However, this rapid and disruptive shift is causing pain in the CMS community.  CMS providers and their customers spent millions automating, managing, tracking, and publishing “web pages and sites.”   For example, large and powerful CMS providers are struggling to adapt their page + template based products with more flexible publishing systems.  For example, many CMS providers are establishing alliances and partnerships with adaptive/screen scrapping technologies like Usablenet and Netbiscuits.   These technologies focus more on the quick and dirty approach of adapting a website to other devices, while not changing the underlining CMS technology.  This approach works from a pure reach perspective, this mean it will allow these CMS solutions to publish to a vast array of devices, but usually sacrifices  the user experience and perceived speed.   Adaptive technologies are very hard to implement when constructing a very native / dynamic / and-or immersive experiences.  For example, if I want to manage content used within an native iOS, Android, and-or Vizio TV application, it will be very hard or next to impossible to use these solutions.  Its less about the page, more about the content API.  More and more developers are demanding content publishing systems that expose assests via REST Json/XML APIs.  This enables pure content distribution across more devices and channels. It is my opinion, the era of the “CMS template” is becoming less relevant in regards to overall CMS need.  I want my content to be semantic, agile, and portable.  This way I can truly use and publish it anywhere.  Therefore, its less about bake vs. fry, its now about an API.

Putting these factors into consideration,  I have put together some thoughts on how CMS will trend in 2010.

1. Federation over Centralization: I always love the line “the best repositories are the ones you have.”  This is where I see CMS going.  CMS solutions will need to continue to grow in integration capabilities and function as the connective tissue between federated repositories.  The opportunity cost  of moving large legacy  repositories of one format into another centralized CMS is high.  Centralization is an attractive term from a operations management perspective, but most often not technically viable.  Some CMS evangelists always promote centralization and consolidation when it comes to content management practices, but this not really realistic. For example, many companies will continue to leverage different solutions and packages across their CMS stack, these product will continue to need new ways of talking to each other.
2. Cloud Options: With the economic downturn in play, cloud solutions will grow in adoption, especially in Web Content Management + Marketing scenarios.  The cost saving and time to market considerations will provide significant pressure to try out these options.  Many products are looking for examples on how o install and configure their products within Mosso, Amazon EC2, HP, IBM, or other cloud hosting providers.
3. CMS + API + SOA (Rest, JSON, XMPP): Content will need to continually pushed and pulled to and from more sites, channels, and mobile device.  Content will need quick and easy means of integrating into widgets, apps, iphones, android apps, etc.  As a result, APIs and SOA for content services are critical for strategic positioning.
4. WCM + Analytics + Targeting + Testing: WCM will continue to expand into the complete experience around content. Especially how content is performing, targeted, and delivered within experiences across multiple sites and channels.  WCM vendors will continue to acquire and establish partnerships to expand their offerings.
5. Faceted Search: As federation expands, faceted search with grow in importance to search and locate content via filtering and metadata.
6. Open Source will expand: Open source solutions will grow in adoption, especially in social networking and content distribution scenarios.  The adoption of Drupal by the http//www.whitehouse.gov is dispelling the myth that open source cannot scale and provide an enterprise level solutions.

By Matthew Johnson
Senior Technical Architect
Razorfish CMS Center of Excellence
http://www.razorfish.com

As we have seen over the last 5 years, ROI is one of the most important performance measures and justifications of large enterprise CMS projects. The primary measure of CMS performance can no longer be solely based upon efficiency (automation and centralization of content.) Now, “actual content performance” measures the success of a CMS. Content performance relies on how relevant a company’s content is to its target audience/customer base. Continual testing, optimization, and delivery of content are vitally important for companies looking to improve conversion ratios, usability and ROI. It has been proven that small changes can have huge impacts on conversion, sales, etc. Through multivariate testing, companies can quickly identify and adjust content to meet current demands and quickly adopt a test and learn methodology to refine content. However most CMS vendor focus on the repository and display of content, not the complex process of leveraging analytics to refine, adjust and deliver content based on real-time scenarios. Every CMS product on the planet can pretty much do the basic CMS functions (storage, metadata, presentation templates, basic workflow, etc…), however most do not have A/B, multivariate-testing capabilities.

