You are absolutely correct. What typically happens is a company will bring in a focused solution like a contract management system. Because of its focus, it is able to do its job pretty well.
As that tool is successful, people will start thinking, "I sure wish I could do that with my [Word docs, Photoshop files, video files, etc]," and they start looking. Then they find Content Management and think they've found the perfect solution (and it really does sound good on paper).
But there are three fundamental problems: Unlike the contract management system, you generally don't use the CMS to create or edit documents[1], so you always have a point of impedance between the authoring and the management. Now you are relying on people to "do the right thing", and the right thing isn't the easiest thing.
The next problem is managing versions of the documents gets ugly and confusing pretty quickly. Most file formats we use today don't diff well, so the benefits of e.g. seeing just the changes from v2 to v3 are hard-to-impossible to implement.
The final problem is the content lifecycle of most documents is very fluid. Whereas a contract has a well-known lifecycle with a point in time that it is DONE (e.g. the contract is signed) and a well-known set of approvers (companies generally understand their money-spending approval process well), most documents people interact with follow very ad hoc processes. Invariable, people try to build formal processes out of those ad hoc processes, and people get frustrated. Given the first problem (authoring outside of management), people can easily make an end-run around the tool, perhaps putting a document into it only when they absolutely have to.
Anyway, I could go on for a long time, but my take-away from my experience in content management is to solve small, well-defined problems and forget about the siren's call of "all our documents managed in bliss" because it won't happen.
1. Like contract management, web content management tends to be more successful, because the authoring environment is usually the management environment.
Comments
You are absolutely correct. What typically happens is a company will bring in a focused solution like a contract management system. Because of its focus, it is able to do its job pretty well.
As that tool is successful, people will start thinking, "I sure wish I could do that with my [Word docs, Photoshop files, video files, etc]," and they start looking. Then they find Content Management and think they've found the perfect solution (and it really does sound good on paper).
But there are three fundamental problems: Unlike the contract management system, you generally don't use the CMS to create or edit documents[1], so you always have a point of impedance between the authoring and the management. Now you are relying on people to "do the right thing", and the right thing isn't the easiest thing.
The next problem is managing versions of the documents gets ugly and confusing pretty quickly. Most file formats we use today don't diff well, so the benefits of e.g. seeing just the changes from v2 to v3 are hard-to-impossible to implement.
The final problem is the content lifecycle of most documents is very fluid. Whereas a contract has a well-known lifecycle with a point in time that it is DONE (e.g. the contract is signed) and a well-known set of approvers (companies generally understand their money-spending approval process well), most documents people interact with follow very ad hoc processes. Invariable, people try to build formal processes out of those ad hoc processes, and people get frustrated. Given the first problem (authoring outside of management), people can easily make an end-run around the tool, perhaps putting a document into it only when they absolutely have to.
Anyway, I could go on for a long time, but my take-away from my experience in content management is to solve small, well-defined problems and forget about the siren's call of "all our documents managed in bliss" because it won't happen.
1. Like contract management, web content management tends to be more successful, because the authoring environment is usually the management environment.