[Sigia-l] Where does Content Management belong?

[Beth Mazur]

>I strongly believe that Content Management needs to be a hybrid, 
>which can certainly be an organizational challenge. Unless it is 
>owned by *both* IT and Communications, a company's content management 
>efforts are unlikely to be effective from both perspectives.

I think it is a tad more complex than this and suspect that the
real answer is that the CMS is "owned" by the group that is going
to pay for it and maintain it. That said, any attempt to implement
a CMS without useful input from the end-user (and in our case it
is more broad than just Communications) to understand the *actual*
business requirements has got a big uphill battle.

In our case, we've had two less-than-stellar CMS implementations,
both driven essentially by IT. One of the problems that we have had
was that of the normal large organization IT group. They are trying
to solve problems with "well-supported" applications that will scale.
So even though they go through the motions of understanding the
business requirements, it's hard to avoid feature creep (which the
business owners will drive as well), and before you know it,
you have a Porsche instead of a Hyundai when all you needed was
something to commute to work.

The jury is still out on our third implementation, although signs 
are currently positive. One of the factors that I think made a difference
this time (though Thomas Vander Wal has his own ideas at
http://www.iaslash.org/node.php?id=7236) was the fact that the
people who made the selection (us) were hybrids of a sort...we 
understood IT, but we also understood business and end-users. 

The other thing we did was to phase our implementation. We were
warned by our developers that it can be a problem to build the
foundation for a cottage when you're planning on building a mansion.
And in fact, now that we're adding workflow, we are having to go
back and re-architect some of this foundation. That said, we had 
6 months of working with the initial version (which was delivered 
sooner than had we developed the larger app) which really helped 
inform our requirements for phase 2 in a way that dealing with stuff 
in the abstract would have been far more difficult.  

Beth Mazur
IDblog: http://idblog.org