In preparation for the web content management session at our upcoming Aarhus 09 conference, I’ve been thinking about the many significant unsolved challenges facing WCM. I often talk to buyers, and it is clearly still the case that project failures are far too common. Even those happy with their projects or perhaps even happy with their vendor are facing big problems, with issues such as performance, usability or migration to name but a few. Ask those paying the invoices and they will undoubtedly agree that the web content management sphere is in dire need of improvements.
Thus far, web content management has been an industry obsessed with technology and with an agenda set by vendors. While the rest of the world focus on getting their projects to run smoothly or quite simply on surviving the current financial climate, WCM vendors are generally doing very well financially. Perhaps customers should explore ways of tying payments to actual project success?
Perhaps we need to look beyond the day-to-day issues and rethink web content management entirely if we are to make progress?
My 2 fellow session speakers and I have agreed to use #fixwcm as our Twitter hashtag to prepare for the conference session and you can see a tweet from the discussion below:
My co-presenter, Jon Marks from LBi has already shared his thoughts: Let’s #fixwcm Before The Wheels Come Off
Whether you can make it to Aarhus or not, I invite you to participate in the discussion, either by tweeting or posting a comment a below. If you have the time, we’ll be showing a live stream from Twitter at the session on Wednesday at 10:30 – 12:00 Danish time (GMT+1).
David Hobbs November 2nd, 2009 15:40
In photography, most of the focus is on the cameras, when things like photographic vision and lighting are far more important (blog post forthcoming on this comparison!). To be more precise, the focus is on specs and not on actual handling.
I would propose that the same thing is happening in the WCM space. With all the focus on features, there is less focus on much less interesting things like actual site implementation success
. Coming up with consistent terminology / architectural models for WCMs would also help, so that it was easier to even have discussions about the differences between CMSes (with less hand-waving).
I think more focus on how to successfully implement / migrate CMSes would be useful as an industry, mostly from a process perspective.
Persuasive Content | Does WCM Really Need a Fix? November 5th, 2009 15:40
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