[kictanet] What steps could be taken to support the introduction of good practice standards in the region?

[Titus Ngeno]

What steps could be taken to support the introduction of good practice standards in the region?



1)      We need Content Management Strategy and Roadmap:
An organization's vision, mission, objective and long term goals should be understood before starting a Content Management initiative. The Content Management strategy must be aligned with the organization's goals along with well-defined Key Performance Indicators. When coming up with the strategy, one must understand the past and current business needs of the organization and envision the future state. This in turn helps to create the right Content Management strategy roadmap. In order to help prioritize Content Management initiatives and ensure alignment with organizational goals, the Content Management strategy must be clearly communicated to the business and executive management. One must follow a holistic approach in leveraging existing systems, applications, solutions and create a Content Management platform by consolidating and rationalizing the existing Content Management infrastructure and products without impacting the business. This helps in the standardization of Content Management platform. Once there is a strong Content Management strategy and roadmap in place, it is easier to radiate and spread the change.

2)      Become disruptive to resistance to Change: Change is something which every human being will resist initially.
One must have a mindset of 'change is something which is constant and will bring in opportunities'. There must be a clear plan for change adoption, first in terms of identifying the like-minded, change-avert people who can influence change in the organization. They must be instilled with confidence and convinced with a strong business case that the new system is valuable and that change should be implemented. If this is successful, this team will act as your Change Agents across the organization and will radiate the message and value proposition of the change to the entire organization. The key is to identify the right set of people who are change champions.

3)      Keep the project within the budget and keep the deadlines.
This is a common syndrome for many projects. It is highly common for Content Management implementations due to the lack of understanding on chosen Content Management Product features. Often times, most of the people look at the product features and assume that they are out of the box features of the product. However, when the content use cases are realized and implementation starts, it may turn out that the use cases require customizations, which would involve more development effort, thus impacting the project schedules. Hence while choosing the product; the emphasis must be placed on product configurations rather than customizations. More customizations would require more maintenance and support of lights-on projects. Because Content Management implementations involve all the business and IT units in the organization, the dependencies within the groups must be thought out carefully and included in the schedule.

4)      How to overcome lack of Information Governance and Information Architecture:
This is the key to any content managed site. Information Governance will help define the roles and responsibilities for content authoring, creation, review and approval - which are necessary to ensure that the right content is available on the sites. This coupled with scalable Information architecture is the back-bone of any content managed site. Information architecture which deals with Content Taxonomy, SEO, Intuitive User interfaces, User experience, Metadata, searchable attributes etc must be identified before the design of the site is laid out. Any wrong step in this process will lead to a non-user friendly and un-maintainable site.

5)      How to overcome lack of thoughtful, scalable and appropriate architecture:

This is another key item which is necessary in order to build a strong, scalable content managed site. A great deal of forward thinking in terms of growth of user base, based on future business growth of the organization, must be taken into consideration while sizing the hardware. Other key items which must be considered are content archival process, site availability, and disaster recovery.



So that is my two cents....


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