George Siemens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi...I've posted an intro article on CM: > http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/contentmanagement.htm > > I'd appreciate any feedback or suggestions. I'd like to use it as a > framework for pitching a formal CMS initiative at our college.
Currently I'm developing a presentation for my organization which is tentatively titled "What a CMS is and Why You Should Care", so I've been tackling the same sort of problem myself. I have no particular criticism of the meat of your article; what you have to say about CMS's seems all very well. But your presentation of that information is overwhelmingly abstract. I have found that the sticking point in trying to sell people (even techies) on CMS's is that they are so hard to comprehend, in even the broadest sense, if one has no prior experience thinking about the separation of content from format, etc. People need examples, to begin thinking about these things. I think this is even more critical when one is trying to convince someone that there is a problem which your proposed solution addresses. In many organizations, the people who authorize the expenditures have little to no awareness of the issues confronting their "content wranglers", who all to often are at the bottom levels of the corporate hierarchy. The people who decide on infrastructure initiatives are not directly exposed the chaos of trying to manage content without any system, so they are not aware that they have a problem. This is -- astonishingly -- an issue even in small companies, or ones with very flat hierarchies. In an effort to impress their bosses, many webmasters or content developers outright conceal that chaos; after all, they don't want to be thought of as poorly organized. I do not know if you will be pitching to an audience which is aware of having a problem or not. I know that I'm pitching to an audience which is just now becoming aware of the issues, in a hazy way. I see my first task to be convincing the relevant management of the legitimate problems before their development/maintenance/content staff, especially as some of these projects scale up dramatically. The next task is getting them to comprehend what a CMS is and can be. Only then will I have a hope of extracting user requirements from the various departments which will have to share this system. I see it as informing their imaginations. Many of these managers, even the ones aware of the problems before their web staff, not being techies, have never imagined such as thing as a CMS. They've never thought about their "business process" (a phrase which is almost taboo, here in .edu-land) and what their workflow is, and certainly never asked themselves "how might I model this in software?" -- Vanessa Layne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Web Toolsmith TERC * 2069 Massachusetts Ave. * Cambridge, MA * 617 547-0430 -- http://cms-list.org/ more signal, less noise.
