CM Realities

Customers come to industry conferences to have "experts" tell them what they should be doing.  I wish more of these "experts," including industry analysts and vendors, came to these shows to listen to what is actually happening.  In the race to be "in the lead" these experts have a tendency to put "should be" so far out in front of "is" that it becomes impossible to sort best practice from wishful thinking.

Case in point.  Over the course of the show last week, I spoke at length with several customers using a variety of different content management systems.  A sampling of the problems they were most concerned about:

• Over customization - many struggled with problems stemming from massive customization of their system.  Performance problems from improper (or sometimes proper but heavy) use of APIs, deployment, and upgrades were all impacted adversely. Yet, only this customization allowed their CMS to meet the core needs of their business, so they were trapped.
• Usability - another variation on our running theme that business units aren't really sure what they want out of their CMS.  No matter what the implementation team seemed to build, the business unit found it too difficult to use or train users on.  Part of this was an arms race.  As heavy users were appeased, casual users were disaffected.
• Cost of maintaining the solution - this is NOT the same as merely the cost of vendor maintenance fees, but rather the cost of keeping the solution running well, up to date with business requirements, generating worthwhile and measurable business returns, keeping technical and business staff trained, and so on.

What is striking, is how far away these topics are from the hot button issues that the experts want to talk about.  Yes, these customers were aware of all the "shoulds" they had not gotten to yet.  They seemed embarrassed to admit they had dozens of different content management systems.  These were Global 2000 companies for which the Enterprise Content Management value proposition  should long ago have helped them reign in the chaos down to the proverbial "three or four major systems" that the experts show during ECM strategy consulting sessions.  But they just weren't concerned about how ugly their systems looked on a white board.  They would be happy if the systems they already had could simply deliver anything commensurate with what had been invested in them. Yet if you were to peruse the sessions, articles and reports coming from the community of experts these days, few deal with these "everyday" topics. 

Now, don't get me wrong.  These shows are still tremendously valuable to customers and vendors.  There are years of experience built into every presentation.  Content Management Strategies in particular is a great close-knit show where you can get into one-on-one discussions easily.  But here's an idea for the rest of the shows coming up this spring season; for just one session, turn the projector around and have the panel of experts sit and listen to the audience for a couple of hours.