Get Your CMS To Hit The Targets You Want By Bob Rose
With more than a thousand Content Management System (CMS) vendors, organizations face tough choices navigating the tricky waters of technology. A CMS solution that is perfect for a large company may be ineffective for an SMB as it has no use for features that are used extensively by a larger enterprise.
Buying a CMS is similar to buying Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions - you need to clearly evaluate your organization's needs and then map them to make an informed choice. Once you succeed in identifying a CMS solution, how will you ensure that it simplifies your work as promised? What measures will you use to show your leadership team that the CMS will provide good ROI?
Before beginning a CMS implementation, it is extremely important to identify the key business goals that must be achieved. Without this clear vision of the objective, CMS implementations are almost sure to fail. In this context, it is not surprising to find that most CMS implementations often overshoot budgets and timelines, and over their lifetime consume far more time, energy, and resources just to stay functional that you ever imagined.
Organizational goals are diverse - but we can take a look at some common business objectives that must figure on your checklist before a CMS implementation.
Goal #1: Improve Business Responsiveness In an intensely competitive world, organizations must be able to quickly update their Websites as soon as a new product or service is launched. In this scenario, organizations need the capability to accelerate content publishing, and provide subject matter experts (SMEs) with tools that are simple to use. Content specialists must be able to focus more on creating content - and not let content control them.
For example, consider the marketing arm of a technology services firm that has just found out from its sales team that -
1. there is a big SAP implementation services contract coming up 2. the company awarding the contract is checking vendor Websites to evaluate capabilities before drawing up a shortlist
In normal circumstances, the marketing team would have hurriedly asked the developers to put up a few links to SAP whitepapers (usually hidden inside the site) on the home page. If the same company had a Web content management system, the SMEs could have created a microsite with content tailored to showcase SAP capabilities. The ease of uploading content will also allow the same team to put up more recently created whitepapers on this microsite. In situations like this where time is of the essence, a user friendly CMS is invaluable.
Similarly, if SMEs feel that a particular content - such as a whitepaper on the Website - must capture email addresses of the people who download it, they can easily create a form using the content management tool, and ensure collection of this data. The email addresses can then become part of a lead generation exercise, used by the organization to sell specific services to users according to the type of whitepaper downloaded. Further, if a marketing person feels the need to run a campaign showcasing RFID capabilities, he can easily create a microsite within the main Website, and provide an in-depth overview of his company's capabilities. It is clear, therefore, that ease of use in this scenario can actually drive business efficiencies and opportunities.
Goal# 2: Improve Branding An organization's image in the marketplace is a combination of multiple factors, out of which--the Website--is clearly one of the most influential. A simple mistake such as a non-existent link on a company Website can mean a missed business opportunity. The chosen Website CMS must enable the organization to maintain link integrity - thereby significantly reducing the chance of users reporting a missing link. The CMS must also give the organization the capability to maintain consistency across all pages of its Website (with style sheets, templates, etc.) so that branding and design are controlled to the level desired, regardless of who is responsible for the actual content.
As a result, visitors can have a consistent and professional experience on a Website managed through an effective CMS.
Goal # 3: Improve Quality of Information The CMS must enhance the organization's ability to improve the quality of information by giving it the capability to deliver content that is updated, comprehensive and validated by SMEs. A Website CMS must have intelligent workflow automation, and ensure that content passes through appropriate quality gates before being published. For instance, ensuring that files can be given a full document lifecycle, including check-in, check-out, versioning, rollback, approvals, and scheduling.
The CMS should support configurable workflows that enable organizations to assign tasks to any person, and escalate in case defined thresholds are crossed. For example, the CMS must automatically send email alerts to content owners of specific sections on a Website, if these sections are not updated after a specific time period.
Goal # 4: Reuse content In a digital world where content can be creatively used in a variety of forms such as whitepapers, podcasts or articles, effectively managing and using this content is critical for competitive advantage. However, the same content present in multiple mediums, across different business units can create silos of unmanageable information - and increase maintenance costs. Organizations must encourage content reuse by reducing duplicate content and storing each kernel of content only once. An efficient CMS can help find and tag content assets from a single point of control. This centralized control medium also means that the organization can effectively measure the success of its various online marketing initiatives.
Goal # 5: Take Advantage of New Communication Media The Web 2.0 audience demands an interface that is functionally rich, easy to use, and publishes content quickly. You would not want to frustrate an audience that is used to sites such as Flickr or Blogger. Adding complex content posting rules on your company's blog will only alienate your would-be listeners. Further, different forms of metadata such as 'rating' or 'tagging' by voters introduce new layers of complexity in managing content. Additional challenges in content management arise due to multiple device types. Organizations that follow a manual content updating style, or have a CMS that tightly binds content and structure, will be at a distinct disadvantage when publishing content to different formats. Hence, organizations must look to a CMS that enables and facilitates easy creation of content that caters to multiple mediums and audiences from a single source, for example; publishing of digital assets like audio and video files, and simplify the process of publishing the XML associated with the Podcast RSS feed.
Goal # 6: Improve Productivity To improve productivity of key content specialists or SMEs, choose a CMS that allows even non-technical users to contribute and update content on a Website from anywhere, using just an Internet connection. Choose a CMS that encourages SMEs to experiment with the presentation of their content. For instance, enforcing design with, navigation schemes, and the presentation of content through standardized presentation templates. These templates ensure that the content presentation, titling and linking are arranged in a way that enables even non-technical staff to easily update content.
Productivity can also be enhanced by giving SMEs the ability to search and quickly identify digital assets that are present in the organization. Content owners can thus save valuable time in creating content that is already present.
Conclusion Like sails driving a ship, goals are vital for content management. Using the right metrics can add further control and boost effectiveness. For example, 'business responsiveness' can be measured by the organization's ability to quickly update its Website as soon as new products or services are launched. Other metrics used to gauge success of CMS goals can include Web usage statistics, turnaround time for publishing new material or implementing changes, customer satisfaction, development time for new pages, and cost of training. Having a clear vision of what the CMS has to achieve can turn the direction of change in an organization's favor, and make it better equipped to maximize CMS potential.
envisage CMS is a fully feature packed CMS, designed to be a true WYSIWYG website editor. The content management software is accessed via any browser, wherever you are in the world, allowing you to manage your website with no technical knowledge of HTML or any other languages. For more info visit : www.envisagecms.co.uk