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

[Patrick Neeman]

...

Okay, half right.

1) The customer is never wrong.

No matter how screwed up the customer is, the vendor should provide some insight into what is needed to run the damn thing. CMS
companies have had years to come up with a ballpark, and should have a rough idea of what the company needs even before they try
selling it to them i.e. I'm not going to try and sell a classifieds ad site to a musician who wants to post their music on the web.

2) If the product requires significant support, then it isn't meeting the needs of the users i.e. company.

Example:

If the company has 1,000 employees, and they are losing an average of two hours a week because of a bad intranet, that's a cost of
about $1 million a year based on an average cost per employee of $40 bucks an hour.

If they buy a CMS system that costs $1 million to configure, install, and build custom components, and the company has to hire an
additional two people to support it, and there are an additional $100,000 in services provided per year, plus licensing, it's going
to take FIVE YEARS to see the true return on revenue. This isn't what technology is about. Technology is about empowering the end
user so they see quantifiable results quicker than that. Five years is too long, and it doesn't take an MBA to figure that out.

Which is a serious problem for these CMS providers -- if they can't meet that true return in two years or less for the money spent,
then it really isn't worth it. And while content/document management is something that really is more valuable over the long haul,
how long should that haul be.

P@

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org]On Behalf Of
> John O'Donovan-INTERNET
> Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 9:43 AM
> To: 'Ann Rockley '; 'Patrick Neeman '; 'Todd R.Warfel '; 'Peter Merholz
> '
> Cc: 'sigia-l at asis.org '
> Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] "Study: Content Management Tools Fail"
>
>
> 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.