A/B testing: compare two different versions of a page or content location.
Multivariate-testing: simultaneously measures the performance of several content variations on a page.

However, this is all changing, large CMS companies are seeing this capability as a key blue ocean feature. This year Autonomy/Interwoven and Sitecore  added optimization and targeting capabilities to their CMS platforms.  Even Analytics vendors are arming up with this capability; WebTrends acquired Widemile a leading provider of multivariate testing and site optimization technologies and services.

I think the role of a CMS will change to:
1. Repository
2. Management
3. Measure
4. Refine
5. Distribute

A holistic CMS/Targeting solution I believe will give many organizations a competitive advantage in delivering the best in breed content to their targeted audience.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Autonomy Expands into Marketing (arnoldit.com)
• What Web Marketing Strategy Are You Testing Right Now? (marketing.blogtanker.com)
• The Importance of Analytics in User Experience (90percentofeverything.com)
• Webtrends Acquires Testing & Optimization Shop Widemile (readwriteweb.com)
• Webtrends Buys Widemile (xconomy.com)

I just wanted to provide a brief reply to this basic question I get from various clients. Why should I use a CMS? Many clients who are new to CMS/WCM, view the solution as just another repository or database.  I continually get this response, why can’t we just put the content in Oracle, or SQL Server etc… well you can… but that is not the primary objective of a CMS and it will not get you the economies of scale in content management.  A CMS is supposed to enable a “Management System” which involves:

• Operations Management & Governance: (Strategy, Policies, Roles, Responsibilities, Workflow, etc)
• Content Development: (Content Editing, Reuse, Search Engine Optimization, Channel Agnostic and Specialization)
• Content Repository: (Content Storage, Source Code Storage)
• Content Distribution: (Cross Channel / Cross Infrastructure Deployment, Integration Services, Transformation/Template Services)

Many companies jump right into repository and integration mindset.  AKA, how do I store some content and get it onto the site.  Well this is a great idea, but to get value out of a CMS, you must set up the operational infrastructure and governance model to sustain a CMS.  If you focus on repository/integration, you are only solving specific technical problems for most often one defined channel like one web site, not larger scale and business specific operational needs.  Most often this approach involves a reduced set of resources that know how to store and integrate the content for a specific channel.  The result is a CMS that can be leveraged by only a certain subset of resources and then limits the reuse of content.  I do not know how many times I have seen a multi million-dollar CMS implementation that only can be used by 4-5 people and only use 30% of a CMS’s capabilities.

A CMS is supposed to empower your Content Management Model to allow more people to participate in the content process, whether its content production, viewing, reuse, and deployment.  A properly deployed CMS solution will also enhance a short time to market for content integration/distribution into new channels.

Key questions to ask yourself before you begin big CMS projects are:

• Who participates in CMS requirements? (It should not be controlled by IT only)
• Have you developed your Content Types and Content Hierarchies?
• Have you defined your roles and responsibilities (Who are editors, content contributors, QA, support)
• Have do defined your existing workflows and how they can be mapped to a CMS?
• Is you content semantic and portable?
• Are you planning to transform your content so it can be used cross channel?
• Do leverage in context view of content?
• Do you use Data Capture and Presentation layer template technology?

The last decade has been a time of radical change in content ecosystem.  Users used to primarily consumed branded content thru one or few of “on-domain” channels like somecompany.com.  This hub and spoke ecosystem focused on how to lure as many potential or current users to on-domain properties to consume content that conveys the company’s value proposition.  Companies presented online users with emails, micro-sites, and advertising with the goal of getting as many users to click thru into their “walled garden” (large .com sites).  Within these large walled gardens companies could leverage web content management tools to share/distribute large blocks of html and metadata across organizational silos.   However, times have changed, the advent of web 2.0 and social media changed how content is being consumed.  Walled gardens that follow traditional on-domain methodologies are being torn down and in its place are social media, open networks, new aggregators, API frameworks, and widgets.  A critical success factor is no longer based on getting people click thru to on-domain content but how well content has spread virally across the Internet using a channel most relevant to a user.

