starting point

parkway

I'm a Business Analyst tasked with developing a "Roadmap for determining CMS cost savings". I'm not an expert, but I have discovered a few points that should be included in this roadmap.

1. Branding importance
2. Frequency of site updates
3. Structure of content
4. Architecture

I was hoping DevNet might be able to assist expanding on this list with your experience with initial CMS cost justification.

Thanks

Bowker

parkway,

That's a tough question. There are other things that's tougher to get a handle on.

1) User acceptance of the system
- - - Will you be fighting an uphill battle or do people like change?
2) How well is the content/presentation currently separated?
- - - Do the business users know the difference between presentation and content?
3) How technical are the business users?
- - - Do they want to learn (or can) the structure of the content vs presentation (dcr vs. html)

With that said - - -
We wrote our own front end to TeamSite (we use only the backing store, workflows and opendeploy, none of the templating or UI). We spent about 16 months from start to finish (2 programmers 2 business contacts and 2 business liasons).

I don't know the total cost, but in our environment changes that used to take about 15 man hours (doing the work, approvals, redoing work, re-approvals...) is now taking 1.5 hours (typically less than that). The changes are now done by the business partners and not the technical staff. It took a while for them to 'get on board' but when they saw that what was taking up to a week to get published could be done in an hour or two - they were hooked.

The ROI on our system is about 6-12 months depending upon the number of updates coming through. There are also savings not related to time, but accuracy and timeliness of changes. Our content will 'come on-line' and 'go off-line' when specified automatically so holiday schedules are setup in advance, press releases can be setup to display when desired... etc.

I would say that the most important part of the whole process is TO GO SLOWLY. Without exception everyone in our local Interwoven User Group expresses the same thing. Go SLOW. Find one site to convert or maybe just one group of people who are your 'forward thinkers' to convert first. Get the kinks out of the process before opening up to the masses.

Good Luck.

Dan Bowker
Northern Trust
Web Publishing Technology