Hi Holly, most have been said, but politics apart I would like to provide some additional information both from the technical and process management point of view.
1) Technical - System admins are responsible for the behavior and reliability of a system. Depending on the workflow modeling abilities provided by Stellent CMS (I have no experience with it) there is at least one important issue that contributes to ill behaviors and technical instability of a system - Workflow Changes and its impact on the state values of information and attached automatic electronic processes. Stating a new workflow is not difficult, the problem is the collateral technical impact after it as been established when changes occur. For instance if you remove a Workflow Activity that changes on a state of a peace of information, mean that that information will no longer assume that state. 1) If one process such as sending an email to the customer or pushing that information to an external system relies on that state to be activated, that process will no longer happen. 2) If a workflow is in process what happens to the data that relies on the workflow being changed? Should it be discarded? Should the system wait until the all processes defined by the workflow finish processing? Does Stellent provide point and click facilities to deal with this? 3) What happens to the data that relied on the previous workflow (changed workflow)? Yes, because according to the new workflow their states can be inconsistent (What is the established procedure). 4) What happens with the Audit Trails? 5) etc. Depending on the manner Stellent deals with these issues and the features (Wizards) that they provide business users to act on it may mandate a further technical expertise that process owners usually lack (but might not be the case). 2) Process - Process owners are responsible for process optimizations. Process optimizations usually require changes on the workflow. To depend on the IT department to implement optimizations is less then desired. But then again you have probably chosen the CMS that you wanted. One usually point of compromise is to allow the process owners to establish roles (attached to workflow activities and workflow administration) and assign people to those roles. After all the workflow does not change its morphology, only human agents are defined (This is usually mandatory for a process owner). On the other hand let the admin work with the process owner to correctly map changes to technology. People might argue that this can provide security liability witch is "rubbish" in my view. After all you have the audit trail and electronic signatures that can actually expose miss conduct (depends on the Stellent features). If you do not have those facilities then yes security may be compromise, but that is what policies are supposed to solve. But note this could be all unnecessary if eventually the CMS provided flexible and easy to use workflow setup mechanisms that go further then showing a workflow graph and defining activities, and then yes, it would be simply political issue. But then again assuming that the Stellent CMS is not well understood both by technical people and process owners is best that knowledge transfer go in two stages. First let Admins understand the implications with supervision of some process owner mandate (Web engineer within the payroll of process owners). Second, see what can be done and transfer responsibilities gradually. If done otherwise I suspect that correct adoption of the system might take longer or maybe not depending on the technical abilities of within the intervenient business departments and the IT Admins commitment to its success. There is more to be said but then again I need to make a living :) Best regards, Nuno Lopes Independent Consultant. PS: Brendan's advice is to be followed strictly. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:cms-list-admin@;cms-list.org] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: quarta-feira, 13 de Novembro de 2002 15:27 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [cms-list] workflow best practices My company is about to install Stellent. We're in the process of mapping out roles and responsibilities for use of the tool. My area is the web programming area. We create all of our corporate web sites. It's our opinion that we should have the role of creating content workflows within the system. But our server administration area believes their role should be to create workflows. For anyone who is on the development end of websites, it, of course, seems silly that server admins would be involved in a business process they are so far removed from. But it is becoming a very huge battle. So I'm looking for any documentation on workflow best practices, or just general best practices for CMS roles and responsibilities. (We feel we should have admin rights, but our server area wants to control that role.) If anyone knows a URL, has some documentation, or has old war wounds, I would love to hear from you. Thanks in advance. Holly Boelter [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice/Fax: 651.662.1651 Pager: 651.629.8282 Email text pages: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The information contained in this communication may be confidential, and is intended only for the use of the recipient(s) named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication, or any of its contents, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please return it to the sender immediately and delete the original message and any copy of it from your computer system. 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