KnowledgeBlog

One of the great benefits of a modern content management system is the ability to ‘federate’ administration of the site to content owners.

This means that the users who create the content, take on the responsibility of  uploading and maintaining that content. As Seth Gottlieb notes here in his great piece entitled The Myth of the Occasional CMS user “one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information.”

It certainly is a great idea – imagine all that unbridled knowledge your users could share without having to wait for those geeky IT gatekeepers to upload their content? Imagine all that previously untapped (or tacit) knowledge that now can be created, published & shared by any content creator?

Now don’t get me wrong, this is the way modern Content Management systems work, but only if the users follow the right rules.

Take for example a recent Intranet & Content Management implementation we have done for a Government organisation. While there was an enormous amount of goodwill for the project, we quickly became aware that one of the key content owners who was tasked with updating a critical part of the site, simply was not doing it frequently enough. As we all know, when users login to see out of date content (especially after such a short time of the site going live) trust in the system is severely diminished.

Luckily, the system has built in safeguards that notifies the system administrator when content is becoming stale. But this misses the bigger point. After all the excitement about a new system, a system that empowers the content owner, within 3 months it fell back to the project team to monitor. Is that a failure of the software, the implementation or the user? To be fair, all three probably share a little bit of the blame. I will go into the answer in more detail in my next blog.

In closing, while social media sites such as Facebook prove that people are great sharers of knowledge, there is still some way to go before we see such enthusiasm  replicated in the workplace.