Content Management …………… Simplified

Let’s go back in time for a minute. Say the Business wanted to change the word "Colour" to "Color". They will communicate this to the Developer and he or she will make changes to the code base and has to go thru the change management process before it finally gets deployed.

The question is how to give the business owners the ability to make content changes without having to make the changes to the code base.

Let’s go back to our Insurance Company example to illustrate this better.

For the sake of this example let’s assume that all businesses have web interfaces that are consumer facing and the business wants to have a review process in place before the content gets to the consumer.

In a nut shell we need a Workflow.

We need to have clearly defined roles like Author, Reviewer, Approver, Publisher to support the business process of publishing the content.

Now let’s explore how the content is consumed by the departments.

"New Business" consumes the content by directly interacting with the content database, "Renewals" consumes a DLL which is generated say by a batch process which is run twice in a week, "Claims" gets the content via Web Services exposed by the CMS.

Now we not only have inconsistency in terms of how the applications access the content, but also how fast the content is available for application consumption.

Things will get further complicated if the Business decides to expose business process to different delivery channels.

I illustrated this as a cross domain example for the sake of understanding, but the same principle applies to all the applications within the domain that consume content.

So need to not only develop a good Content Model but also a consistent Delivery Model that could address these issues.