Implementing a content management system (CMS) can be a painstaking journey. For companies with complex architectures and far-from-ideal IT procurement processes, your digitalisation ambition can quickly turn into an energy-draining endeavour without clear diagnosis of the systemic and behavioural readiness for change.

Moreover, failure to orchestrate an adapted governance approach covering numerous stakeholder groups can stifle productivity and stunt adoption.

1. Diagnose the CMS landscape

With an endless supply of options to base your evaluation on, there are three categories of CMS software that make up the overall marketplace.

Knowing which category your solution fits within requires a broad understanding of the systemic variables. While assessing the market, make sure to evaluate: scalability, pricing structure, features and update frequency, personalisation, security (SAML, SSO), add-ons and plugins, and vendor support.

If you’re seeking more control, flexibility, and low cost — with the ability to modify code and benefit from increased ownership over data and access rights — then open source is your best option. In contrast, proprietary and SaaS tech solutions will be better suited for usability, dedicated support, and all-in-one subscription.

To ensure interoperability and long-term success, shortlisted CMS software must be compatible with your enterprise architecture. Involving the Chief Information Officer function early on in your assessment will help you holistically prepare your change initiative while proactively gaining buy-in from this key stakeholder group.

2. Design for human centricity

Human-centred design, a critical dependency in platform initiatives, tends to be a heavily overlooked aspect during the conceptual phase of a technology review. Why is this the case? 

With managerial efforts firmly focused on addressing budget parameters and systemic needs (such as architecture review and data governance), behavioural elements crucial to adoption (i.e. user experience design and platform management) are often neglected until implementation phases. 

While it’s understandable for systemic needs to be prioritised, this can be costly in the long run. Consequently, configuring a solution state primarily on platform mechanics will skew any form of evolving human interaction design.

In such contexts, your conceptual process will benefit from discovering which use case(s) the solution is addressing. For example: Are you designing for business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), or business-to-employee (B2E)? How might this impact the UX design of the CMS?

Systemic vs. behavioural readiness

To guide platform evaluation efforts, prepare a needs statement early on about what you are trying to design or redesign in terms of systemic change (for example, a digital experience platform for multi-experience customer journeys), and how you plan to enable this through behavioural intervention.

The below impact matrix demonstrates the extent to which systemic and behavioural elements might depend on your entity’s change readiness, and the perceived effort in applying small-to-large innovations or optimisations.

As a rule of thumb, for each digital optimisation there should always be a correlating reinforcer (or ergonomic variable) to sustain the desired change. 

For instance, centre your CMS evaluation on what kind of governance approach is required to maintain the platform. Without a dedicated content management role that proactively shapes user experience, a digital platform is bound to become clumsy and obsolete over time.

As with all source code, a programming function is needed to apply the relevant codex inputs for the machine intervention to learn effectively. While this may change over time as AI models demand less data for training, it will always be necessary to allocate a human role to architect the information environment for reliable ergonomic design.

Will you need to factor in an additional resource to manage the platform, or has this already been considered? If not, can you source this kind of role internally, or will you need to hire externally? How might you justify this capability to management? 

3. CMS evaluation & selection

Once you’ve shortlisted the vendors of preference, your next step will be to evaluate each software based on it’s relevance to your defined change state. 

Evaluate

To ensure you objectively assess the market offering, make sure to conduct both online research (via Gartner or G2 sources) and qualitative research (a survey for your user cohort to complete during each vendor demo). Depending on the scope of your initiative, the survey should include a standard set of variables to be scored. This criteria will be based on the systemic and behavioural needs determined in your design phase.

Below is an example of 4 variables that your team may decide to assess: 

• Office 365 compatibility (systemic)
• Plugin to interface with MS Teams collaboration tool (systemic)
• Content search experience (behavioural) 
• User interface look & feel; intuitive layout (behavioural)

Select

These variables will then each receive a score out of 5. After all demos have been conducted, your assessment should indicate which is the preferred vendor based on aggregated opinion.

Reflecting back on the CMS diagnosis, and together with your qualitative insights, it is essential to determine the most robust platform that matches the organisation’s digital maturity.

Implementations often fail due to incompatible CMS offerings that do not suit the target state ecosystem in terms of flexibility. For example, a large institution may take a long time to approve systemic feature optimisations which may reduce the effectiveness of a SaaS that makes quick releases or modifications to its feature-scape. In this scenario, it is better to go with the conservative solution and not the state-of-the-art vendor promising wonders.

You should also consider the mid-to-long term viability of the CMS relative to your company’s growth ambition. According to McKinsey, only 12% of respondents who participated in and/or led a transformation say their respective initiative sustained performance gains for more than three years. 

With this in mind, a 3-year user model is recommended to forecast how many users will be accessing the platform and if there will be additional use cases (personas) that may need to be factored into the UX design. Getting your model right during these initial phases will future-fit your implementation. 

4. Business case & project planning

Next up, addressing your needs statement early on can help coherently frame the initiative for optimal stakeholder awareness and buy-in. Senior leadership, IT, procurement, legal, and HR stakeholders will all benefit from this information which can further reinforce the intent of your initiative.

Considering the below capabilities outlined by McKinsey as critical for successful digital and AI transformations, your documentation preparation should concisely cover similar areas to provide a convincing value statement about the longevity of your initiative. 