However, many CMS solutions unintentionally bind content to specific channels of consumption, aka blabla.com.  Content Types created in Interwoven, Drupal, Alfresco, SiteCore, and other products need to be strategically created to anticipate and plan for new and developing channels of content distribution.  Content types needs to house semantic and simple content to alleviate distribution across news sites, facebook, mobile apps/mobile web, and emerging channels like XBoxes, Digital Signage, Set top boxes, podcasts, etc.. I see the issue over and over again, companies create a global content types to meet a current or generalized need and then start up the content production line using dreamweaver or WYSIWYG editors.  Content which looks like it can be reused, cannot be reused because the content types do not provide the metadata, guidelines, governance, structure to give the content agility.  Content should always try to be agnostic of channel.  Content should be so semantic that is can be easily dropped and restyled using CSS or XML transformations.  I can say it over and over again, its all about the content types and their hierarchies.  CMS projects should not always jump straight into technical integration and performance testing.  True performance is how you expand the reach of your content across the web, not drive to a specific site.

In the last 10 years, I have seen a common theme in fortune 500 organizations in regards to Content Management Systems (CMS) and-or Web Content Management (WCM) solutions.  Many CMS projects begin with a misalignment between the objectives of the business (Marketing, Finance, Operations, Silos, Product Groups) and information technology. It is essential that a CMS/WCM solution be started with all parties having common and clear set objects and performance measure for CMS success.  CMS initiatives should always reflect an organizations long term business strategy (Internet, extranet and intranet etc…).  However, more often than not, the CMS reflects a general interpretation of business needs by I.T.  Why would I say this?  To start,  most CMS initiatives begin to assuage a general need across the company.

For Example:

“The business would like shorter time to market for web content change and decrease the need and dependency of resources from I.T.”

“The organization would like to reuse and share content across the organization and gain efficiencies and reduce duplication of effort across departments.”

Do these sound familiar? Well this is common sales pitch for a CMS.  However, these needs are typically paired up with vague performance measures that quickly attempt to define measure for ROI and before you know it, you have a CMS budget and the project begins.

According to Gartner’s atricle “Tactical Guidelines for Narrowing Your Choices When Evaluating WCM Vendors” from December 2008:

1.  More than 65% of the Web Content Management teams were unaware of their organizations’ high-level, nontechnical objectives.

2.  More than 95% of Web Content Management related inquiries involved teams that had not identified specific, measurable metrics for their WCM initiatives.

This research validates my professional experiences and points to an overwhelming trend in companies that enterprise level CMS/WCM projects are executed without clearly identifying the needs/wants of the business and the key performance indicators of success.  In fact, many CMS/WCM projects are designed and executed from a technical point of view within information technology communities. Information Technology groups are measured by ROI of their systems and resources shared across the organization.  I.T. traditionally tries to develop a “general”  CMS solution that can be shared across the organization as to achieve economies of scale in content management and support resources.  For example, many WCM initiatives revolve around solutions that allow business units to leverage

• Generic Presentation Templates for HTML/JSP/ASPX Generation
• Generic Content Types and Metadata
• Generic Tag Libraries or APIs for integration with legacy systems

However, this “one size fits all solutions” directly or indirectly conflicts with the expectations of business units that are moving toward a more segmented/targeted solutions that deal with customers at a more granular level.  Many business units interact with the web and see all the new technologies dealing with Analytics, Segmentation, Targeting, AJAX, Flash, Silverlight, Video, JavaScript, Facebook, Social Media, and RSS. The business units then ask the internal I.T. group on the time and effort required to get these features into the CMS/WCM solutions.  What is the result…. push-back!!!

Why do they get push-back?

