I was recently working for an investment bank trying to flesh out compliance requirements and reconcile these with the needs of the marketing team.

- As someone in marketing publishes a new piece of content, I asked, do you need to check it’s compliant?

- Yes, responded the compliance officer.

- So do you need to be alerted by email when new content is ready to go live?

- No.

- How will you know when the content needs your approval then?

- They’ll come and talk to me.

- This is a large organisation. Do all the marketing people know who you are and how to get hold of you?

- Yes, they’re used to it for print materials.

- And is this how your colleagues prefer to act too?

- Yes.

- So you wouldn’t find any efficiencies in being able to login to the CMS to preview content before it’s published?

- We don’t really mind what format it’s in: a hard copy or transcript, or we’ll sit and watch a video or listen to a podcast. Everyone publishing marketing material knows the basic compliance rules, it just needs us to give the document a quick once-over before it goes out and that’s best resolved by chatting about it.

- The content may be going out in many languages and to many different geographies, should they all operate this way?

- There are slightly different compliance rules in different countries, but generally the compliance officers in each country work in the same way. They’ll just review the translation, ensure it doesn’t breach any special cases and trust the marketing people they work with.

- What about other content contributors, such as researchers? There’s a fair amount of churn in those areas so they’re less likely to know the rules.

- Research gets published to our subscribers only, so doesn’t follow the same compliance rules. We don’t need to review it.

- So as far as you’re concerned, the technology doesn’t need to enforce any workflows other than the reviews specified by the marketing department and their relationship with each operational area.

- No, we’ll just discuss everything face to face.

Increasingly we see CMS implementations focusing on how to translate business process improvement into CMS workflows. Content management systems are particularly adept at providing compliance rules around publishing rights and version management so should be ideally suited to enforcing and improving the publishing process. But wherever I go, I find resistance to enforcement of workflows by the technology. Why is that?

Part of the reason is of course general resistance to change. Another is transparency: everyone needs to know what it takes to push a piece of content live. They need to know that once they’ve made their amendments, whether this means the public can view their content or if someone else needs to approve. Some CMS workflows can obscure this. Another reason is fear of over-engineering: it’s far too easy to create overly complicated and unmanageable workflows that users then try to circumvent.

But the main reason is that many technologists conceive that we should always interact through technology, that IT automatically means efficiency, even where offline processes, however informal, can be even more effective. We don’t always need global collaboration software to publish a web page.

The key for the business analyst is to identify where the CMS can make real process improvements and provide value through its audit trail, rather than forcing authors into activities that hinder when they should be making lives easier.