Empirical Aspects on Content Management

The Institute for Media- and Communications Management of the University of St. Gallen recently completed an evaluation study of 65 Content Management Systems (CMS), among others a number of Open Source Systems such as OpenCMS, Typo3, Wyona or Zope.

For the evaluation of the CMS, we designed a special evaluation method, which evaluated general features of all the CMS and also use reference customer information. Among other data, the "Top Five" reference customers of the system were identified, as the experience of the reference customers is to play an important role within the scope of the evaluation of the CMS. We interviewed between two and four reference customers from independent companies per CMS evaluated by telephone. Additionally, the Chief Content Manager of the reference customer was asked 40 questions. Among the reference customers were companies from different industries and of differing company sizes (ranging from 2 to 65.000 employees). The data which was obtained in the 200 interviews was used for the evaluation of the individual CMS as well as aggregated and statistically analysed.

In this talk we will show to what extent theoretical aspects of CM as a special field of Information Management can be found in practice. The following question will receive special attention: Are the theoretical aspects of Content Management (CM), which are discussed in scientific papers as well as by CMS suppliers only relevant for the theory of CM? Are the theoretical aspects also useful in designing a CMS? Are the theoretical aspects highly relevant to practical implementation and use?

In particular, we will discuss our results:

• The empirical analysis of this data shows that CMS are above all used for the administration of web content.
• Only a minority of the companies integrates the CMS into their enterprise information systems.

The inquiry of how CM and collaboration are connected shows that the implementation of CMS doesn't lead to a distributed administration of content. Independent of the size of the companies in most companies less than 20 persons work with the CMS. In smaller companies a higher absolute and relative share of employees are integrated into the content management process.

We will conclude by discussing the role of CMS as a part of enterprise information systems and the connection between CM and Knowledge Management in theory and practice.

Florian Stahl
Research Assistant
University of St. Gallen - Switzerland

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