• The key performance measures of I.T. conflict with the business needs of the client.
• I.T. focuses on centralization, support, and reuse while the business units wants segmented, targeted, and custom solutions.
• I.T. just spent 2-5 years developing a CMS infrastructure to meet the requirements of five years ago and architecture cannot support current needs that demand quick, agile, custom across multiple distributions channels.
• The current infrastructure is just now getting return on investment and the CTO/CIO are under pressure to squeeze every last dollar out the current infrastructure before significant improvements are made or rebuilt.
• Traditional I.T. projects require 6-12 months before customizations and modifications can be brought online.
• Most enterprise CMS/WCM vendors (Microsoft, Interwoven/Autonomy, FileNet, Documentum, Oracle) move just as slow as internal I.T. organizations in delivering more relevant and rich feature sets to meet current and future needs.  Therefore the CMS vendor architecture itself cannot support the business requirement  (Now I know most vendors will directly disagree with this statement, but its true)
• Due to this push-back, many business units tend to see their internal CMS controlled by I.T. efforts as slow moving, difficult to use, and political.  As a result, we see growth in software and as a service (SAAS) solutions being leveraged by business units, such as marketing, to go around their internal information technology departments.  This is especially prevalent in situations dealing with social media, user submitted content, and moderation.

In order to prevent and-or lessen these issues in regards to CMS initiatives, it is essential to create and develop a cross-department CMS team that has a common set of high level non-technical business objective agreed upon.  These objective must be measurable and have specific targets to measured against.  Once done, technology and business will be on common ground for successful cross-organization CMS experience.

2009 Trends in Content Management

The world of content management is ever changing in the digital world, especially in enterprise scenarios.  To start off, we at razorfish though we’d look at some important trends in 2009 that are sure to make for an exciting year in content management.

Move from decoupled to coupled

One key element around CMS is whether to leverage a decoupled CMS (e.g. Interwoven, Documentum) vs a tightly coupled CMS (such as Tridion, SiteCore and Vignette). In the last couple of years, we have seen a stronger trend towards more tightly coupled CMS. A couple reason for this exist:

Personalization and targeting is becoming a standard requirement for many web sites. As a result, instead of a page centric model, a more component / module centric model is more applicable. This requires a different delivery model, as well as a different administration view.

• Social capabilities are becoming an integral aspect of the overall content management ecosystem.
• In-context editing is a key requirement to support a component view of content. In addition, in-context editing is crucial to increase adoption.

As a result, vendors like Interwoven have developed additional modules that provide dynamic editing and delivery capabilities such as LiveSite and Targeting to address the market place needs.

The CMS becomes social

The focus of traditional CMS software packages has primarily been content. However, the social use of a CMS has grown in importance. It is not just about content, a CMS is starting to play an important role around communication, conversation and collaboration. All these elements need to be tightly integrated with the content itself.

This place a more important emphasis on capabilities such as:

• blogging
• commenting
• discussion
• feedback
• ratings
• collaboration
• filtering
• rating

In addition, content is being distributed, and capabilities around sharing, RSS, email and social network integration and other related areas become must haves.

A development community is becoming an important selection criteria for a CMS platform

Especially around the social capabilities, innovation happens quickly. Social networking platform vendors like Facebook add new capabilities like Facebook connect, new tools like Twitter are coming to the forefront. As a result, the community that exists around a CMS platform is becoming more important, as it becomes a differentiator in how quickly you can adapt to these new trends. It drives the release of new plugins or modules.

For example, the wordpress community is very active, and new plugins with new capabilities are released on an almost daily.

Cloud computing further drives Open Source CMS adoption

Cloud computing has been gaining traction in the last year. Computing power can be ordered online cheaply, and without contracts. As a result, Open Source CMS technologies that are aligned with cloud computing has gained more traction. The benefits of using Open Source platforms like Drupal or WordPress are:

• No license restrictions. Licensing and cloud computing do not combine well. Many licenses are sold on a CPU or server basis, and in a cloud environment, this license is not valid any more.
• Cloud environments provide agility. It is easy to establish an environment. This applies to many open source CMS tools as well. A reasonably capable CMS can be installed and up and running within a matter of hours.

Ownership of content management is shifting from IT to Marketing

With improved analytics and richer consumer interactions with well-targeted audiences and market segments, changes are being made more frequently. As a result, marketing departments are seeking more control for managing content, as well as the overall web site experience. This requires more flexible and agile CMS solutions. This enabled by two parallel trends:

• Service oriented architectures allow for further decoupling of a web experiences from transactional enterprise capabilities. As a result, the web experience can evolve faster.
• CMS solutions have become more turnkey, and richer in capabilities. Changes require IT involvement less often
• Marketing departments have become more web and technology savvy

Content re-use is dead

A few years ago, a main focus areas for CMS systems was to enable content re-use. This focus has shifted towards content distribution and RSS, and enabling re-use at a delivery point instead of enabled within a content management system

Over the past 15 years, content management has grown and evolved across organizations.   Content Management Systems (CMS) are now shifting from a product driven solution owned by technology departments to a mission critical digital communication system used by marketing and business units to directly execute on initiatives.  CMS has grown from document and web management of the late 1990s to a series of tools and processes of today to manage and distribute content across the web via blogs, twitter, social media, web-sites, email, mobile, etc.

