immediate, visceral response from readers familiar with the pain of the Myth. We followed up by presenting The CMS Myth to a full-house at a CMS user conference in Boston. At the end of October, we’re scheduled to speak to 35+ web pros and marketing execs in Portland, Oregon, eager to understand Myth-related threats (and opportunities). At its core, The CMS Myth believes this: A web CMS project is not just about the technology you choose. It’s really about the Three P’s: your plan, your people, and your process.   The goal of this blog is not to recommend one system over another. Rather, we want to help you beyond CMS acquisition by delivering tips, tricks, perspectives, best (and worst) practices, web strategies and tactics that matter.   We also plan to grow this site as an online community for web pros, marketers and anyone else whose job intersect with CMS and websites, to capture the good, the bad, and the ugly of your experiences. (Got a CMS story to share? Email us at mythbusters@cmsmyth.com.)   Finally, most blogs have a few guiding beliefs that set the tone.  Here are a few of ours, straight from the consulting advice we provide to interactive clients every day: “Content management” is a philosophy and a business process; CMS is a software tool. You need both. Don’t equate one with the other. If you don’t have a clear web strategy, get one. If you don’t have a strategy, don’t get a CMS. A CMS is not a web strategy.  A CMS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Other web software (analytics, email marketing tools, etc) is probably in play. The CMS may be the glue that holds it all together, but always remember that it’s one part of a diverse web ecosystem. Plan ahead and document your plans. And when you’re done, plan some more. There’s no such thing as too much planning before you tackle a CMS project. All vendors say their CMS is easy to use. OK, we’ll buy that. If you buy it too, be prepared to invest in user training and mentoring – and potentially lots of it. Posted Oct 18 2007, 10:30 AM by David with no comments