Introduction

Deciding on a Content Management System (CMS) to help your organisation manage your website communication can be a mind-boggling job. So whether you are looking to replace your current system, or about to start your eBusiness strategy, you’ll hopefully find the following tips helpful in getting the right mindset to manage this project.

Define your business need

Before any product decisions are made, you will have to define just what it is that you need and when you will need it by. The first will help you work out your business requirements, and the later will help you set project goals for implementing the new CMS.

The questions to ask here are:

• What business processes will be automated by the new CMS?
• Who will be using the CMS?
• What will be your future needs of the CMS?

It’s this homework aspect of defining your business needs, which will set the direction for choosing the right CMS.

Define your CMS requirements

So now that you’ve determined that there is a business need for a CMS, the next step is to define your CMS requirements. This process can be summed up in one word: Research.

This is the crucial time to get your stakeholders involved, particularly as you’ll need their ‘buy-in’ to help manage the change. Stakeholders will also have valuable information regarding resource requirements such as number of users, hardware specifications and budget.

Whilst the following requirement suggestions might help get you started, they are by no means exhaustive, and every organisation has it’s own unique needs.

Requirements to consider:

• Content Creation: How will content be created? Who can create content? How will you add images, links etc. to content? Will it be easy to use?
• Content Management: How will you manage different version of the same page? Can you set future publish dates?
• Security: Is the system secure? Can user access be limited?
• Publishing: Is there a workflow tool to manage the approval process?
• Reporting: Are there features to report on site statistics? Are there tools to report on site errors such as broken links?
• Extensibility: Can additional modules be incorporated with minimal custimisation? Is the product scalable?
• Support: Will training and support be provided? Is there user documentation available?
• Cost: How much will it cost to buy and implement the system (and then add half as contingency)? Will there be a support plan? Will you need developers to make system changes and customize the product?

Choosing Your Product

Whatever evaluation process you follow, whether it be a formal tender, or product demonstrations, a great tool to help you decide on which product will be the best fit is to score the competing products. We tend to use the KT Decision Analysis process, but whatever scoring process you’ll use, you should define beforehand what your ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ will be and prioritise your requirements. Using a formal scoring process is a way of comparing oranges with apples, and will help eliminate the potential for bias decisions.

Conclusion

Regardless of whether you need a simple blog tool or an enterprise-wide CMS, choosing the right application for your needs is an investment, so requires a clear outline on how it will help you meet your current and future business needs.

ILB can help you at any stage of this process, so please feel free to contact us.