Why do Content Management System projects cause so much pain in Enterprise Scenarios?

Large-scale CMS initiatives commonly fail to meet the short and long run expectations of business users.   Expectations usually revolve around the establishment of a simple, efficient, powerful, and relevant content management process (or content management framework).  This content management process will provide the enterprise with the operational tools to quickly create and deploy professional, high quality, and rich digital content.  However, many CMS solutions engender low satisfaction rates due to a discrepancy between what business users want and what they get.  A CMS will only deliver the promised business value when attention is paid to the non-technical issues of governance.

What do users want?

Efficient and intuitive ways to quickly add, update, share, re-use, and deploy large quantities of content across various distribution channels.   These channels consist of various online B2B, B2C, and B2E properties, which include web sites, micro-sites, widgets, mobile applications, extranets, intranets, blogs, email, and traditional media (e.g. print brochures or direct mail).

What do they get?

An expensive, complicated, often confusing content repository that is perceived to be out-of-date with current trends.  The very reasons for adoption of the content management system–decreasing time to market, increasing efficiency, and improving content agility are often the criteria the implementation fails to meet.  Many large-scale CMS solutions become rigid, creating operational and technical bottlenecks.

Governance is the Foundation of Successful Content Management

Why do most organization fail to get what they want out of a CMS? A majority of CMS initiatives are executed without proper governance models being established prior to product selection.  A majority of CMS initiatives prematurely dive straight into technical design and development, with the project leads hoping that the CMS software product’s features and capabilities will solve operational requirements.   More often than not, internal organizational pressure to deliver on time and to limit political discussions on content ownership, accountability, process, and cross-departmental collaboration cause governance model definition activities to be shortened or skipped.

In my experience across many Fortune 100-500 organizations, either external technical consultants or internal technology departments have defined and driven CMS initiatives.  Technology consultants seem to be the logical choice and are selected for their subject matter expertise and proven experience with delivering various product driven CMS solutions.   These subject matter experts quickly conduct interviews, assessments, requirements, and detailed designs over a typical project duration of 6-12 months.  In theory, these tasks are used to identify the strategic short- and long-term content management needs of the organization.   However, most of the time, these consultants are placed into situations where the client organization has limited or no expertise in operations management of large-scale cross-channel content repositories.  Business users and leadership typically do not have professional backgrounds in periodicals, journals, magazines, and newspapers.  These content-based industries are accustomed to the requirements and demands of effectively managing content assets, and have gained experience with the fundamentals of content management governance.

But most organizations are new to content management.  They do not have specific departments, roles, goals, and metrics directly tied to content production, oversight, and publishing.  This situation creates a significant gap for CMS design and implementation projects, since the core problem is a missing set of processes, operational guidelines, and skill sets, not just the need for a good tool.    Technology consultants are typically skilled in information and software architecture of various CMS platforms, but not in operations modeling and governance.  This results in a solution being designed from a primarily technical point of view and not specifically designed to meet the needs of a business user and their operational environment.

A governance model is essential for enterprise-wide content management initiatives that cross organizational boundaries and involve large numbers of employees and projects.  Successful content management solutions are driven by governance–that is, by people working together—not by technology.  Operational problems emerge from failures in day-to-day decisions about how content will be managed, as well as unclear assignment of roles and responsibilities.  The decentralized nature of many enterprise content management systems often leads to lack of clear ownership, inconsistencies in use, duplication of efforts, and strong dependencies on technical resources.

