First of all, making content available internally across an organization might seem attractive, but making all content available to everybody across an enterprise is phenomenally complex. And with what results? There are a bewildering number of content types for a fantastic number of purposes. The truth is that the larger the organization, the more specialized people’s jobs become, and the less likely it is that any single element of content is going to be useful.

In fact, the more content available, the more important the content discrimination process across the organization becomes. The law of diminishing returns can be applied with prejudice. Prioritizing and promoting important, relevant, current content is the true objective. Enabling everybody to become a publisher invites mass confusion. Suddenly, there is a new job created… managing the content “management” system. Yea, it’s funny – if you’re not experiencing it.

For the enterprise, the great danger here is that software vendors love big projects – the bigger the better for more licenses, more professional services, more everything.

Who’s defining “standardization?

Of course, IT standards are critical. Nevertheless, companies tend to confuse the adoption of industry standards with the procurement of a single vendor’s product suite for use broadly across heterogeneous departments or to address diverse functional needs (such as Digital Asset Management, document management, workflow management, etc.)

Is there one product vendor that can solve all of an organization’s varied needs for content creation, conversion, integration, management, and display? Is the product vendor that specializes in desktop page-layout going to be an effective enterprise management provider (and vice-

In the real world, workgroups do indeed need specialized tools. Various groups of content managers within an enterprise have diverging requirements for the content creation and management process and content display. For example, a brand manager who needs to update content on a small, brand-specific web site has an entirely different mandate from the IT manager tasked with the development of a document workflow system for invoice processing.

Also, because isolated workgroups typically create and manage content for different purposes, unified automation and training programs often don’t provide a benefit. Look at the largest companies out there who have standardized on a single application -- they rarely have a single team who implements and manages the various instances of that application across the enterprise. It turns out that training IT staff to implement a specific solution across the organization is good in concept, but can be very challenging to execute, especially in a geographically diverse organization.

Unfortunately for many organizations, standardizing on a single product for efficiency has had the opposite effect. Attempting to use the “enterprise” product selected by the IT standards committee for a smaller, workgroup-specific project is too frequently a waste of time and money. Even worse, many “enterprise” projects never get started because their sheer size exceeds budget or staff constraints.

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