Change your client’s mind
As I read Vitamin’s latest article by Paul Boag, called The 5 hidden costs of running a CMS, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the author had been looking over my shoulder the last couple of weeks. It was as if he pulled some quotes from discussions I had with a client, not too long ago. Take this one, for example:
[There is] a substantial problem with content management systems. They are often implemented in the hope they will solve what is an organizational rather than technical problem.
The Brit hits the nail on the head, although I’d like to take a slightly different approach to his statement. The problem does not lie with the CMS itself so much, but rather with the people implementing and using it. It is they who expect that a piece of software will cater to all their (or even everyone’s) online needs and solve all their problems. Some might even think they have real influence and power over the company’s website just because they have a user name and password to login to the CMS and edit data. Even though those changes will never appear online without approval of a web editor.
This is a difficult problem, because you need to convince people to think differently about the system they’re using. Change their minds, so to speak. Do they really need to spend a lot of money to buy a huge content management system that can handle multiple workflows and permissions and whatnot? Or can they suffice with just sending an email to the web editors every now and then? Remember, it’s not CMS’s that kill websites. People do. (And some browsers, but let’s not go into that…)
Comments
Low, this is so right. I see it all the time, people blame the cms and never the organisation that causes the problems. Strangly the less people know of the techniques, the more they think of it as a problem solver. Time to get through their heads that a cms is just another tool and is as good as it is used.
(buying a nice and expensive toolkit doesn’t improve my skills at fixing thing around the house..)
What is the saying: “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”?