What are the benefits of a strong governance model for content management? Strong governance provides an operational and content centric foundation that facilitates growth, increases quality, and improves collaboration across organizational boundaries.  The end result is content that is more customer/user centric, better managed and maintained.   The sections below break down various strategic and significant areas that are affected by governance.  Each section explains the current state on many organizations and their problems, followed by a summary of a future state that can be achieved once a governance model has been established.

Benefits of Governance and CMS

The sections below break down various strategic and significantbusiness areas that are affected by governance.  Each section explains the current state on many organizations and their problems, followed by a breakdown of a future state once a governance model has been established.

Governance and Strategic Alignment

Current State

• No clear alignment of the organization’s various content owners with brand’s strategic direction
• No set governance body to administer  content and terms of use across channels
• Low awareness of content inventory by other departments (Marketing, Public Relations, Finance, Accounting, Digital Agencies, Advertising Agencies)

Future State

• Clearly defined objectives and alignment with strategic directions and goals of the organization and brand
• Clear governance structure, roles and responsibilities regarding content management
• Clear ownership and accountability for various content assets

Content Creation and Editing

Current State

• Ad hoc and unstructured – leading to duplicate content, inaccurate, out-of-date, or conflicting content
• Technology, vendor, or product specific processes that may not be adopted by the business users at all – because real-life work environments, workflows, resource allocations/skillsets and training needs have not been taken into account

Future State

• In-depth planning and scoping
• Standardized yet customized processes and workflows across the organization and external vendors
• Faster time-to-market of relevant and fresh content

Content Quality and Compliance

Current State

• Technology-driven structure of content directories, taxonomies, metadata, content types, and authoring interfaces
• Inconsistencies in content across channels and organizational units
• Inconsistencies in terms of use and presentation of content across channels
• Content that does not communicate current branding or align with messaging
• Duplication of content and efforts across the organization
• Non­compliance of content with organization guidelines

Future State

• User-friendly and business-driven content type definitions, taxonomies, and metadata that can be shared and re-used across business units, for greater adoption
• Content alignment with segmentation, brand, and organizational messaging
• Greater consistencies in use of content across channel
• Consolidated, streamlined, and up to date content
• Delivery of a more a consistent user experience
• Compliance with organization standards (such as legal requirements, messaging, branding, accessibility)

Organizational Awareness

Current State

• Lack of awareness of content life-cycle process
• No proper process for creating and updating content
• Lack of awareness of responsibilities and requirement for maintaining content
• Lack of promotional calendar/ lack of awareness regarding how to market and promote content to targeted channels, customers, partners, and other departments

Future State

• On­going communication and collaboration among business units, partners, and other organizational departments
• On­going communication and liaising with agencies on roles and responsibilities
• Higher quality online and offline content distribution channels via structured and operationally efficient content management

Building a governance model

Goal Setting

Once an organization has identified developed a general content management strategy and vision, it’s imperative to then define a set of specific that address governance needs.  These goals typically include the following:

• Create a process that improves time-to-market of new and existing content
• Create a formal decision-making process that is accountable, strategic, rational, balanced, and consistent
• Provide the organization with a framework to identify, prioritize and manage content modifications and enhancements
• Establishes a vehicle for communication regarding content management up, down and across the organization
• Enable the sharing of content and resources across the organization
• Create an organizational body that can oversee “shared-cost” investments and avoid duplicative work

It is important that these goals are communicated and aligned to business needs.  Executive sponsors must clearly dictate their definition of a goal and their expectations from each department to properly align objectives across organizational boundaries.  In enterprise situations, where different organizational units have vastly different priorities, objectives, and performance measures, it is essential that a clearly defined goal be presented to all stakeholders.

For example, the needs and wants of technology and business units can be in direct conflict.  Technology departments often focus their goals around centrally-controlled solutions that maximize return on investment and closely align with specific architecture and resourcing guidelines that were establish months to years before a CMS project was initiated.  The systems and processes that technology groups deem acceptable may be in direct conflict with the operational needs of business units.  Once a common set of goals are agreed upon in definition and scope, the cross-organizational units will be on common ground to participate in the design and development of a governance model that supports content management.

