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

[John O'Donovan-INTERNET]

Some good points Ann.

An interesting issue with installing a CMS is that the support / procurement
team within the customers company is often unsure whether they are in a
procurement or a development project - thus as has been said here, they lack
key skills to understand how to define what they want and translate the work
of the vendor and consultants into something that stakeholders understand.

With a CMS people think of it as a procurement then realise they have
actually purchased a platform which they have to configure and develop with
extensively. And I mean extensively. Except for the simplest of publishing
tasks, my experience of CMS is that they just don't deliver much out of the
box, for web projects especially.

This means the customers team cannot support the development, don't know
enough about the product to work with it and can easily be left high and dry
without the product fulfilling their requirements when the consultants
leave. Even if they have shown due diligence in communicating their
requirements.

A CMS needs a team to run it and key technical, analyst and design members
of this team should also be included during the procurement. Otherwise the
customer can be railroaded in a variety of inappropriate directions.

This oversight is both the customer and the vendors fault - the customer
does not invest enough in the team to run the CMS or in the analysis and
requirements gathering phase. The Vendor does not want to imply that it is a
lot of effort to apply the product to the customers organisation and may not
push hard enough to speak to and understand users. The vendor is only
looking to configure their product to the customers needs - the customer is
likely expected to know what it wants.

And the consultants? They just get paid. If no-one is listening they will
eventually lock the issue in a box, sail to the middle of a deep ocean and
throw it over the side...

Cheers,

jod


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