Why Content Management?: Part Two

The Brook Group Content Management System Value on Investment series is a set of brief discussions about the issues faced by organizations that introduce content management systems into their Web publishing operations. To learn more about content management consultations, and Tacklebox, Brook Group’s award-winning CMS, contact Brook Group at 410-465-7805, or info@brookgroup.com.

Why Content Management?

The elevator doors open, and the CEO is standing inside, alone. You smile, get in, and the doors close. After a moment of staring up at the floor numbers, the CEO asks what you’re working on, and you answer that you’re evaluating Web content management systems. The CEO’s brows knit. “Why do we need a Web content management system?”

Can you answer that question in a sentence or two? It’s a question that causes many of our new CMS clients some stumbling and muttering. They know that they have issues with their current Web publishing process, but as often as not, part of the journey of CMS assessment is to find the value that a CMS can bring.

Organizations often are frustrated by the difficulty of showing measurable return on their Web investments. For many it is a cost center, and even though it has clear marketing and PR value, as a corporate communications vehicle, the operational cost of maintaining a high quality, up-to-date site can be great.

That is where the value of content management systems lie. They address some fundamental operational issues that plague most HTML sites. This paper is not designed to give you a nifty elevator speech for the CEO, but it can help you identify aspects of one of those key issues: bringing what we call Quality Content to your site.

Quality Content

The goal of every organizational Web site is to marry an efficient publishing operation with compelling and reliable presentation. On the back end, the content needs to be authored by the right people, approved by the appropriate entities, and since the Web is a corporate publication, fully auditable.

On the front end, content must be delivered on time, whether that is immediately upon creation or scheduled for delivery at a specified time. It must be authored by content experts and consistently presented in accord with organizational brand standards.

These attributes describe quality content. Content management supports these attributes in a number of ways, each of which provides real value on investment.

The Right People

In a traditional HTML-based Web shop, there are the content creators and the Web team. Content is generated throughout the organization. Product information, marketing or public relations materials, legal disclaimers, corporate policy statements, news…content can arise from any part of the organization. Ironically, the one entity that is responsible for formatting and placing that content online – the Web team – is frequently not actually an original content creator. This separation of content creation – and content ownership – from the people responsible for publishing the content, often results in tension between the Web team and content creators. The Web team feels that they are a service organization trying to juggle a large amount of conflicting priorities, while the content owners feel that they lose control of their core work product, handing it off to techies who do not really understand it.

The Web team feels overworked and underappreciated. In addition to managing the content tasks associated with publishing, they are constantly developing, testing, and troubleshooting the technical aspects of the site, from HTML to scripting to FTP to server and networking issues. The content owners feel that the publishing process places their core work product in the hands people without the experience, inclination, or sense of priority that will result in that content being handled appropriately.

This is the Webmaster Bottleneck.

A key benefit of content management systems is that they restore balance to the publishing equation. They break the bottleneck by separating technology from content.

Content owners and Web team members who have a real feel for content can use the CMS toolset to focus on the content itself, letting the system take care of the technical aspects of formatting and posting. They don’t need to send their content off to be managed by someone else. They open up a CMS client program on their desktop, change the content, and send it to the system for publishing.

IT staff who often are co-opted into playing the uncomfortable hybrid role of content publisher/technologist, can focus on their areas of knowledge and experience: managing the system components, services, and code base that underlie the publishing effort.

Value on Investment: Anyone in the organization can be responsible for authoring or reviewing site content; the IT staff utilizes their training to support the system.

Approved Content

In discovery sessions with first time content management clients, a familiar phenomenon often is revealed: Content is posted on the site without appropriate review by designated staff responsible for that content. In fact, it often is posted, updated, and edited with no review.

This phenomenon is so familiar to Web folk that it is probably no surprise to you. It does not happen because organizations are rife with rogue employees. It is because in many organizations, the existing review and approval processes are based on printed documents: press releases, corporate correspondence, etc. Those processes, often in place for many years, assume technology that everyone can use: Papers sent via interoffice mail, or e-mail with a word processing document attached, and approvals that can be noted by a stroke of the pen or by pressing the Reply button.

Web publication, on the other hand, uses HTML, a mysterious-seeming, technical and often incomprehensible technology to most people. There is no HTML equivalent to interoffice mail or e-mail. So in Web shops, the review and approval process becomes cumbersome and haphazard. The non-techies have no review and approval tools, do not know and do not want to know HTML, so expedience rules.

Content management systems provide the Web equivalent to the familiar processes used in print. An item is authored using a familiar-seeming WYSIWYG tool, it’s automatically sent into the publishing workflow, where the system moves it from review to review, using e-mail to notify the players at each step in the flow, until it reaches the final approval stage. In most CM systems, multiple workflows can be configured, each adapting to a variation in roles, sequence of steps, or members, so individual people and roles are matched to specific content. The complex coding is hidden from the participants in the publishing process, and the system ensures that content moves from station to station and is acted on appropriately.

Value on Investment: The quality of content is raised by the fact that appropriate review and approval is conducted before publication. Mistakes are reduced, potential liability is greatly reduced, and time is saved decreasing the need for constant revision and editing.

Auditable Content

In the world of library science, there is a classification of printed content called “ephemera.” It refers to use-once, disposable printed materials such as pamphlets, playbills, brochures, and postcards. In the world of organizational Web sites, many thousands of corporate documents also have joined the “ephemeral” realm, often without the knowledge of corporate counsel or executives.

Because a few keystrokes can change or delete the content in a publicly-available document, organizations are increasingly aware that their Web sites constitute a potentially dangerous liability problem, not to mention a potential source of miscommunications. The ephemeral nature of HTML-based content only aggravates this situation. Not only is this content sometimes unrecoverable, it is also not subject to audit, so that it can be difficult to determine when the changes occurred, and who was involved.