Governance Structures

When it comes to governance, there are many of operational/reporting structures that an organization can adopt.  These can include:

1. Hierarchical

Hierarchical Structure is based on the concepts of division of labor, specialization, and unity of command. In the context of CMS, key content decisions and approvals are made at the top and filter down through the organization. Middle content managers, writers or content contributors do the primary production and deployment of content to various channels. Middle manager then communicate up to their superiors the outcomes and request approvals for publication and deployment.  However deep and nested hierarchies can impede leadership’s access to how content is being written and used across the organization. This results in leadership that does not understand strategic makeup and uses of content across the channels. Technology is typically used to support, store, and communicate content requests along the lines of the hierarchy and to support/supplement the content management procedures

2. Flat

Within a flat structure, content decisions are centralized and-or decentralized at an individual level.   Individuals or groups are empowered to do what needs to be done with regards to content creation and approval.  This structure can respond quickly to content needs, especially in highly dynamic and uncertain environments.  However, the flat structure often impedes long term growth and achieving economies of scale in content management.  Routine technology work is often done by the individuals themselves or off-loaded to external resources.

3. Matrixed

A matrixed structure typically assigns content resources two or more business units in an effort to integrate and cross pollinate content across organizational silos.   Matrix structures often fail due to resources not having the tools, policies, and procedures required to meet high demands of their customers within the organization.

Each structure has its pros and cons when it comes to CMS.   However, an organization is not restricted to use just one structure within its governance model.  All structures need to grow and change due to growth and environmental changes in business.  It is beneficial to design a structural roadmap that outlines how the CMS units will evolve.  It is beneficial to start simple, small, centralized, flat, and then evolve into structure that is aligned with demand and needs.  There is no right answer in selecting a governance structure, but is essential that the organization assesses the current environment,  but also anticipates hot content growth will affect it resources and policies.

Identify Roles and Responsibilities

Within large companies, perhaps the hardest and most time-consuming task required for defining a governance model is the assignment of roles and responsibilities.  The goal of this task is to plan and assign the activities for day-to-day operations and maintenance of content and content consumers.  A key component of this process is to assign ownership and authority.  This is easier said than done in large companies.   Although many large companies seek to encourage easy interaction and coordination across business units and reporting hierarchies, the boundaryless (open door policy) organization hasn’t truly materialized for most.   Many organizations still continually struggle with accountability and ownership.

Due to this fact, many CMS solutions retreat into a silo model, where a generic “self service” content management system is established. Content silos create an overall environment that suffers from duplication of work and poor cohesion of content.  Each silo often becomes a general dumping ground of content.  In turn, the user experience of customers and business users diminishes as they become confused due to sheer volume of content and inconsistencies.

What are the signs of a self-service/silo model?   Usually the organization has established a central CMS repository controlled by information technology.  Each business unit can optionally sign up and be allocated a folder within the CMS system that is under the business unit’s control.   These business units are basically delivered a password and generic web site template.  The business users then proceed to struggle with the “now what?” question and continually call IT for help.

Within the enterprise, content traditionally has numerous layers of oversight across departments, each of which participates in clearing and approving content for consumption across online and offline channels.   This causes an issue when identifying ownership and accountability.  If the organization leans more towards consensus in governance, rather than ownership, accountability, and leadership from the top down, then  the scenario where nobody can agree so nobody makes a decision is unfortunately quite common.  This usually creates a level of organizational paralysis in regards to content management.

Who is the “editor in chief”?

While content ownership is often distributed among many departments, it is important to ensure that definitive ownership of the content resides with one individual.  Figuratively, this resource will serve as the organization’s editor in chief. The editor in chief is the overall executive with CMS subject matter expertise and has the final authority and responsibility for the enforcement of content procedures and policies.  This executive role maintains a macro-level view of the content, the content’s purpose, and its use.  The editor in chief will provide guidance to the content owners, enforce the governance model, and act as the decision-maker.   This role prevents organizational paralysis and serves as the overall “tiebreaker” where disagreements arise.  With a clear chain of command, the governance model will be efficient and clear, helping to create an environment with a higher probability of success.

Once the editor in chief role is established, oversight committees should be established up to report to the editor in chief.  Oversight committees will be needed to handle the economies of scale in CMS issues across the organization and to ensure consistent and relevant policies, information, and tools are effectively delivered to the various business units..

