Make the Most of IT

by Doug Henschen

The slowing economy has executives scrutinizing each new technology investment, but perhaps equal scrutiny should be paid to the technologies already in place.

This thought came to mind during a recent visit to a midsized company in New York City. The firm had invested in a Web content management system one year earlier and was well along in putting it to use. After meeting with executives to hear their perspectives on why they had chosen the technology, I was introduced to a "Web producer" charged with administration of a number of separate sites. The idea was to get a hands-on look at the system's advantages.

I soon realized I was witnessing a big-league investment gone awry, with software underutilized due to a lack of planning, training and/or hands-on oversight.

"Content management systems are great for keeping track of content," observed this young employee who was originally hired as an HTML programmer. "With a site built with just flat HTML files, things can get crazy."

The irony was that this Web producer was still approaching his job like an HTML programmer. While he was using the software's Explorer-like interface to navigate and organize content, he was ignoring the template features designed to separate content from presentation. Rather than setting attributes such as type sizes, colors and specs once in a style sheet, he was coding content with HTML tags and dumping everything into templates intended for content alone.

"I'm doing most of my content creation in Dreamweaver and bringing it in from there," he said - without any apparent sense that using an HTML authoring tool was defeating the purpose of the company's investment.

As you'll discover in this month's cover story, 'Hands-On Content Publishing', effective Web content management separates content creation from presentation, allowing ordinary business users and subject-matter experts to become content contributors. This capability also enables reuse of content and easy multimedia publishing. Indeed, executives at the company I was visiting said one of their motivations was to support wireless delivery. Won't they be surprised when style sheets developed for WAP microbrowsers (or whatever other technology comes along) will be rendered useless by HTML code intended for conventional browsers?

It's all too common to find gaps between IT investment aspirations and deployment realities. Early document management implementations struggled to overcome resistant workers who ignored or defeated indexing mechanisms, rendering documents difficult to retrieve.

In many cases, employees are blameless for wasted effort because they have not been adequately trained or retrained. Such efforts are much easier thanks to Internet-based training and collaboration options, which are lowering the cost of education.

Just as businesses try to make the most of office space, staffing and budgets, so too must they make the most of investments in technology. Reviews of procedures and, perhaps, some consulting with software suppliers or independent analysts might go a long way toward reinventing business with existing software.