Why Is This Content Management Thing So Difficult?

As I approach my 18th anniversary at AIIM -- Yikes! -- I find myself in a bit of an introspective mood about our collective effectiveness.

Specifically, "Why is this content management thing so difficult?"

On the one hand, there is a lot of both quantitative and anecdotal evidence of the transformative impact of content technologies.  Almost universally, end-user organizations that I ask, "Would you go back to the way you did things before?" respond with a definite "No way."  On the other hand, studies conducted by Doculabs and others paint a somewhat checkered history for an uncomfortably high percentage of projects – projects that either went over budget, or over time, or that achieved adoption rates that were dismally lower than the initial projections.  

So how can we improve this?

According to our data from hundreds of implementations, the top problems are...

• 42% -- Underestimated processes and organizational issues
• 31% -- Lack of training for internal staff
• 30% -- Uneven usage – poor procedures and enforcement
• 30% -- Project derailed by internal politics
• 22% -- Underestimated effort to distill or migrate content
• 21% -- Excessive “scope creep”
• 19% -- Taxonomy or metadata concerns

Or in other words, most problems have their origin at the beginning of the project -- a failure to get the basics right on the front end, a failure to get everyone on the same page about the how and why of the project, and a tendency to think too tactically about content management.