For my 8th birthday, my dad bought me a swiss army knife. He told me that a utility knife was extremely useful, but could be used to do things it shouldn’t and that I needed to be responsible with it. For years I carried this knife around with me everywhere I went. It was the perfect size for a kid, really. Early on, I explored the many different ways in which I could use this new device. I remember trying to cut down a tree (it had a mini-saw). I learned that while it “could” do the job for many job types, it probably wasn’t best suited for industrial strength needs, but the knife maintained its utility status for years, and I remembered how thankful I was every time I came upon a situation where I needed it. Whether it was for opening a package, sharpening a pencil, opening a bottle, or cutting hangnails, it was the perfect knife.
Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) are not that dissimilar from utility knives. Like swiss army knives, they come in various shapes and sizes, and some are more advanced than others. They also have a main function, but can also be used to do many different kinds of things. For example, they are perfectly suited to store and publish content, but did you know they can also help to manage workflow processes and analyze content usage? They can help target and segment content for various customer bases. They can even manage visitor profiles. Like an 8-year old boy and his Swiss Army knife, we can imagine all kinds of uses for a WCM platform, and for years many companies have been buying WCM platforms and extending them with the same illusions. But, when put to the industrial strength test we find out it that these auxiliary functions rarely meet the needs of the entire enterprise.
The reverse of this is true too. Sometimes as an enterprise, we want to use best-of-breed tools for every specific function of our business, rather than an all encompassing tool that has it’s own utility functions. It reminds me of my neighbor, who is a master craftsman. His knowledge of tools in his space is mind blowing. His garage is a hardware store, housing a tool for every situation. The quality of his work is a testament to the fact that without the right tool for the job, you will be forced to compromise on quality and increase the overall time and effort needed to accomplish the same work. Unfortunately, most of the tools hang on his wall going unused until the right job presents itself, and oddly enough, even when I want to borrow a specialized tool, I am not skilled enough to use it anyway.
Enterprises do similar things. For example, they buy tools specific to business process management, or content segmenting, or product information management and content management, and try to harness the power of each one for their specific cause. Later, as the need arises, other departments within the enterprise, may attempt, or explore the use of these tools to handle similar use cases, but determine that their use case is not an exact fit for the tools in house and ultimately decide to buy a different tool…. one that tries to suit the exact business need. This results in a proliferation of specialty tools, much like our master craftsman’s garage.
When I listen to my client’s business needs and technical preferences, I’m often presented with a similar challenge: do their business needs require a Victorinox SwissChamp version of a WCMS or can they get by with the Victorinox Climber Series version of a WCMS tool. Understanding the key business problems that need to be solved becomes paramount to everything else when making this decision. Setting the priority for core capabilities can help a business choose a WCMS that actually fits closest to core requirements without overfilling the toolbox with tools that are very rarely used, or prevent them from buying a tool that only meets half the requirements, and thus tempting them to customize the tool to do things for which it wasn’t made.
In my next series, we’ll explore why many companies struggle with this dilemma.
That’s a great point and a great start. Gartner calls it the push to basic content services. When I first heard the argument I thought it was stupid but then I got sucked into the reality of implement WCM on a variety of different sites with differing products. I quickly realized that a one size fits all approach or even a one tool fits all approach made the project more expensive and in some cases, extend the launch date.
I’ll be interested to see the rest of the series.