 believes that the current Enterprise Content Management Solutions available are far from adequate. Those that approach the flexibility needed to maintain enterprise sites created to make a company's business effective and efficient require significant programming to integrate into the company's web architecture. This defeats the purpose behind a web content management system; to allow the individuals responsible for the content to be able to publish to the web site without the requirement of a programmer.
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An Enterprise Content Management System should not be designed to eliminate the programmer but to make the best use of the programmer as a resource.
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Currently, if no CMS is in place, the content workflow begins with the contributor. It is emailed through the department for approval without attainable status to where it is within the approval process. Once approved, it is sent to the web developers for conversion to a web document along with content from other departments in the company. The web developers become inundated with change requests.
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Theoretically a content management system will enable a company to meet its business needs without increasing the budget. However, according to Meta Group:
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"Business cases for enterprise content management (ECM) built on time savings for users finding and accessing relevant information are often flawed. In addition to time savings never actually being realized (as productivity gains), the additional effort required by users to apply appropriate categorization, security, and life-cycle management information is often more than four times greater than the savings anticipated. An appropriate ECM strategy will help lower risk, improve cycle times for key business processes, remove geographic dependencies, improve scalability, etc. Therefore, these aspects must be focused on, quantified, and pursued. General productivity benefits are rarely sufficient to sustain long-term executive-level support."
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To take full advantage of many of the off-the-shelf content management systems, the web site architecture has to be modified. This change can be time consuming. A customized content management system takes into account the current architecture, although it may not eliminate the need for some architecture changes to the existing site, can certainly minimize those changes.
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Additionally, many content management systems provide more features than are necessary for the company's business rules. However, because it is an off-the-shelf product, the company cannot choose the features or prioritize when and how they are implemented; in may cases, it is "all or nothing".
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With an customized content management system, a business can choose features it needs and prioritize their importance. This approach will allow a "rolling release" of the system so that it can be put into action while the rest of the features are developed. Best of all, you only pay for the features you need.
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