What were the challenges?

The following notes could be common to all the organizations who make the transition to use a web based CMS or other types of web applications in their workflow.

Obsolete Corporate Design Guidelines:

Corporate identity guidelines are often very focused on the printed material, and how the company logo ought to be used. Guidelines dictated for the online material are often borrowed from the printed material, with the mindset of viewing web pages as static documents, and not as interactive information portals.

This approach might have worked in 1999 when web pages were indeed mostly online static html documents; however, today in the era of online Content Managements and Web Applications, these identity guidelines need to be updated by people who are specialized in both Graphic Design and User Interface Design for information systems.

Lack of Collaborative Work Culture

Maintaining large amount of content using a CMS, demands a collaborative work environment where every team member has equal authority to be responsible for a sub-section of overall content in a large website.

Collaborative work environments are more horizontally distributed, and the management style is mostly supportive and not directive, because every team member is aware and educated enough about their responsibilities.

This concept often goes against traditional corporate structure where an organization consists of smaller pyramids of power with a middle management on the top of each unit who supplies orders to the subordinates.

These organization's often prefer to have a “Web Master” figure responsible for maintaining their website according to the orders coming from the upper management. Problem with that approach is that maintaining a content dense website is no longer a one-person job where information has a higher degree of growth and interrelationship.

Corporations need to adopt more collaborative style work groups in order to improve the quality of information they produce and publish on the web.

New Technology Induces Change in the Power Hierarchy

A Collaborative work environment could mean decentralizing the authority of middle management in a Power Pyramid, so basically part of middle management's authority and responsibilities are now given up to the team-members who now get to work in a more democratic fashion.

For example a marketing strategist who used to orchestrate Web Masters, Graphic Designers, and Content Developers is now going to give up a portion of that control to the team, and perhaps better focus on the Product, Price, Placement, and Promotion ( 4 Ps of marketing! ).

This could easily create a resistant point within an organization who is in favor of protecting the status quo and job descriptions. (Who would want to give up the glamour of playing design director after all? ) This type of resistance could slow down the process of adapting collaborative technologies such as online Content Management Systems within an organization.

Upper Management need to be open minded about the change, and all the benefits that new working structure could bring into the organization.

Slow Learning Curve in the Corporate Environment

Stakeholders often need to be educated on many aspects of newly introduced technology. There is often an initial resistance to adopting new ideas.

For example, it took more than half a year for the Marketing and Technology Solution Management to be convinced on benefits of using CSS over tables for their web pages. It was partly lack of knowledge, and the fact that they probably had to reconsider their long term relationship with their Graphic Design and Ad Agency they were working with, and take their web projects to a different company who could design HTML templates using W3C compliant HTML and CSS code.

Fortunately, Premier's in-house team of developers really welcomed the new approach on the CSS based layouts, because it would save them days of unnecessary work trying to brute force table based page layouts done in Dreamweaver on top of a Web Application or Perl script.
 
The idea of having a template engine and CMS enforcing a consistent theme, and user navigation pattern throughout the website was first received as taking away authority and flexibility from people who used to tell web masters where to cram more hyper-links in every available white space. Despite those, signs of acceptance and satisfaction finally showed up. Staff were pleased with the new possibilities that using a content management had provided.

Learning more about Joomla! CMS they have started coming up with their own set of creative ideas to improve the usability and information flow of the website.

We were aware that adaptation of CMS in a large organization is often a very slow process, as a matter of fact it wasn't an overnight success, but with a dose of wish-full thinking we managed to have the project successfully launched and used. This was clearly an improvement over the past corporate website for Premier.