As the recent poster notes, this isn’t a new article, but it stands out as a really useful overview of the key issues, and your experience of actual client work is clearly evident (not always true in these days of over-the-top self-promotion). I really appreciate how your approach is technology-agnostic as well: so much is written with specific systems in mind, or as a promotional tactic by CMS vendors.

It’s interesting how the pendulum seems to swing between control and devolution, with CMS/Editorial/Content teams re-tooling (growing or shrinking, narrowing or widening skill-sets and roles) with surprising predictability.

I think the centralized approach can work well when the website small to medium size (say up to 5,000 pages). In the case of large sites (over 20,000 pages) and complex organizations, CMS/Content teams tend to groan under a punishing maintenance workload (true of a client I’m working with now).

For these companies, some form of devolved publishing seems unavoidable as a coping strategy. The key challenge is to create a supportive environment for distributed teams, and as non-disfunctional a relationship as possible between them and a Quality Assurance team charged with maintaining standards through periodic reviews, spot checks and a rolling program of training and support.

So, it’s true that the technology-led approach doesn’t succeed very often, largely because implementing governance is a people problem, as your article makes clear. It’s all about changing the culture.

Thanks again for writing this – it’s helped me refine some of my own thinking, and you can’t ask anything more from a blog post.

Cheers,
James

Good stuff.