Do Content Management Systems really work?
This is not really your question, but from the delivery side, I can’t help but understand your frustration by not seeing it in the recipients of my own systems. I personally have implemented a number of large custom CMSs that have worked. By “worked”, I mean – they fix problems, people use them on a day to day basis, the tools support the work that those people have to do, and they use the system to do their work instead of looking for ways to bypass them. It is absolutely critical that you first understand the problem. Most CMS installations “fail” because the problem they’re addressing is poorly defined. If the system imposes constraints that don’t map to the real world, it will make the users frustrated. Secondly, you must get buy in. If people don’t want to use a system, they won’t. If it’s not supported by management, it won’t be used. Everyone must be convinced that this is an effort to make their jobs easier, which it should be. Your a) item: “the ease of use, power, configurabi
On rereading your question, two other things come to mind. 1) Small changes can often work wonders, and people tend to follow in good habits when others are persistent in leading with them. If people don’t know what’s going on, it’s because other people aren’t diligent about telling them. Giving them a place to do so will help, but it won’t fix things if there’s a fundamental resistance to sharing. Make sure you address that. 2) You’re somewhat asking about a knowledge sharing network, not just a CMS. You can get some of these features in a CMS, but you’ll have to be specific about what you need. Again – step 1 is to identify the problems.
huy boy. When we had this problem at an information management company of about the same size, I wrote a document/task management system from scratch to solve the problems. We had five problems. 1) No one could get a good list of what was on their plate due to a very crappy job order requisition system. 2) Time tracking worked pretty well, but it was difficult for management to generate reports. Managers spent hours every day writing SQL queries to drill down into the database. 3) It was difficult to impossible to pass tasks around like footballs, which often needed to happen. Helpdesk would get a jobreq from a user who had found something on a server that was broken. Upon investigation, it wasn’t the server down, it was a broken script. The jobreq would go into a programmer’s queue and may never see the light of day again, and there was no way to find that ‘cept an aging report. If it needed to go onto another programmer due to either workload constraints or experience constraints, it