At a recent presentation to an audience of federal Web site managers, I mentioned that every item published on a federal government Web site becomes a public document the moment it goes live. As such, that item falls under the purview of federal publication laws, which require that a copy of it be saved and forwarded to the National Archive. There was an audible gasp among the attendees.

Everyone who runs a Web site knows that content comes and goes and changes on a daily basis. Without a content management system or some other way to capture every version of every item published, there is no true audit ability for published Web content.

Web content management systems can provide such an audit trail. In some systems, every iteration of every item is saved, as is an associated history record that can tell you when and by whom an item was created, posted, edited, deleted, or any other action was taken, down to the level of each step within a workflow. Many systems also provide a “rollback” function, in which this information is used to actually recreate a page or a site as it was at a given moment in the past.

Value on Investment: Web sites have quickly become the public face for organizations. As such, the words and images on the sites become an essential part of the public record for those organizations. From the standpoint of liability, corporate record-keeping, and internal knowledge management, an audit capability is an essential asset delivered by content management systems.

Timely Content

The other day I received a flier in the mail from a local retailer, inviting me to take advantage of their one-day sale at the local mall. I was pleased to see it, until I noticed that the one-day sale had occurred two days ago.

While the delivery of a flier is subject to the vagaries of editors, designers, printers, and the US Postal Service, a given item of Web content on an HTML site is a more controlled process. A Web team member posts it to the site and it goes live (barring technical difficulties.) Yet even then, any number of human errors can intervene to derail the process. What if that Web team member calls in sick, or a number of higher priority items jump ahead of it in the queue, or an item is supposed to be posted live at midnight, but the Web team member isn’t available then?

The value of delivering information on time is real and measurable. But the manual nature of HTML site maintenance, by requiring human intervention, works against the reliable delivery of content on time. To take a single example that we have witnessed: A press release was scheduled to go live on a company Web site at 12:15 pm, to coincide with a press conference held by the CEO. At the noon press conference, the CEO told reporters to go to the Web site for the release. The release was not there, because the person responsible, who had received the release two weeks earlier, was away from their desk at 12:15.

Content management systems offer two great advantages in terms of timely content delivery. First, they allow anyone with the proper permissions to post content. They eliminate the “Webmaster bottleneck,” that place where numerous conflicting publication requests land, all of them due at the same time with the same priority, creating a chokepoint – and a potential point of failure – for timely publishing. The CMS can handle as many simultaneous transactions as are necessary. By pressing a “Submit” key on a Web form, any staffer can ensure that content is updated when it needs to be, rather than relying on a single Web team member with many tasks in the queue.

Second, most content management systems provide for content scheduling, allowing staffers to specify the date and time that a piece of content goes live on the site. That means publication timing is removed not only from direct human input, but from any other environmental constraints (including the US Postal Service). Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor international time zone differences matter to a CMS. Content can be created and approved hours, days, or months ahead of time. When the appointed moment arrives, the content goes live.

Content scheduling modules also often provide for content expiration. Let’s say that Marketing wants a promotional area to go live on the site at a given time, stay live for a specific period, then disappear from the site. Content scheduling can automate that process.

Value on Investment: Timing can be everything. Content management can bypass the “Webmaster bottleneck,” providing content scheduling for publication and expiration. When timing is critical, the publishing system will ensure that content arrives – and departs – according to schedule.

Easy Content

With apologies to my many coding friends, HTML is not for normal people. That is to say, it is not a mainstream business tool, like telephones, spreadsheets, and word processors. HTML is a programming language loaded with esoteric codes and conventions. But it is the lingua franca of the Web. If you want to make Web pages and you don’t have a CMS, you must speak HTML.

That is a problem for organizations, because very rarely are the content “owners,” the experts on a given topic of organizational importance, speakers of HTML. Further, they already have jobs. They do not have the time, training, or inclination to become programmers. So, the job of content management falls to HTML specialists, often technologists who speak code very well, but may have little real knowledge of the actual corporate content. To them, content is often not information, but “data,” keystrokes to be entered into a file so that the HTML page will “work.”

That’s a worst-case scenario, but not at all an infrequent one. Even when staff members have enough HTML knowledge to edit a page, trouble can occur. When you open an HTML page, you have access to everything on it: images, layout, content, meta-tags, code, script language, the whole shebang. And if an individual decides to “improve” any of the above, or accidentally alters them, there are not necessarily any checks and balances to prevent the unfortunate results from showing up online.

Content management systems approach content completely differently. Rather than opening the page and all of its elements to an author, and requiring that they understand HTML, they provide a word-processing-like window into each specific piece of content.

Through user roles and workflow assignments, they allow the right people to have access to the right pieces of content. Using familiar “WYSIWYG” editing toolbars, they provide those people with basic content editing capabilities. Authors can cut and paste content from any number of sources, from plain text to formatted word processing documents. Styles, tables, colors, and font choices can be limited to those that are consistent with the overall corporate brand standards, so that even when authors have the ability to format their content, they will not depart from the approved look and feel of the site.

Because an author or editor only deals at any given time with a specific content item, there is little to no danger that they can adversely affect a page’s payout, graphics, or design elements. They are limited, appropriately, to doing what they do well: providing timely and informed content.

Value on Investment: Content authors and editors are provided the Web equivalent to Word processing, allowing them to easily manage the content for which they are responsible, without having to learn programming and without the danger of them adversely affecting the Web page.

Conclusion

Content quality is a key measure of Value on Investment for content management systems. Content management provides a structure for publishing in which the right people author, edit, and approve content; content is published in a timely fashion, all content publishing activities are recorded and auditable, and the system is easy to use, eliminating the need for trained programmers to manage it. From these qualitative differences can come measurable, quantitative, increased value.