Having asked yourself what problems your content management system should address, you reach the stage in the selection exercise where you can shortlist some products. This does NOT mean going to Gartner, Butler or Forrester and picking whatever’s in the magic quadrant. That is a recipe for expensive mistakes.
There will be a lot of software on the market that can help to overcome your problems. You can whittle these down by placing other constraints on your selection process.
Due diligence: have you involved the right people?
Your project will need buy-in from various stakeholders. If you haven’t got their buy-in by the time you shortlist products, you’ll be facing all kinds of political issues even if you pick exactly the right tool. But you need input from all the relevant parties. What benefit do you get from excluding people in communications or marketing, hands-on content editors, technical support and development (whether these are in-house or a trusted service provider), the people in charge of your IT strategy, and of course, procurement. Not only do all these parties have a stake in the selection process; they’ll be able to contribute something constructive too.
How long will you keep the technology for?
Clearly your shouldn’t be looking to keep the technology for longer than the duration of your web or content strategy. If you’re planning to keep something for longer than you know what you’re going to do with it, you’ll probably get into a mess. So, if you have a clear strategy, you’ll want a product with a roadmap to match. If you’re just trying to satisfy short-term goals, you’ll probably want something that’s easy to deploy rather than highly extensible. Having an awareness of how long you’ll want to keep the software for will also help to inform your business case.
Do you really need just a single content management system?
Firstly, you need to understand the limitations of a CMS; it won’t do everything you need. You may need an additional search engine, it won’t satisfy eCommerce requirements, it probably won’t allow much in the way of personalisation, forms created in it will be pretty limited, it’s unlikely to stream live audio or video… these are all best served by distinct applications (which can mean a difficult integration project). So manage your stakeholders’ expectations and constrain your project objectives.
Now consider whether a single CMS is right for your organisations. Are different departments contributing to the CMS likely to need to share content or code? Or could they each have their own devolved system with a common interface for delivery, such as a portal? Will there be licencing or training cost benefits from a having a single CMS?
Work out your budget
Figure out what you can afford, then build your business case. As a rule of thumb, in order to get something workable and fully tested, you’ll need to spend upwards of 75% of your budget on services as opposed to software and database licences. This is likely to cross a whole range of software off your long-list right away.
Baseline your technology
Why does your CMS need to be Java or .Net? Is this your existing in-house skill set? If not, do you really want to invest in re-training? If you have no in-house team, do you really care what technology the CMS is built in? Shouldn’t it just be the cheapest available? Java and .Net are useful if you know you’re going to have a number of integration exercises with applications in those technologies. Otherwise your technological prerequisites may be a costly red herring.
Invite both software vendors and integration partners together
Encourage all participants to do pitch together. In my experience, no web CMS vendor has sufficient in-house experience to address all the services issues in a web project: information architecture, interface design, even systems integration. Conversely, the only services companies you’ll find who know a product inside out will be those who have ex-employees from the vendor. And even then, these developers won’t know the product roadmap or the best practice that the software supplier has gleaned from its many clients over the years. Get them together and have a happy menage-à-trois.
You now have your requirements and your constraints. You should be in a better positioni to shortlist suppliers. If you don’t know where to start in drawing up this list, you can contact us.