Week 1 - Implementing a Content Management System

We have been struggling with implementing a content management system that suites our needs for several years. Then, late last year, we came across an interesting team of IT solutions called Flatirons. They impressed us with there demos and so we gave them the green light, sinking more money into this long-term endeavor of content management.

Before agreeing to hire Flatirons, we were working with a company called Astoria. They did not work out for several reasons. First and foremost, they offered us a 90-day trail on an out-of-the-box CMS system that was not suited for our content needs. We did not know that it would not be suited for our needs, however, because we did not even know what our needs were, which leads into problem number 2. We assumed that the CMS system offered would fulfill our requirements, without having ever defined them in the first place. With that, we had no goals to test the system against, leaving us confused with an overall lack of guidance. In short, we had no plan or model to use as a basis of comparison to judge the new system.

Then technical issues began to run rampant throughout the systems. These problems ranged from server access issues to pop-up windows appearing blank to false graphic conversions; also computers simply crashed for no apparent reason. Moreover, the Web Client interface was not intuitive and the ability to directly comment on a chunk of information while in a review status was non-existent.

Transfer knowledge issues also arose...For further details, see Rebekka Anderson's dissertation analysis by going to her HOME PAGE. She presents a detailed qualitative study analysis of how we have dealt with content management systems in the past and how we finally decided upon hiring a different company than the one we originally contracted.

Ms. Andersen also has some interesting insights to the world of CM at The Rhetoric of Enterprise Content Management (ECM): Confronting the Assumption and Transforming Technical Communication.


Return to HOME page or leave comment below.