Editorial
The Gist
- Root causes identified. CMS challenges arise from outdated systems and shifting user needs, impacting the effectiveness of content management processes across organizations.
- Content creation matters. Low expectations for content creators have led to a disconnect between intent and execution, undermining the overall quality of content in CMS.
- Need for ownership. Clear ownership of content management systems is essential, as it aligns content teams with technical stakeholders to enhance the user experience.
A few weeks back, Michael Andrews wrote about the content management industry’s mid-life crisis. He looked at symptoms, but not root causes.
Like anything at this scale, no singular reason explains the cascade failure. These failures underscore the CMS challenges that plague many organizations today. Many issues impact each other, weakening the whole, until calcified grime provides more support than the system’s own structure. That said, some issues play an especially significant role in such evolutionary deterioration.
For example, Michael explored the drift in content management systems, which are moving away from the presentation of content to customers to focus on various concerns of users working with the platform. He attributed this shift with CMS vendors, but vendors do not change their focus in isolation. An entire market would not have coordinated such a shift without directed impetus.
User Demands and CMS Challenges
Ask any vendor about any product they are working on and why. One answer is more likely than all others combined: Customers are asking for it. (There are sometimes exceptions to this rule. It could be a hype-driven fad they’re afraid to miss out on. LLM-based AI, I’m looking at you.)
As such, a primary contributor to the degradation of the CMS has been the very users who are now struggling with the failing capabilities of the tools available to them. Prior generations of CMS purchasers asked for features and capabilities, and the evolving landscape has revealed new CMS challenges that current users are now confronting. Today’s generation is discovering that these features are hobbling them. CMS purchasers failed to ask for the capabilities needed to deliver on what is now expected.
Just as the CMS industry’s woes derive from multiple causes, this failure to request the right capabilities has also contributed to a less healthy ecosystem. There is not room here to explore every single branch of that rabbit hole, but we can look more deeply at one key factor and how it impacted the decisions that set the stage for the CMS industry’s current issues.
Related Article: Content Management Systems Solutions: Examining Your Core Issue
How Low Expectations Affect CMS Content Quality
For much of the first two decades of this century, content creators were seen as disposable, interchangeable resources. Rather than being people who are to be trusted to manage communication, they were responsible only for churning out words. Content itself was an annoyance, needed to decorate the web channel (and later, apps) and to lure search algorithms.
(Note to self: write a column on the correct view of content.)
This mentality has exacerbated the CMS challenges faced by today’s organizations striving for effective content management.
This mindset — and the ensuing hiring practices — were the equivalent of getting temporary workers to deck out store-window displays in the world of brick-and-mortar retail. Ultimately, this hiring strategy breeds a knowledge disconnect between intent and execution.
With such low expectations of those generating content and with so little trust invested in them, is it any wonder that content creators were not hired for their ability to consider how their content will function later? Is it any wonder that they did not care to analyze the content they created and annotate it for future automation and reuse? And is it any wonder that they didn’t identify threads that bind pieces together so the intent behind customer interactions can be effectively analyzed?
Ownership Issues in Content Management Systems
Content creation has often been isolated and disparaged, alienated from the platform within which it resides. Indeed, creation governance and workflow management in most CMSs have historically been such that many writers created content elsewhere, only putting it in the system as a last step. With content creators not hired for their technical chops, responsibility for the platform itself fell elsewhere. As the CMS is a technical platform, ownership landed with the IT department.
But a CMS is more than a management system. In olden days, the CMS was also a publishing and presentation tool, and now it feeds multiple presentation platforms. Serving its stored content creates bandwidth challenges. Throw in SEO considerations, analytics, customer experience and countless other expectations, and the content experience is stretched to breaking point. The platform itself becomes the ball kicked around by a dozen interested parties — but without anyone granted actual ownership. Every team makes demands in isolation. In response, vendors rush to implement patch solutions without considering the impact of those fixes on other teams
Dysfunction ensues.
Amidst this chaos, the IT department retains responsibility for procuring the platform. Enterprise architects and CTOs wield veto powers in defense of organizational standards. However, their understanding of the many concerns of the content team is limited, and the non-technical concerns of the platform’s primary users -– those creating and managing content — must be subservient to the IT architectural vision.
Consequently, procurement demands made to vendors do not focus on the content creators’ needs.
Related Article: 14 Rules for Selecting the Right Content Management System (CMS)
Rebuilding Systems to Overcome CMS Challenges
The rot runs deep. Platforms that have evolved over years — even decades — are not fit for purpose. A motley of hacked patches holds many implementations together. Needed capabilities, lacking the infrastructure to support them, are often custom functionalities embedded within the content at a later stage.
Maybe Michael’s assessment was too generous. This is not a mid-life crisis; it’s a cancer.
Content processes are critical. Content is a load-bearing structure in modern organizations. We cannot simply excise the putrid flesh, for we have nothing suitable to graft in its place. We need to build the replacement alongside the current system.
We cannot afford to implement this replacement system piecemeal within the existing processes, for that would require making it interoperable with existing shortcomings, thereby undermining the intent.
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We need to design new systems that effectively address the CMS challenges we currently face, starting with a holistic view of the entire content process. We need the content platform to be owned by people who understand content, its processes and its place within the customer experience — and who also have more than a smattering of technical know-how.
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