CM Adoption

It has been a LONG time since I blogged anything related to what I do for a living, but I figure an occational entry on that front is OK, even if most of the people who read this could care less.

I came across an interesting article today on the phases of spending on a content management implementation. It appears to be more geared toward web content management, but also applies to other types, including the presentation manangement sort of thing we do.

Spending patterns during CMS implementation
(James Robinson, CM Briefing)

Beyond the initial go-live, there is still much work to be done. There is typically more content to be migrated, or more sites to be moved into the CMS.

The number of authors is generally also expanded during this phase, particularly when moving to a ‘decentralised’ authoring model.

More work will also be done on general ‘housekeeping’, such as rewriting key content, deleting old material, or further restructuring the site.

Workflow rules may also be tested and refined, along with security settings and other CMS configuration details.

Overall, it may take upwards of 12 months to fully complete the content migration, and have the CMS running as ‘business as usual’.

(via CMSWatch)

Actually, I think if anything here, they significantly underestimate the effort required in the adoption phase. While the dollar costs may be less if you don’t count person*hours, the total costs are more significant. One of the biggest reasons for CM implementations failing is underestimating the work required for the adoption phase. Work processes have to be adapted to the new tool. Habits need to be changed. Internal users need to be “sold” on the idea that the system actually helps them. They have to become comfortable with the tool. The best way to use the tool to match the business needs has to be determined. And for any enterprise scale tool (and even many smaller scale ones) this is not trivial, and requires thought and planning. Those that try to just “wing it” will almost certainly fail unless they get really lucky.