Anthony Milner

Derek Jardine is tutoring an Enterprise Content Management unit at UTS Sydney this term which is as part of post graduate course in Information Management. He asked me to come in a talk to the class about Web Content Management and to demonstrate the capability of Community Manager.

I agreed and prepared a Powerpoint presentation along with some demos etc…I took my Russian Dell Vostro 1510 notebook [Vostro like Vodka] and arrived early to setup. I hooked up to the projector without a hitch and then connected to the UTS network. That’s when the fun began.

A Juniper Network connection utility was installed in the background and suddenly the Vostro started zooming. Say what! Yes you read it right- zoom. It was as if the man inside the machine had drunk to much Vodka and fell asleep on the mouse.

The desktop….zoomed….[1000%]

Powerpoint…zoomed…[400%]

Explorer and Firefox Zoomed….[1000%]

The students suggested it was my Bluetooth mouse so I unplugged it – no change.

I disconnected from the UTS network – no change

I logged off and back on – It stopped happening.

One student suggested there was a ghost in my notebook.

Actually it felt more like a the zoom ghost of UTS.

Luckily we had a classroom terminal and the presentation was completed without interruption and it went pretty well.

Freakin weird huh…Has anyone experienced anything like this before? Would love to hear from you if you have.

Falkayn pointed me at a Jeffrey Veen article titled “Why Content Management Fails“. Thanks Angus, it’s a thoughtful article and Jeffrey definitely has some serious web 2.0 clout so I had to listen and to be honest I nodded and smiled a lot. Jeffrey argues that the holy grail of decentralised content management is a pipe dream. He suggests that people are creatures of habit and changing their processes to adapt to a CMS seldom happens and in any event the average office worker has no idea about what is essentially an editorial process. It should be noted however that the article was published waaaay baack in 2004. Now this may sound a tad clichéd but 3 years in Internet time is a long, long time. CMS technology has matured markedly and this combined with significant social change has shifted the playing field.

Social change

Gen X and Gen Y have caused a social tipping point. Gen Y is comprised of highly educated internet natives and Gen X are slackers no more. Both groups have serious day jobs, the X-ers have big mortgages and young families and the Y-ers choose who they work for and how long (not the other way round). These young guns understand the web intimately; they grew up with it evolving around them. In fact you could argue that Gen X built the web and Gen Y generates the content. These cohorts will not only expect their workplace to have a CMS they will be extensive users of it.

Technology

Another big improvement since 2004 has been the widespread enterprise adoption of informal content management such as blogging and wikis. The runaway success of these technologies has a lot to do with the ease in which they enable informal information capture and dissemination. Historically the adoption of knowledge management systems in the enterprise has been low and slow because they were just too hard, a simple entry sapped considerable time and to extract info you needed a science degree. The blog is an imperfect solution which works seamlessly with our imperfect human minds. Random ideas, thoughts and processes can be captured and extracted quickly. Folksonomies and tag clouds just make sense and help to highlight at a glance what content exists and what may be important.

Making Good on the Promise

Failed CMS implementations are no longer an option, the success of your business depends on it. As practitioners we need to ensure that our customers are aware of the pitfalls and to help them to navigate their way through to successful CMS implementations. I’d love to hear about your CMS implementation experiences. Whether you’re a developer, project manager, usability consultant or end user drop me note and let me know if your CMS is making good on the promise.