The first step in any brownfield implementation is to assess what you have already. Indeed, you should be assessing your web content management on a regular basis, particularly if your online business is seasonal. But what are the ground rules for that assessment and what should it cover? I’d recommend a rapid SWOT-check.

SWOT analysis is a long-standing if relatively simple technique used across many types of business to provide the executive with a summary of the current situation. It should be easy to read and quick to determine, rather than involve weeks of assessment and long reports. It should be a couple of pages document or four slides that highlight the most salient issues. You can find some templates on Business Balls.

The contents of your SWOT should cover all the facets of WCM: commercials, technical, design, operational.

Strengths and Weaknesses

• Does your WCM meet performance and availability expectations?
• Is the site W3C compliant and accessible?
• Does it meet usability criteria for both consumers and contributors?
• Does the content meet quality expectations for target audiences?
• Are you able to track key performance indicators? What are they telling you?
• Are the business objectives for the WCM in tandem with organisational objectives and strategy?
• If so, are these objectives represented in the site’s look, feel and functionality?
• What extra functionality are your competitors offering? What advantages does this give them?

Opportunities and Threats

Porter’s five forces for competitive advantage provide us with a good baseline for assessing opportunities and threats. In WCM terms, these translate as follows:

• Potential entrants: Are you considering all the delivery channels: syndication, mobile, widgets, etc.
• Buyers: Which markets could you expand into? What are your audience expectations as they begin to consume other web technologies (Facebook, Youtube, iGoogle)?
• Substitutes: Do collaborative tools like blogs and wikis threaten your content management processes? If you have a large Enterprise Content Management platform, is this challenged by Software As A Service, or by Basic Content Services?
• Suppliers: How dependent is the system on a single supplier, whether internal or external? What contingencies do you have in place should you lose this resource? If you’re going to make enhancements, what sort of training or procurement implications would this have?
• How do I exploit all the content which might be relevant to my audiences? How do I make the information I’m presenting be cohesive and comprehensive?

Who should make the assessment?

Lots of questions, but who should answer them? You need someone sufficiently distanced from the site as it stands that they won’t simply rubber-stamp the current situation or rubbish it completely. But the person (or people) undertaking the SWOT also needs to be engaged with the site and its users.

So you need to engage an independent expert who then runs a brainstorm with stakeholders around the bullet points listed above, but who you give sufficient licence to that they can be completely honest about your implementation. You’re asking someone to take a sword to the site not to themselves, so expect to hear things that you’d really rather not have known.

Why is this approach useful

Too many times, project teams are given a brief that’s just an abstract assortment of ideas. A SWOT analysis provides a structured way of getting to the root of the problem. As I said at the start, this is just the first step. Steps two and three are about identifying requirements that tackle the issues the SWOT raises and prioritising those requirements so that you can figure out what’s worth changing. I’ll tackle these two steps in subsequent postings.