 Content management encompasses a lot of technologies that are now mission-critical in enabling an enterprise-wide streamlined workflow, but working with IT and upper management to implement CMS is a huge undertaking and can be perplexing to most. And the usual scenario winds up with a discontented end user.
Built upon an effective central or federated storage repository, CMS includes digital asset management, enterprise content management, records management, document management, file management, rights management, SOA-based workflow governance, workflow automation, web content management, analytics tools - and the list goes on.
Regardless of which one of these areas is being looked at by an enterprise from a deployment perspective, the purchasing decision is wrought with challenges.
The CMS market, being fairly new, suffers from a lack of awareness and rampant end-user confusion. Due to a depressed technology market and lack of spending from the customer side, CMS vendors are viewed with some amount of skepticism.
Technocrats in client companies are also finding it very difficult to get budgets for such deployments as the actual purchasing decision-maker in a client organization rarely has an IT background or enough awareness about how the CMS system is going to realize the value proposition.
The onus of getting the budget for the CMS implementation lies on the shoulders of the business manger who needs the solution, who then needs to get buy-in from the internal IT division.
And even when the marketing or creative department is able to convince IT for the need to deploy CMS more than often, they don't see eye-to-eye with the actual purchasing decision-maker, who is usually from the finance department or a C-level executive with little, if any, exposure to the benefits of deploying such a solution.
CMS vendors need to focus more on initially selling pilot projects for a divisional workflow deployment and using a bottom-up approach for deployment. This gives the client an opportunity to get used to the product at a relatively low cost.
Vendors working closely with clients can help achieve early success in pilot projects so that they can get further buy-in within other divisions and steadily scale up towards full enterprise deployment in phases. This helps client teams justify raising money internally for further deployments by using successful divisional deployments as a benchmark for budgetary justification and also creating more awareness within the organization, which can work as a pull marketing strategy.
Another strategy would be to explore the possibility of a subscription-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. During economic down times, the SaaS model is particularly more in-demand since it is easier to get through budgetary negotiations as the sticker shock is spread out over 12 months. Also, the IT department typically has less to worry with a SaaS implementation since most of the deployment and integration headaches are the concern of the vendor and the business manager.
Mukul Krishna is global director, Digital Media Practice, at Frost & Sullivan. Visit www.frost.com for more information.
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