Posted on Mar 22, 2012 in Technology & Analytics | 0 comments

I recently spoke to several publishers at Publishing Expo in London about their content management systems, and a few gave me the usual sad story about trying to build a newsroom in-house. This is more than a “build vs. buy” issue, especially for newsrooms where the CMS is critical to the entire business operation. Failure in the newsroom is not only expensive, it can spell disaster for the company as a whole. IT project failure rates are the stuff of legend. The Standish Group, a Boston-based IT consulting firm, is famous for its annual CHAOS Report, documenting IT project failure rates (which hover around a shocking 30% success rate, with over 2/3 of the projects “Failed” or “Challenged” according to the report criteria. Statistics like these are well known to the IT and bespoke development community in the corporate IT world. But lessons from corporate IT don’t seem to have trickled into the publishing world, so let me offer a few insights into project failure and why you don’t want to build your own newsroom. First, newsroom systems are complex pieces of software; they are not simple document management systems of the kind a clever IT organization could reasonably be expected to design and build. Today’s newsrooms manage workflow, multimedia management, complex information architectures, analytics, multi-platform delivery, social media integration, and a host of other features that make them pretty complicated machines. But instead of going into the complexities of these systems, the more important insight is in understanding the difference between software developers and IT staff. A software developer is an engineer; they are trained to design and build software. IT professionals are trained to install, manage, customize, and integrate software, but they are not trained to conceive, design, and build it. The best analogy is from the automotive industry: software engineers are like automotive engineers, the folks who design cars and motorcycles for manufacturers. IT pros are mechanics, the folks who repair, maintain, and sometimes modify the cars and motorcycles designed by automotive engineers. Software engineers generally go to college to learn engineering or computer science. IT staff may well have engineering degrees, but many are vocationally...

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