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A CMS, or Content Management System, is an application whose purpose is to allow non-technical users to simply add, edit and manage a website.

Although a poor choice won’t turn you into dust (just perhaps your status in your company), your corporate web presence is a critical part of your business and thus your CMS is a significant business investment. Additionally, implementing a CMS solution will impact the Business side of your organization as well as the IT group and as such, a set of requirements must be developed with each of these groups in mind.

At a Corporate level, some of the major considerations in adopting a CMS will include:

• Budget for the project
• Allocating resources from both Business and IT pre and post launch
• Any “must have” platform considerations related to existing infrastructure

To ensure the project remains within scope and aligns to the defined parameters, it’s best to clearly define a corporate project leader who will shepherd the search, selection and launch of the system.

To help in determining what you should consider when undertaking a CMS implementation, I’ve created two lists below: one for the Business part of an organization and the other for the IT group.

Business Requirements

• Workflow – Develop a strategy before the site is built

– Best to have hierarchy of access:

– Super Administrator
– Administrator(s)
– Content Authors/Contributors US centric versus Global

– Who other than Marketing will add/edit content?

– Legal, PR/Communications, HR, Training, etc.

• Ease of updates – The crux of a CMS system is to allow non-technical users to easily update content.

– How simple is editing public facing content

– Can you easily create “Special sections” (event registration, landing pages, etc.)

– Will there be multiple domains managed via the CMS other than language sites?

– Marketing content owners should be able to be trained on system usage in a week’s time.

• Is your site US centric or Global?

– Does US Corporate define global content strategy?

– Is translation of content managed by US Corporate or by regional managers?

– What to consider legally: SOX compliance, SafeHarbour regulations

• Connecting to 3^rd party systems (shared with IT) – What impact will your CMS have on other systems?

– Marketing platforms (Integrated landing page solutions)

– CRM systems such as Salesforce.com of SalesLogix (Collect data from forms, flow to CRM system or intermediary database to cleanse leads)

IT Requirements

• Open Source versus Commercial

– Consider security, platform, support

• On premise versus hosted

– Can/does IT Department want to manage the Web Environment?

– Are we willing to budget for a hosted solution and support?

• Mobile strategy

– Will the website utilize a Responsive template or a programmatic mobile recognition solution?

• Anticipated traffic on your site

– Will we need a robust environment with a web server farm?

– Web security concerns: What type of transactional data will flows through the site?

• Ease of updates – How easy will it be to manage:

– Updates to CMS software

– Updates and patches to server environment

• Plan to integrate certain systems from inception of project

– Web Analytics (tagging template pages as well as forms)

– Marketing platforms (Integrate landing page solutions)

– CRM systems – Collect data from forms, flow to CRM system or intermediary database to cleanse leads

– Investor Relations portal

– Who will own these pieces if they “break”?

A  CMS can greatly improve efficiency in a growing organization. Don’t underestimate the commitment of time and money though. And, when choosing a vendor, whether for the CMS software or for Professional Services, ask for testimonials from current customers and case studies. Best of luck!