I am sitting in on the session, A Look at Some Management & Technical Challenges, which is moderated by Seth Gottlieb of Optaros. The speakers are Ann Rockley, Jan Johnston-Tyler, Hardware Writing Manager at Juniper Networks, and Scott Handley, Master Technologist at Hewlett-Packard.

  • Some technical difficulties to start, reminding me of something Leo Kottke said warming up for a song. “This song begins like a like of my songs, with a lot of tuning.”
  • Jan Johnston-Tyler’s presentation has the clever title, “Content Management After the Bubble”
  • Jan: Content management used to be an arcane science. Then the internet happened.
  • Jan: Putting the “business” back into the business case for a CMS means relying on real metrics.
  • Ann: Don’t pick the tools first. Figure out what you need first, and then match the tools.
  • Ann: CM project should be in line with organizational goals
  • Ann: Business groups shouldn’t do CM implementations on their own. They should partner with IT. (Indeed, I would say IT is typically leading the charge these days, and not leaving many departments or business units to do this on their own.
  • Scott is giving a really nice presentation on how to plan for content that needs to be published, updated, and (eventually) retired.
  • Good discussion of controlled vocabularies and who should build them. Experts don’t always realize that the average visitor to the web site may not know the highly specialized vocabulary the expert knows so well.
  • Scott’s HP case study is based on DocBook.
  • Last question: How to demonstrate ROI? Scott: the support staff for the internal publishing has been halved over 5 years. ROI for future enhancements may be harder to quantify.
  • Excellent turnout for the session, everyone seemed to stay, and lots of questions and applause at the end. Clearly, people enjoyed hearing about a real implementation.