Digital Web Magazine has a great interview published this week: Tony Byrne interviewed by Louis Rosenfeld. The topic is content management systems (CMS), but much of the commentary can extend beyond CMS only. The opener caught my attention:
People rarely ask me the really obvious question about content management systems: “Should I really do this?” Meaning, “Should I really implement a CMS?”
Maybe by the time they find me they’ve already justified a CMS project to themselves and their boss. But the more I talk to companies, the more I feel that their real business problems concern content—their content sucks, or there’s too much of it, or too little or whatever. You can get people to acknowledge that, but in the back of their minds they keep some hope that a CMS will fix their content deficiency, or at least help fix it. Certainly, some corporate cultures require a major technology project just to justify shaking things up.
The interview presents a much better balance about the value of CMS and the importance of having people involved in the process, as is the case for any project.
[Found via a local mailing list, and I see that James Robertson at Column Two has picked it up as well - he is even referenced in the article.]