Once a clear line of executive ownerships has been established, the definition and management of the roles, responsibilities, and user experience associated with each CMS stakeholder and user (departments, partners, etc.) is critical to success.  It is extremely difficult to identify and change the processes-workloads of resources throughout the organization.   Executives must continually resist and prevent technology from driving the identification and establishment of procedures for managing content.  The organization should leverage existing operational workflows in approval and editorial procedures.  This will ensure the organization will always have a clear definition of governance and content management procedures.

To put it into perspective, if the business owners have a clear governance model for their management of content, then they do not have to worry about a CMS server outage or disaster recovery scenario.  The organization will have the fundamentals of a content management process to rely on and continually operate.  A CMS software solution should enhance an organization’s existing content management process – not take the place of people and processes that work.

If the introduction of a CMS and the roles assigned to business departments and/or individuals represents a substantial departure from business-as-usual, buy-in from executive sponsors and revision of job descriptions will be necessary in order to properly support content management.  It is critical to develop and maintain a clear communications plan toward the goals and objectives of enterprise content management.  This will not only keep the engagement on track, but also get critical buy-in from users and stakeholders.

Establish Policies and Procedures

The next step in governance model planning is the establishment of content management policy and procedures.

Common activities include:

Policy

• Determine which policies are decided at the Enterprise, Unit and Individual levels
• Develop a security/permissions model that implements the content administration model
• Develop staffing plans to support both the content and technical processes
• Content Authoring and Publishing Procedures
• Determine content approval workflows for various content types
• Develop a site administration model that covers the content
• Cross-Organizational Knowledge Sharing
• Develop processes for the creation and management of knowledge sharing communities
• Tech Support
• Develop development processes for ongoing enhancement of the platform functionality
• Develop a model that covers the various page types, functionality and user administration of the site

Identify Content Distribution and Analytics Strategies

A key aspect to building a successful and future oriented CMS process in understanding how organizations what to use and track content.  If organization identifies these channels of distribution early, it can proactively address governance and operating structures needed to the address the operational requirements to support these scenarios.   For example, content can now be distributed via:

• Traditional Web Sites
• Email
• Micro-Sites
• Wikis
• Widgets
• Blogs
• Social Media (Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc)
• Micro Blogs (Twitter)
• RSS
• Flash
• Mobile Browser
• Mobile Applications (Apple iPhone App Store, Google Android Marketplace, Blackberry Marketplace)
• APIs

Many of these new web 2.0 content distribution scenarios demand quick and almost real-time approval and production scenarios.  Hierarchy driven content management systems allow for significant lag between when content is produced and when it is deployed into the wild.  However new content distribution mediums can create havoc within most large organizations.  Many organizations do not have operational readiness to quickly  establish flat and decentralized systems where low to mid level resources have direct control over what can immediately be posted to a blog or wiki.  In order to be successful in CMS and governance, an organization must proactively address these common questions:

Legal: How can the legal department handle the bandwidth to approve every blog, wiki, social media and twitter posting?
Accountability: How can our current hierarchy handle content quick approvals?  Who should have the authority to create these types of content?
Collaboration: Who owns the blog, wiki, etc ? (Marketing, IT, Oversight )
Support: Who will support the blog, wiki, etc ? What are he service level requirements we need?

Sample Governance Model

Content Management Leadership Committee

• Headed by editor in chief
• Provides strategic direction setting for enterprise content and the development of a content management process/framework
• Approval authority for content polices where there is a significant policy impact at a cross organizational or company level

Content Management Department or (CMS Dept.)

• Reports into the Content Management Leadership Committee
• Provide content policy direction and management procedures
• Provides content management and content production expertise
• Collaborates with various cross-department stakeholders and experts to develop a content management framework
• Content Management Teams or Focus Groups

Reports up into CMS Department

• Applies policies of the content management framework defined by CMS department
• Manage specific content verticals in collaboration with organizational units
• Members may consist of subject matter experts from other units or divisions (Strategists, Writers, Designers, Developers)
• Provides content and technical assistance on CMS framework (Content Production, Approval, Sharing, Distribution)

In conclusion, the design and development of a governance model that support content management roles, responsibilities and activities drastically improves the probability of success in the adoption of content management system.