Misconceptions about content management
Written by Admin on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
OPEN THOUGHT
Misconceptions about content management
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Information is a valuable strategic asset and should be treated as such, not as merely a component to IT projects. Doing so can change one’s view of systems and how projects should take shape dramatically.
I recently talked to the IT department of a company that was rolling out a huge new content management system and was quite surprised at how backward some still can be in 2008.
The company was rolling out a huge content management system for its 300 or so knowledge workers using a proprietary solution based on Microsoft’s .NET (dot net) framework.
“Haven’t you looked at BEA’s Aqualogic or at least create something based on an open J2EE stack rather than a proprietary solution,” I asked, quite shocked, only to learn that the reason this company was selected was because it had industry-specific expertise, which none of the names I threw around had.
Fair enough. Some niches still exist in the IT industry.
However, the next response was even funnier. The organisation already had a proprietary CMS, which the new one was to essentially log into and copy entries out of, at least initially, for publication on the web.
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to do an SOA wrapper over the existing CMS and offer the content up as an XML service,” I asked, not really expecting an answer. I was not disappointed by the blank look that followed.
“Alright then. By the way, have you looked at Mambo or whatever it has morphed into lately,” I asked. Mambo was one of the industry’s most popular open source web-based CMSes which fragmented into a number of derivatives.
My friend replied, earnestly, that he did not even consider it as his IT department has no time to do a system itself and needs it to be outsourced or a turn-key system.
And therein lies another mis- conception that needed to be fixed. There are many commercial open source system integrators out there, even in Thailand, who are all too happy to take your money and Drupal, Joomla or another open source CMS and deliver a solution based on open source technology. The software may be free, but software is only a tiny portion of the entire bill of a project. Plus, an open source project like Joomla or Drupal is probably better than a proprietary solution based on dot net in the long run for scalability and migration, though my friends at Microsoft would beg to disagree.
That company could have done well to bring in IBM to talk about the Information Agenda and viewing information as a strategic asset, rather than viewing things by the project. Or it could have bought in the World Bank.
Back in probably 2003/2004, I remember the World Bank giving a strong opinion as to why the ICT Ministry should have control over the citizen database, still under the Ministry of Interior’s Bureau of Registration Administration (BORA).
On a side note, it is interesting to see how Thai department names seem to always stress the wrong word when translated. BORA is about registration, not so much about administration. Another one, the National Statistical Office (NSO), under the ICT Ministry, by the laws of grammar is a national office which is statistically-inclined, as opposed to an office of national statistics. Not that it matters as I doubt they are able to do even basic math subtraction anyway.
But back to the World Bank and BORA. The argument was that if the Ministry of Interior holds citizen records, it will do so for the benefit of the MOI first and not to maximise the value of the information. However, if a body that does not have a use for information (and MICT back then had no citizen facing units) is set up to take care of that information, it would do so in a way to maximise the information’s value to the entire government rather than itself which has no use for it anyway.
Remember, that this was four or five years ago, long before SOA and services were mainstream words.
Had that happened, things would be quite different today. For instance, the government has asked all web boards to log ID card numbers when posting comments. However, when a webmaster asks if he can verify the ID card number of a poster, the answer from BORA is that it is a government secret. Hence, I could conceivably post an entry with my ID number as 1234567890123 and name as William H. Gates and nobody could be able to verify it one way or another. Well, perhaps something not so obvious.
BORA being under MOI works for MOI and serves MOI’s objectives. It has no reason to try and create a system to serve the general public and is all too happy to respond with a “this is government data” reply.
BORA under MICT could have conceivably done ID as a service or ID verification as a service to the banks and financial institutions as well as to MOI. It could have worked to maximise the value of that information rather than serve just one ministry’s siloed needs. Could have, not would have, but the issue of MICT competency is another saga in itself.
A government CIO with an understanding of this or what IBM called the Information Agenda would work wonders.
And the web content company I was talking to could do the same, beginning by taking a step back, viewing information scattered across the organisation as information rather than projects or departments, and then start about optimising its use and maximising its value, as one should with any other valuable, strategic asset. That would have made its projects come out looking quite differently.
