Technology Changes Patterns of Work: The Case of CMS Deployment

As deployment of Web content management gains traction in the institution, the technology advocates and champions assume that the promised benefits will sweep through the work-a-day culture toward its fulfillment. Lo, we are perplexed and saddened when disappointment sets in. In one college, fours years after these early adopters shelled out huge licensing fees and annual maintenance fees for a CMS solution to what seems an organizational problem, only small sections of their Web presence are ostensibly under content management. I say ostensibly because the content consists of entire pages from the old static sites - markup, navigation, presentation and all (yes, even <font> tags) - have simply been dumped into a database. The resulting site uses few of the advantages offered by content management such as smart navigation, plain text content, metadata, content re-use, and scheduled publishing. Distribution of content maintenance might happen, but authors  have been  assigned to maintain the old &ldquo;content&rdquo; - embedded, bad markup and all. Failure is nearly a certainty. Pain exchanged for pain is still pain. Somebody, please, end this endless cycle of pain.

I just demonstrated the anti-pattern at work: without changes in processes and practices, failure of new technology deployment is probable. But who do we have to blame but ourselves? How can we expect our people to deeply understand the extent to which our work changes if we don't change our processes as part of  technology deployment? Better still, shouldn't we try to predict the acceptance of new processes before the decision to deploy is made? We are not Borg - resistance to change is certain and will often kill any chance for success.

Evaluating return on investment in new web technology is difficult - but not impossible. But, we are overworked and understaffed, so important metrics are not developed simply because the effort isn't bearable; crucial data isn't identified and collected; evaluation of success or failure becomes merely an opinion. Worse is the suspicion that in some cases it may not be even a clueful opinion. In the end we cannot truly evaluate the success of technology projects in the absence of data. And so it goes with planning new technology investments. 

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