Back to front
Last week I gave a short presentation at Publishing Expo, one of four exhibitions at Earls Court, in a session called ‘Open Source – the way forward?’
The idea was to talk about our technology decisions for the relaunch of the sharedserviceslink.com website, which went live in November and has been a big project for me since last summer.
When I first spoke to Michael Upshall from Consult MU, the session’s chair, I wasn’t sure how much I could contribute. It wasn’t a question we’d spent much time deliberating when choosing a content management system (CMS) and certainly wasn’t something I could debate with a room full of publishing professionals.
But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether this was even a useful question? If you’re looking for a tool to manage your content, how high up the priority list should it be whether the one you choose is open source or not?
Coming at any issue solution first will likely result in you shoe-horning your needs to its features and limitations rather than finding a tool that truly meets your needs. I’ve seen many initiatives run awry when project teams or developers lose sight of the issue they’re there to address or get carried away with adding bells and whistles to the technology.
Knowledge management teams can similarly alienate people when they first meet a group to talk about how they can help and simply walk them through a long list of potential solutions: information sources, research and analysis, collaboration tools, online and classroom-based training, methods for capturing and sharing knowledge, people-finding systems, all manner of repositories, intranet pages, facilitation support, etc, etc.
Chances are your group doesn’t completely understand how some of these tools can help, so dissecting and understanding their plans and objectives is a crucial first step. The most relevant solutions should start to become apparent as you talk, and your knowledge plan is born.
Coming back to the CMS choice for sharedserviceslink.com, we needed a tool that would ensure the website could meet the business’ objectives to:
- Build our membership base
- Be an easy-to-use source of knowledge for members
- Improve our search-engine ranking
- Generate revenue through the site
- Integrate all our channels and information sources
- Support our growing product portfolio
Important additional considerations included:
- Limited budget, technical skills and resources
- A strong focus on content not technology
- A quick turn around
- Integration with other systems
- A solution provider that understood our industry/business and could provide advice as well as technical skills
We opted for a proprietary tool, WorksSitebuilder, because it best met our needs and the team we’d be working with had experience we valued, not because it was proprietary.
Listening to Steve Parks my, co-panelist from Code Enigma, an agency that works with Drupal, an open-source tool, we could easily have opted for his company’s services providing it had the experience and approach we wanted.
I’m not saying the open source/proprietary tool debate isn’t important, but if you’re looking to get your hands around your content and you’re not a techie, which the majority of the people in the Publishing Expo audience didn’t seem to be, then I think there are other questions that need answering first.
No matter what project you’re working on, coming at it solution first won’t help.
