[Sigia-l] "Study: Content Management Tools Fail"

[Hilary Marsh]

I heartily agree with what Ann has to say. I'm also a consultant to 
companies on CM strategy and implementation. And often, the problem 
is that the decision to purchase a product comes way before they've 
decided on a strategy, let alone developed business requirements.

In English, this means that before you have the requirement "our 
content owners should be able to contribute content to the website 
without needing to know HTML" you need to have a good sense of who 
those content owners are, whether they are the people who *should* be 
creating your content and deciding when/how it should be updated, 
whether they have access to the right parts of the site, whether the 
people involved in all the steps of their approval processes (aka 
"workflow," a concept that writers and editors never use) have the 
time, ability and interest to use the CMS, and whether that content 
is what users need and want.....

all before they even explore what tool to use.

If content owners prefer creating their stuff in Word, why does that 
make the CMS bad? The CMS should be able to allow busines users to 
use tools of their choice and work with those.

I am in the midst of preparing a whitepaper called "The Top 25 Things 
Content Management Vendors Should Know about What Their Customers 
Want," which will address this exact topic.

--Hilary


-- 
Hilary Marsh
president
content company inc
plan  *  create  *  manage
http://www.contentcompany.biz