Adam Gaffin wrote: > > <snip, CM questionaire> > > I like the idea of the questionnaire, but do have > some comments on your assumptions.
Ditto. I also like the idea of the questionaire, but I also want to underscore the importance of some of Adam's comments about a CM tool "helping" and not "providing". Most CM tools can "help manage", but they are poor at directly or indirectly "providing" *content*. Unless you consider "publishing" to be "providing" content? I don't... that's publishing, a manipulation activity, which puts it in the "management/handling" category and not the "creation" category. > > H1: The type of CMS will influence the > > quality of the content. Companies without a CMS > > produce poorer quality content than companies > > that do have a CMS. > > I think this depends on whether or not content is > the company's main product or what your definition > of "quality" is. Agree with Adam again. If you're talking "quality", you're in a world of subjective pain. Measurable, but very expensive to measure, and you'll still have a high degree of error. If you use the word "consistency" instead of "quality", though, then that seems reasonable. > > H4: Larger numbers of non-technical contributors > > of content will negatively affect the quality of > > content. The impact will be more severe for > > companies that do not employ a CMS. > > > > <snip, any other hypotheses using the word, > > "quality"> Same problem. I'm not convinced you can prove *anything* regarding CMS correlation to "quality". If you *did* find a correlation, I would find it highly suspect (before accepting the premise, I'd want *lots* of supporting information, beyond the initial questionaire). I want to echo Adam's thoughts again because I think they are so very relevant: > I dunno. Shakespeare managed to turn out some > pretty high-quality content without access to a > CMS. I'm not trying to be flip (well, not too > much), but it really seems as if you've decided > that the technology is more important than the > content. I'd argue the opposite: It's the > content that really matters. Technology may help > improve the delivery of content; it may even > help people improve the quality of the content, > but ultimately, the technology exists to serve > the content. And ultimately, content is, for the > most part, written by "non-technical" people. > <snip> I work in a *lot* of environments, from very non-technical people to *very* technical people. They all have a Universal Problem: Sooner or later, they *all* lose content about as fast as they create it. Nearly every organization gets to this stage. That's when a CMS is *supposed* to make a difference: You're less likely to lose stuff as you get more stuff (you can keep more stuff). Programmers have an old saying, "When the cost of re-creating the thing is *lower* than the cost of *finding* the thing, ALL HOPE OF REUSE IS LOST". I think that applies equally well to content management (I've been studying a tremendous number of similarities between the industries lately). A "good" CMS enables re-use. Above all, that's its primary purpose, IMHO. It may also encourage people to document something they would not otherwise document, or review/edit something they would not otherwise review/edit, but that's only at the "Nirvana" level when you get a user-interface that's more fun to play with than a night out on the town. However, more realistic "side-effects" indicating a particularly good fit of a given CMS to a given environment would more likely be consistency of presentation, enabling alternative target publication medias, the ability to "know" what content existed on a given date, the ability to "roll back to" content from a previous date, ease-of-reformatting, etc. The *biggest* source of noise to results from your questionaire, IMHO, will be that (as Adam says), a CMS that "didn't fit" is WAY worse than no CMS at all. That will screw up any trends you might find. Unless you can measure the "quality of CMS fit" to each site responding to the questionaire, and disqualify the poor ones, I'd say you're toast. Yes, I know that the "quality of fit" is its own (large) new world open for exploration. (sorry). OTOH, if you pursued any correlation between the survey respondants that do/don't utilize CMS and the volume of content they manage, I'd be highly interested. I'd think that can be done quite well (with the one problem that companies drowning in content will self-select themselves to deploy a CMS). Just my thoughts. --charley [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
