i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Strategic Content Management - Jonathan Kahn

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/strategic-content-management/
related article on content strategy
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy/

This blogpost, and its related blogpost on content strategy, discuss the problems faced by content management users and designers today. Even though content management technology has evolved over the past two decades from manual HTML editing to advanced online content production software packages, the underlying problems are mostly unchanged. The author argues that we have been selecting content management products based on their features or user base instead of their fit to the content strategy. The most important question has been left unanswered. Who are the users and what do they use the CMS for? [L2]

In the end a CMS is about the content and the editorial staff, not about the taxonomy management, the advanced faceted navigation or multichannel delivery options. Having these options does not guarantee a successful website or business. Neither does buying the same CMS ‘because someone you admire uses it’. It seems like we are considering every factor apart from the content, even though that is what a content management system should be all about.

So even though the technology has changed a lot over time, the challenge remains the same. Features are there to support your work as an editor and can be a great enhancement to the work-flow but without thinking about the way you organize and work with your content any CMS implementation is bound to fail. [L1] To address this problem CMS designers should collaborate with the end-users on identifying their needs and expressing the content strategy. The CMS selection, and more importantly, customization process should be about the needs of the end-user and the content model. The classic information organization vs. retrieval trade-off is an important part of that process. Questions such as ‘what does this content represent’ and ‘how much detail should we go into’ help to determine how much effort should be put into organization and how much should be left to retrieval. [L6]

The author concludes that selecting a content management product is not about buying an off-the-shelf software product. It is about continuously iterating your content strategy and requirements and adjusting your software to meet those demands. Even when selecting a CMS based on a well-designed content model and editorial strategy, the system will need to be customized in the future to keep up with a changing model and evolving requirements. It is impossible to create a ‘perfect’ content model from the start, vocabularies change and organizations’ needs evolve. [L7]