The Importance of Being Current, a Case for WCM
By Tj Kellie, Systems Architect, Power Objects.

The contemporary website is more than just your company brochure displayed to the world through the internet. Both the general public and your clients expect to read updated information and gain access to self-service tools on visits to your website. The challenge of creating new content and publishing it on the website has been a growing source of headache for businesses of all types. This stress creates serious business inefficiencies and cannot be ignored.  Don’t put your sales force in the perilous position of trying to explain why your new products or services are not featured on your homepage.

In many businesses the task of website updates is still placed on the Information Technology (IT) department. With the cost of IT staff on the rise again, it’s a good bet that you have better projects for your IT staff than updating the events calendar with details about the next charity golf tournament. According to research conducted by the U.K. firm, Dynamic Markets, 40 percent of responding companies would allot three months of an individuals full-time work resources to structurally alter a single site. Another 40 percent were unsure about the scale of the task required to develop site content and keep it consistent. At least 20 percent suggested the assignment would be anything between four months of work to a full-time job.

To try and answer this problem (and avoid the golf event updates) the IT industry has been quickly adopting Web Content Management (WCM) systems. While these systems can vary in price and features, the goal remains the same; to help distribute the task of updated content to the people that have the ability to effectively create the message. The methodology sounds great when IT is looking at features, but the CIO is staring at the price - after all some of the big CMS packages out there can run into six-figures just for the software license. So how do you go about choosing the right path and determining the key evaluation points, for both features and ROI?

Return on Investment

• Better brand control for your website
• More control over your public image and message
• Time savings for IT staff and budgets
• Disaster recovery through easy re-deployment
• Time savings through customer self-service
• Faster development time for IT web applications

WCM features

• Integration with current company technology culture (.NET / Java)
• Security framework
• Self updating navigation
• Flexible template based page creation
• Extendable platform for IT developers
• Workflow for promotion of staged content
• Easy authoring process for business level contributors

There are many robust WCM systems available that allow for easy content creation and workflow based publishing to maintain current Internet and intranet sites.  Although there are many systems with substantial up-front costs, it is necessary to consider the long term return on investment and efficiencies the tools facilitate.  The broad range of prices of the systems make it easy and necessary to find a WCM that fits your business structure and IT budget.

Tj Kellie currently works at PowerObjects in Minneapolis where he is involved in application development and integration. 

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