It’s been a hectic past couple of weeks juggling travel, clients, baby, blogging, etc. – with the latter suffering the most.

I had an interesting dinner with James Robertson of Step Two who was in Vancouver for the IA Summit. Over sushi and other nibbles at the Blue Water Café we discussed and debated the process for determining client organizational requirements for content management, and specifically workflow.

James isn’t a fan of surveys or focus groups. So, we agreed to disagree. But James has developed a very interesting process for working with a client to document and  prioritize an organization’s requirements for implementing a content management system. You’ll have to hire him to learn the full details but it involves locking the organization in a room for a full day or two and using cards (representing each functional requirement for a CMS, for example, workflow) and using glass beads to mark or ‘weight’ each of the top requirements (a few dozen in all).

The spicy tuna roll was most agreeable and so too was our joint conclusion of CMS workflow: everyone wants workflow, but almost no one uses it. With rare exception, most content is controlled by very few who use offline systems such as email to solicit and garner content approvals and edits – rendering built-in CMS workflow as redundant and often unnecessary.

“Somehow we need to spread the word that the "accepted wisdom" around workflow is wrong, and that new approaches must be innovated” says Robertson (see Workflow: we have a problem). “Workflow does, of course, work in certain circumstances. Where there is a well-defined, consistent and repeatable business processes, workflow rules can be used to automate them. This is the exception, however, with few (if any) editorial processes working this way for general web content.”

In my personal experience, the top priority of most CMS publishers is a true WSIWYG editor. Everyone promises and advertises a simple, user-friendly editor, but very, very few actually deliver. Of particular priority is a very simple if not automatic feature that strips out all MS-Word code (or cleans tags) and a simple to use syndication manager that allows the content manager to publish one piece of content in multiple places.

If you’re tighter on money than time, Step Two has a handy do-it-yourself Content Management Requirements Toolkit for aiding in the selection and implementation of a CMS.

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I'm presently back in Toronto speaking this morning at the 2006 Information Highways conference. I'm co-presenting a client intranet case study Turning the dream into reality: Harnessing people power to create a high productivity intranetwith Andre Robillard, CIO for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (makers of CANDU nuclear reactors). Their intranet has come a long way since I first started working with them two years ago... tomorrow I'll provide the detailed highlights of a troubled intranet turned high-powered employee portal.