Your business case document should include:

• Executive summary
• Problem space (current state diagnosis)
• Objectives & strategic vision
• Project scope (roadmap)
• Budget & cost savings
• Governance plan
• Adoption plan

Your project charter (one-pager) should include:

• Problem space & objective
• Project team, roles & responsibilities
• Anticipated quarterly timeline with milestones
• Budget scope for systemic & behavioural components
• Potential risks
• Expected outcomes

Your roadmap should focus on 3 phases for driving momentum:

• Phase 1 – Define & decide
• Phase 2 – Implement
• Phase 3 – Adopt & monitor

5. Change sponsorship

Now that you have coherently structured your initiative, another aspect that appears easy to recognise upfront and yet ever more tricky to sustain involves garnering a healthy hand of support to justify the initiative during stakeholder interactions.

What tends to happen is a burst of enthusiasm energises the initiative during project launch, only for sentiment to dwell at interim stages when reinforcement is particularly important. This can be costly for implementations when cross-functional business units are not in direct alignment. 

To enhance your endorsement approach, consider the following:

• Be mindful of the ADKAR model as a means to diagnosing and reinforcing behaviour change
• Develop a communications plan that outlines a timeline with key messaging to reinforce each milestone
• Schedule discussions with sponsors to inform them about how/when they should communicate
• Build informal coalition by involving influential colleagues who can act as change sponsors

Parts of an executive sponsorship approach may seem inauthentic to communicate in a top-down dynamic. The intent, however, is to orchestrate information exchange from different sources to ensure people perceive the change in relevant, personalised contexts. This is where your impetus should steer towards.

6. Convince enabling functions

While formalising a change sponsorship approach, three prominent stakeholder groups should be your focal point. Information Technology, Procurement and Legal functions work in tandem to progress technology integrations, however they have independent roles and responsibilities. Your project lead should take ownership in facilitating linkages between these areas, acting as a liaison to fast-track approvals. 

While the IT function focuses on systemic requirements (frontend, middleware and backend tech review), Procurement and Legal departments assume ownership over the terms and conditions of the licensing agreement and any intellectual property considerations.

To avoid delays and scope creep, it is crucial to ensure these teams are aware and committed to co-steering the implementation. The larger the enterprise, the more complex and bureaucratic these functions become, which can seriously impair speed of adoption. 

With this in mind, the best form of mitigation is to plan ahead for potential resistance by developing coherent governance guidelines ahead of any contractual milestones (such as license renewals). This could take the form of a brief onboarding document outlining roles and responsibilities of each existing or prospective stakeholder and clarifying any contact/escalation protocols. Sharing this material internally and also with the vendor liaison will help facilitate awareness and reciprocity.

7. UX design

Having outlined your governance approach, the time has come to map the end-to-end user journey of your target state platform. Here, you should plan to cover elements such as: user research, information architecture, interaction design, usability, visual design, and UX writing.

Depending on the kind of CMS implementation (build versus buy), consider exploring the below elements to ground your CMS in empathy and utility.

In researching the potential user personas through empathy study, your team should uncover hidden struggles and key behavioural interventions that arise while retrospectively assessing the end-to-end user journey. This analysis will help inform the required target state environment in which the CMS will operate.

Mapping the platform’s information architecture will also require an extensive analysis of existing versus new content stacks, categories, tagging and metadata dimensions. Categorising your information hierarchy via a spreadsheet can be an effective way to visualise the repository interface while allowing you to test parameters.

You should also consider to what extent content migration will occur and how this should be coordinated in terms of cleanup and removing duplication.

8. CMS adoption & monitoring

Finally, thinking ahead to the mid-point of your implementation, you will need to prepare for ongoing content management and support mechanisms to ensure user satisfaction.

What will the frequency be for conducting review cycles of your content offering? Will your content manager be maintaining a content calendar and newsletter to plan/communicate update releases? Who are the subject matter experts accountable for refreshing knowledge offerings? 

These questions are key to ensuring your platform thrives with relevant, engaging content. A typical content journey involves: 1/ creation, 2/ storage & sharing, 3/ maintenance, and 4/ (re)use. Identifying the people and platforms in scope for certain phases throughout the lifecycle will be important to determining dependencies and process requirements.

Analytics framework

Furthermore, establishing a reporting framework for monitoring site usage can play a crucial part in optimising content performance for generating fresh, high quality material.

A quarterly report that charts user sentiment in various forms (page views, bounce rate, time on page, conversions, social shares, and comments) can be an effective way to monitor best performing content and map certain features that require intervention. You can also go a step further by conducting a recurring qualitative survey to diagnose the evolving user wish list and top priorities.

AI adoption & closing remarks

As you steer towards AI adoption and third-party integrations, it is important to note that while generative AI is developing at a staggering pace many organisations are still tied to legacy architecture and fragmented data. This tends to undermine the algorithmic effectiveness of current advancements and is likely to persist for some time until appropriate safeguards are instilled to balance quantity and utility with accuracy and security.

How might your tech solution address inaccuracy, cybersecurity and intellectual property infringement risks? What are the implications on your people in terms of re-/upskilling or even displacement? These are some of the most-cited risks in McKinsey’s global AI survey.

Adoption can be a formidable term when considering the criteria required to orchestrate a cohesive solution. But by methodically addressing the 8 facets listed above with a focus on prioritising both systemic and behavioural needs, your digital intervention is bound to grow incrementally with resounding success.