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

[John O'Donovan]

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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ann Rockley" <rockley at rockley.com>
To: "Patrick Neeman" <pat at nexisinteractive.com>; "Todd R.Warfel"
<lists at messagefirst.com>; "Peter Merholz" <peterme at peterme.com>
Cc: <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 1:33 PM
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] "Study: Content Management Tools Fail"


>
> >My two cents on the topic
>
> I help organizations to implement enterprise content management systems.
> Their are jobs for consultants like me because vendors do not know how to
> effectively discover customer needs and customers don't know how to
> discover their own real need. In my experience CMS implementations fail
for
> the following reasons:
>
> -Customers pick the tool before they know their needs
> -Up until 2 years ago CMS was a really hot market so customers made fast
> decisions without due consideration and vendors have been able to sell
them
> "anything"
> -Customers are not good at determining their detailed needs. They may have
> a top level understanding, but do not know what they need to know in order
> to make informed decisions
> -Vendors, particularly typical sales people, do not know how to discover a
> customer's needs. This is a time consuming in-depth process that can take
> weeks or months.
> -Vendors do not always have a clear understanding of what a customer would
> want to do with the product so they do not provide the required
> functionality. They don't seem to spend enough time in discovering this
> even after the tool is sold
> -Customers don't know what they need to do in the context of the tool so
> they are unable to communicate their needs
> -Customers make decisions based on a single narrow focus, eg don't plan
for
> future use or broader based use
> -Customers don't treat a CMS implementation like any other type of
> enterprise software implementation so they don't follow good software
> implementation practices (eg prototype, pilot, implement, change
management)
>
> This is not unique to CMS. Look at how many ERP system implementations
have
> failed. Since the economic slowdown, I have noticed a marked change in the
> way companies are implementing a CMS. They are taking up to a year to make
> a purchase decision. Partly this is due to lack of budget, but it means
> there is a lot of time to determine real requirements and evaluate a
number
> of systems. Companies are taking the time to analyze their content and
> model it for the way they want to use and manage it and they are taking a
> hard look at their processes so they can implement effective workflow.
They
> are also taking a slow prototype, pilot, then implement route instead of
> "implement and run".
>
>
> _____________________________
>
> "Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy" (ISBN
0735713065)
> by Ann Rockley with Pamela Kostur and Steve Manning is now available from
>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735713065/therockleygro-20>amazon.<
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735713065/therockleygro-20>com
> or
>
<http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735713065/therockleyg08-20>amazon.ca
.
> For more information visit www.managingenterprisecontent.com.
>
> Ann Rockley
> The Rockley Group Inc.
> 905-415-1885
> rockley at rockley.com
> Web: www.rockley.com
>
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