CMS When Do You Really Need It

CMS - When Do You Really Need It?
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Bob_Rose]Bob Rose

Marketers today make a strong case for a content management system (CMS), extolling its virtues in no uncertain terms. But it probably makes sense to take a step back and think: does your organization really need an advanced CMS? If your current in-house team is effectively managing your Website, can you justify a CMS investment to your management team? But at the same time, can your existing solution scale quickly enough to handle expected and unexpected growth?

The real issue here is deciding when to stop ad-hoc manual processes and invest in a CMS. And this decision must be based on 3 things: your business goals, the capabilities of your current solution, and the ROI associated with change.

So let's look at when you should consider a CMS.

Invest in a CMS when:

Your Website looks and reads like a blast from the past

An outdated Website is clearly bad for business. Small Website teams typically comprise of a few HTML and developer experts who present and publish content in the right place with the right design. Hiring more people is not a viable option as work volumes are never consistent and additional costs are hard to justify.

Given a sudden need to scale - like a new branding campaign that mandates style, design, and content changes - delivery timelines become hard to keep. Manual processes will not deliver the desired need for business agility.

Your content information landscape looks like a jungle

Inconsistent categorizing, organizing, and publishing can frustrate business users looking for content. Webmasters may change, but nomenclatures and processes cannot. A clear strategy is thus essential to avoid knowledge silos and mixed-up information architectures.

A CMS can help you:

• Maintain consistency across Website pages

• Control design-and more importantly branding-to the level desired with style sheets, templates, and more

• Assure a consistent, professional experience for visitors, regardless of who is responsible for content

Your organization struggles to put up a simple press release

It is not uncommon to encounter inordinate delays with simple content revisions. Press releases and product updates need to be timely, precise, and deliver value. With the right CMS, your subject matter experts can actively participate in making the Website reflect organizational goals. Without dependency on personnel trained in HTML, you can accelerate Website publishing by giving subject matter experts simple, intuitive tools to easily create, edit and publish content themselves.

Your users constantly complain of missing links

Missing links and Website maintenance struggles are sure signs of the need for a CMS. The right solution can help you maintain essential link integrity, and significantly improve the experience of business users.

Your organization lacks programming and design skills and expertise

If a developer or external expertise is required to correct simple spelling errors or change Website structure, a CMS can surely help. The right solution empowers your non-technical staff to create and modify content as well as design without programming expertise.

Your organization is unable to manage the information explosion

What part of the burgeoning volume of information is actually valuable? How easily is this accessible to users? Serving and managing content served in multiple forms is another challenge--especially in dealing with blogs, Wikis, or Podcasts.

An effective CMS can:

• Manage this from a single point of control

• Quickly identify, tag, compose, and assemble content automatically

• Reduce information duplication, and encourage content reuse

Your organization struggles to ensure quality and freshness of content

Manual systems are seldom effective in ensuring content quality and freshness. A typical manual process involves:

• The marketing/communications team tracking down section owners, and requesting content updates

• Dispatched as a Word document, this content then goes through a long and tedious approval process from various stakeholders

• The content upload team, in dealing with inconsistencies, shifts the workflow back to the content department

It is easy to see how this process can be inefficient and time-consuming.

A CMS can provide complete system auditing and reporting, giving you the ability to manage and track the history of all work done. Every file can be given a full document lifecycle, including check-in, check-out, versioning, rollback, approvals, and scheduling. Intelligent workflow automation ensures that content passes through the appropriate quality gates before publishing.
You can also use the CMS's configurable workflows to assign tasks to any person, and that escalate in case defined thresholds are crossed. For example, e-mail alerts can be sent to content owners of specific sections on a Website, to ensure timely section updates. Once these rules are established, you can make sure that section owners are more responsive in assuring content quality and freshness.

Conclusion

If your Web presence is experiencing any of the above difficulties, it is safe to say that a CMS solution is a necessity. As with any technology purchase it is important to factor in the total-cost-of-ownership before investing. But like we've all heard many times before, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

This article is contributed by Rob Rose - Vice President of Crownpeak. If your Web presence is experiencing any of the above difficulties, it is safe to say that a [http://www.crownpeak.com/]CMS solution is a necessity. As with any technology purchase it is important to factor in the total-cost-of-ownership before investing. But like we've all heard many times before, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

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