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

[Gill, Harold B. CONT (NALC SSG)]

Greeting all,

Content Management Systems may fail today because of various factors,
including lack of organizational commitment to utilizing the tools as well
as poor planning and architecture of the systems themselves...but they are
essential for the large competitive organization and are increasingly so for
the small and medium sized businesses. A well tuned Content Management
Policy is essential for any...without organizational commitment and a firm
policy in place along with procedure for usage, any tool will fail, no
matter how well designed.

My background in the field comes from two years as the Technical Editor/Web
Content Writer/Partner Implementation Manager of a very small CMS vendor in
Copenhagen, Denmark. Growing out of the nucleus of a tiny web agency, the
tool developed for a few projects became the root of the CMS that they
intended to build. On joining them in the winter of 2000, they seemed
oblivious to having any competition at all. While this may seem naive, it
had great advantages. By focusing on what they needed to achieve for a few
local partners and customers who were close at hand, they managed to build a
system that was just what the customer desired.

The history goes on, however. They lost their innocence and decided that
they had to build an entirely new system. Luckily, they have a gifted GUI
designer and very focused developers. Even so, without QA engineers in place
and working to unrealistic product release schedules...they nearly caved in
by delivering a product that was under tested and therefore too buggy to
sell. The damage to the reputation is survivable but resulted in loss of
revenue and stymied growth of the vendor.

It is a story reproduced all over..now they know that they must focus on
Customer Service foremost. The refocus and sheer survival is off setting
loss of credibility and I have high hopes for their future.

Customers implementing their solution are usually as well satisfied as they
are prepared with an organizational plan for implementation. If they have
good consultants or in-house IT folks ready for CMS, they are very
satisfied. If not, they are not satisfied. It really boils down to
preparation.

Best regards from Yorktown, Virginia

Hal Gill
Senior Technical Writer
DigitalNet Government Solutions
Naval Ammunition Logistics Center IT 
1351 Spring Road
Yorktown, VA 23691

(757)-847-8154
(757)-847-8080 (fax)
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