I have no idea whether left-brain vs. right-brain theories have any physiological grounding. Nevertheless, the concept that some people are more guided by intuitive feelings and others by rational judgement appears to be commonly-held.
These contradictory temperaments can be seen in departmental cultures when deploying content management software.
On the one hand, IT departments consider CMS to be applications that need to be fully-documented robust applications that conform to all kinds of architectural principles. Since the software will never meet all these standards, they have to be built by internally until some kind of compliant behemoth is unleashed.
On the other hand, the communications team expects the CMS to simply do everything out of the box using basic intuition. After all, Word is used to create and publish content, so why shouldn’t a web CMS do the same?
Of course suppliers are striving for a happy medium, where applications are robust and extendable but have a great deal of functionality off-the-shelf. But I think there are simple and important messages to communicate to both parties:
Even Word doesn’t provide you with the tools you need right away. More experienced users need to create templates that are on brand and conform to your processes. In the case of CMS, this needs a trained developer.
Most CMS are not designed to be heavily customisable applications. They’re meant to perform a simple function: enable the right people to publish the right content to the right places in a timely fashion. If you need to do more than this, then a CMS is one piece in the jigsaw puzzle, rather than being a piece of software that you can extend by yourself.
The message is to keep it simple. Pick the technology that meets a technical basis defined by IT, but only go to the absolute essentials (e.g. Java or .Net or LAMP, XML / web services, static or dynamic, LDAP compliant). This gives you a shortlist of products which the communications team then gets to choose from, focussing on all the features you get out of the box.
And if you’re tempted to tinker with the final product choice, don’t. You’ll be in for a world of pain when it comes to upgrade or roll out to other parts of the business.
The right CMS for your business is one where there are no quibbles over who owns it. If you let just one side of the brain choose, you’ll never satisfy the other.