Last week I attended a useful discussion on the latest trends in Content Management Systems (CMS). It was organized by Hank Dearden’s Capital Cabal group, which is one of the better technology networking groups in the Washington, DC business community.
Hank pulled together a good panel for this morning event at the City Club of Washington. He had Tony White of Ars Logica, an analyst focused on the CMS space; Mark Pilipczuk of directory operator Neustar; and Meg Walsh of Marriott.com. This resulted in a nice mix of views — high level overview from an analyst, and then specific b2b and b2c examples of how to implement and manage CMS platforms.
Tony formerly worked at Giga and the Gilbane group, and is now out on his own with Ars Logica. He clearly knew a lot about CMS, having trouble keeping his presentation to the prescribed time. Here’s my take on the essential takeaways:
- Decide upfront if you want a CMS platform, or a point solution — most enterprises need a platform, but keep in mind that’s all it is. You have to have the developmental resources to customize the software to you specific needs.
- Recognize that the common disconnect between business requirements and IT requirements is a human issue, not technical — documenting every business process that will be affected by the CMS is critical.
- Prepare for mobile — a higher and higher percentage of online activity is now generated by smart mobile devices, not PCs. Make sure your CMS approach can accommodate this trend.
Pilipczuk is VP of Marketing and Customer Services at Neustar. He acknowledged that Neustar is a client of both eZ Systems and Pivotal, the two sponsors of the Capital Cabal event. So Neustar outsourced its CMS decision, other than the maintenance piece.
- When Mark joined in April 2009, there were multiple online properties with no central platform at all for publishing, edits and maintenance.
- In the midst of the CMS implementation, also did a brand relaunch in July of 2009
- Entire process took almost 18 months — don’t believe overly optimistic timelines promised by vendors
- eZ Systems allows Neustar to integrate on the backend with their CRM tools Salesforce.com and Marketo
Meg Walsh is Mariott’s Director of eCommerce. Marriott already had a CMS platform when she arrived three years ago, the company uses Vignette. Based on her talk, they’ve come a long way since.
- Three years ago every page change required a code release!
- There were 320 internal publishers at one point — she’s brought that down to around 30.
- Marriott.com now handles over $20M in reservations per day.
- No changes are made without complete, exact processes documents from the business group.
- She also stressed the need to adapt to content on new, smaller mobile devices.
These hands on stories were very instructive for me. My clients don’t look to me for CMS advice, but the social media campaigns I run for clients need to integrate with their back-end CRM and marketing automation systems. So it’s important I understand a client’s overall IT platform.
If you are evaluating a CMS solution for your organization and want more information, I’d be happy to put you in direct contact with any of the speakers.