Why Is Content Management Needed

It would be surprising if anyone involved in maintaining and evolving a successful commercial Web site did not recognize some of the following basic trends:

• The amount of information and functionality on the site is expanding rapidly.
• There are requirements for expanding the site to encompass new areas such as business-to-business relationships, multilingual sites, and integration with suppliers and partners.
• The content on the site needs to be more up to date and the process for updating site content needs to be more efficient. For example, the “ Webmaster bottleneck” must be overcome.
• There are ever more content contributors to the site, many of whom have very different content authoring and delivery processes.
• Expectations for the reliability and quality of site performance are rapidly increasing. Broken links, missing images, and invalid email addresses are just not acceptable. Page load times must be minimized, and consistency of branding and presentation must be maintained.
• There is increasing demand for personalized content and functionality.
• There are growing requirements for content to be published not just to other digital channels but to offline channels such as print as well.
• There is a growing number of different types of media assets and content that have to be managed over and above basic text and imagery.
• There is increasing pressure for solutions to be accountable: Their performance must be measurable and auditable for a variety of commercial, legal, and other reasons.

Even if you have conquered one or two of these trends, it would be impressive indeed if you could confidently say that you can deliver precisely the right content, to the right person, at the right time, through the right channel, and have maximized the efficiencies of doing this by integrating and aligning your business processes with the ways in which you create, manage, and publish your content as well as maximizing the value of that content through its intelligent and dynamic reuse. That is both the challenge and reward of content management.
There is a difference between content management as an approach and as a content management system (CMS). Whereas the concepts, processes, and practices of content management can be applied at almost any stage and often for relatively little cost, a CMS is a costly piece of software to buy, install, and maintain. Total ownership costs are likely to run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, so this is a big investment decision.
The most likely indications that you need content management are as follows:

• You have lots of distributed content contributors and you are finding it very difficult to effectively manage how they contribute content and quality control of that content.
• You have lots of content contributors who do not have HTML-type skills and need an easy interface to submit content.
• Your somewhat informal processes for getting content onto and off the site are falling apart to the clear detriment of quality and at increasing costs to put right.
• Automation of content publishing to the site would save you a lot of time and money and improve the site users’ experience and perception of the site.
• You have regulatory obligations to be able to store past versions of your site and re-create versions of the site from any point in the past.
• You would benefit from having greater control over the design of the site for branding consistency.
• You would like to deliver advanced levels of content personalization or advanced and accurate reporting and analytics about which users like what sorts of content.
• You have a need to publish different forms of the same content to multiple channels dynamically from a single source.
• You need to syndicate large volumes of content, either into your site or out from it.