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

[Nuno Lopes]

I believe the problem is three folded:

1) Client - Most clients have a vague (really vague) idea about what
they need to solve the problem. They want it solved now and with the
least upfront cost (they even lie to get costs down). This makes it
difficult for vendor to provide an efficient solution. Client needs are
rarely simple.

2) IT Consultants, VAR etc - Usually don't know the products neither the
client environment. Quite often whether they are too specialized in low
level technology (.NET, J2EE, PHP, etc) or they are too high level
without any particular specialization (usually they are called Process
specialists, Analysts, Business Engineers, IA specialists etc :).
Consultant companies have mixed interests by wanting a share of the
sale, and of course they services well paid. They say they know how to
do it, when they can only make experiences.

3) Vendors - Quite often they build speculation around the capabilities
of their products in order to increase sales. Speculation is like a
tidal wave, one starts, competitors follow and so on. Quite often they
use clients to experiment ideas while telling them that this and that
are best practices.

All in all software development is a complex activity that with the
Internet as been neglected as simple or trivial. 

Too often I've heard don't worry about technology tell me what you want.
Also too often I've the reason why the project failed is because of the
technology (bad product, really bad product). I believe both kinds of
statements are used to cover the real truth about what went wrong most
of the times (or actually it might even be the fact that went right
after all for someone else). 

I believe there is a deficit of business ethics in the software
industry, and particularly in the newer software markets like CM, from
clients to vendors and vice versa.

I'm now 30, coming to the conclusion that unreasonable ethical behavior
hurts the economy more then does well. Too much speculation is just
unethical at least, IMO. All we have is people's words and commitment to
succeed, speculation makes it hard to fulfill both.

The article is quite explicit in the fact that these companies simply
got the wrong product for the job, or the wrong product was sold to them
as you prefer. But the fact is, can you blame the product for it? Can
you blame CM as a discipline for it? No you cannot in real honesty IMO.
One can speculate that because of this failures CM as a discipline is at
stake, this is just speculation because in reality it is far ahead from
other disciplines such as IA in most aspects, from success to failure,
in other words, from experience.

I must say that the IA market is not all that different, starting from
some posts on this list. I guess that can be excused from being still a
new arena.

I'm just counter arguing religious negative argumentation. In fact I
believe that IA, CM, DM and KM have much to learn from each other, that
is why I'm here.

Best regards,

Nuno Lopes

PS: There is also a thread going on about this on the cms-list
(cms-list at cms-list.org) if you care.