I came across this article by
I’ve spoken to a number of Web teams that have used a
CMS with varying levels of success. One problem I heard repeatedly was that the project worked fine, but nobody used the software once it was available. I call this the Stupid User Argument, and it’s a favorite of IT departments. The techies did their jobs, after all: They diligently gathered requirements, scoped out the solution, carefully selected a vendor, and managed the project to a mostly on-time and on-budget conclusion.So how come nobody actually uses these systems once they’re in place? The answer is easy: People don’t like to change the way they work, particularly knowledge workers.
Knowledge workers spend years building strategies to accomplish their jobs, practices that likely date back to study skills acquired during their education. So changing those processes — no matter how valid the provided technical solution — is nearly impossible. Users will rebel, even after substantial training.To have any chance of success, a content management project must follow the same user-centered design practices as any other project. Task analysis, rapid prototyping, usability testing — all of these methods are crucial to a CMS rollout. It’s foolhardy to unveil a mammoth, nine-month project to an unsuspecting user community and expect adoption.
But there is a larger issue at play. Even the most thoughtful projects may be misguided. Over and over I’ve heard the same complaint about these projects, “Turns out, after all the budget and time we spent, we really didn’t need a content management system at all. We just needed some editors.
Content management fails for one word: Word. People want to use Microsoft Word to write, and then send it around as email attachments. It’s comfortable. That’s why Blogger just put out the Word plug-in for blogger. They intuitively know that the biggest barrier to usage is the fact that Blogging is not Microsoft Word (what a lost opportunity for Microsoft). It’s too difficult to change peoples’ long-established habits to even try. It’s better to make the tools seamlessly let your content slide into the CMS system. Slippery slope is more powerful than forcing technology adoption.
This is irritatingly true, but such mindset needs to be changed asap. The new technologies are changing the paradigms at work; adoption and openness have become the new buzzwords. Even though people can resist such change for sometime, yet success in the longer run would only come by putting the new technologies and ideas into practice.
What Blogger has done is to address this issue, but in a subtle way so as to make sure that blogging and Blogger keep attracting users. However, these only seem to be temporary solutions, or rather shortcuts, which can help bloggers opt for one of the many plugins and tools available to post their content online. But to spread the idea of blogging to non-bloggers, the picture becomes bigger.
I feel that there is still a jump that has to be made in the coming years for the concept to be realized and understood. Till then, let the ‘ancient’ systems and modus operandi prevail.
Changing a mindset is no easy task. I’ve implemented content management in the guise of Sales Lead Management at a company that was full of Word-using hold-outs. The clincher was that they had no way to respond to sales opportunities without going through the system, which effectively forced them into a blogging environment. Imagine one-to-one private blogging, almost like a message board with two participants and one discussion. But even with this, most “documents” got handed back and forth as Word or Excel documents (attached in the discussion). The company had the bad habit of not responding to any sales opportunities, which is why the system was made in the first place. Making the lackadaisical attitude towards sales leads visible to management resulted in half the sales force being let go. That got content management used. Were I running the IT department, I might even have used a system like this to replace corporate email, and to correlate every phone-call to one of these one-on-one blog discussions. It takes sweeping changes and the elimination of choice for peoples’ habits to change.