Towards a transparent and controlled CM process
Lately I have come to a new insight in the different stages an organization goes through when embarking on the content management learning curve. This is the first time I have tried to write it down. Funny thing is you then immediately see it all around you. Cognitive resonance at work!
Back in the dark age (the mid ‘90s) when the internet became mainstream we needed specialized people to create (the content for) our new websites. The brackets are put there on purpose. We hardly saw the difference between the website and its content. Tools for creating and publishing content were so complex you needed specialized training and therefore we created extra jobs in web management departments. They managed the entire process from creation to publication for the website.
Later every part of our business needed to be on the internet. Remember that IBM commercial? The boss said: “We’ve got the be on the Internet.” And the other guy responded: “Why?” Sometimes I feel we could still run that commercial. I have tried to find it on Youtube. IBM has published many of its commercials there, but I could not find this one. Anyone have a copy somewhere? Anyhow, when we had every part of our business is on the Internet, we realized that we were recreating our entire company in the web management department. Like drawing a map in a scale of 1:1. Just imagine how unpractical that is!
This is when single sourcing, true sourcing and tearing down the content silos were introduced, we write the year 2001 when ‘Information Orientation’ by Donald Marchand is published, 2002 for ‘The Content Management Bible’ by Bob Boiko and 2003 for ‘Managing Enterprise Content’ by Ann Rockley. We started to create at the source, then transport to a system where we could combine and manage the information and from there to the many publication systems (internet, paper, mobile, 3rd party syndication).
Sounds cool, doesn’t it? So what could be the problem with it?
