Who owns your content management system (CMS)? Who is the group that selected your CMS, set it up, and keeps it running? I’m willing to bet that the answer for most organizationsis “IT” or “no one.” And if either of those is your answer, you’re probably not getting the most out of your CMS. It’s probably difficult for authors to enter content, it has a lot of features you don’t use or take full advantage of, and it is blamed for all the problems of the website.
The role of the IT department has to evolve for your organization to become a 21st century success story. Pretty much everything we do today involves a digital system. And so we need to go through digital transformation to make these systems fulfill their promise of making things easier, not just another hassle that gets in the way of getting the job done.
Part of that transformation needs to be that every department owns their piece of the digital pie. IT should provide the infrastructure that allows everything to work as it should. IT should provide the governance and leadership for the organization's systems to work together as seamlessly as possible. But they should not be responsible for every system in use.
What is a CMS?
Your content management system is a tool that allows you to enter, organize, and publish content produced by various authors throughout the organization. Therefore, it needs to be owned by the department that is most closely involved with content creation and publishing. It also needs a product manager who understands how the system will best serve its users. It needs close collaboration between developers, designers, and authors to get it going and keep it running smoothly.
There are three ways to look at a CMS:
- Content Management SYSTEM– This is how you probably look at it now. Another piece of technology to be bought, installed, and replaced every few years when you’re tired of your website not fulfilling its promise. The focus is on the technology.
- Content MANAGEMENT system –Sure it’s technology, but we can manage the crap out of it. Give marketing ownership because they are the ones responsible for selling our products and programs. Or maybe the communications director manages it because the website is a form and function of corporate communications. This way of thinking allows organizational politics to rule.
- CONTENT management system – When you realize that it is a way to organize, store, and publish your content – and content is everything you do – you start thinking differently about who should own it. You might need to update your leadership roles to accommodate this new way of thinking. Have the Chief Information Officer actually focus on the information (which is what content is!) and not the technology that manages it.
Let’s put content back to the center of the content management system. Let’s use it as a system to manage our content.
What does right look like?
For the most part, “content management system” has become synonymous with “web publishing system.” That’s mostly what we have in the marketplace. But in case you haven’t noticed, the web is only one of many places our content is published these days. You need to start thinking about all the ways your content is used. To do that, you need to store content as data so that it can be reused, remixed, restyled, and repurposed in many interfaces and systems.
Now thatwe are no longer talking about website management, you can see why this is transformational. Instead of each department or group creating and publishing content independent of each other, have a governance board work on what topics are important and what delivery mechanism is the most desirable to your members, customers, and other audiences. In other words, have the various content creators collaboratively develop the content that the governance board determines will best meet audienceneeds instead of each group putting their heads down and putting out content in the form of press releases, conferences, continuing education courses, journals, blogs, magazines, etc.
When you focus on the content and how it gets to the right people before looking at the technology, you will find that you might hate your CMS less – and maybe even like it! Because now you have criteria to build upon rather than cramming your content into an ill-suited tool.
You may also find that technology can help transform the way information flows through the organization. We may never get to a point when one system will be enough for all the ways we need to manage and publish content. But even today it is possible to connect systems so that there is a primary home for information that pushes it out to others. Create once, publish everywhere (COPE) is the goal, and it is a reality for some organizations. The transformation is in how the organization thinks about content creation and adjusts accordingly.
Getting there
Remember, thinking differently about your content and your CMS is part of the digital transformation process. There is no “right” way to become a digital-centric organization. It will take time, but you’ve got to think differently now, before you do another website redesign, pick a new CMS, or buy yet another tool to manage yet another type of content. If your IT department is talking to CMS vendors who are coming in and doing demos about how great they can support your marketing efforts, you’re doing it wrong.
Put someone in charge of your content and let them set the requirements for a system that will support it – or at least as much of it as possible with today’s tools. When you start with how you want to manage and support content creation and development, you can choose tools to do just that. Start managing the content, don’t let the system manage you.
