(from Content Management Bible, 2nd Edition by Bob Boiko (C) 2005)

A friend of mine tells a wonderful story of the company CEO who sees his daughter playing on the Internet at home. He comes to work the next morning and tells his IT department head, "We need one of those things, too." The IT head says, "I'll get right on it, sir." He walks down the hall and calls on his top manager. "The CEO wants a Web site," he says. "Can you do it?" "Sure," says the manager. "I'll get right on it."

The manager forms a rapid response team from his top systems people. For a month, the team scours the world for the top Internet products. They spend three million dollars in product and services. The manager reports to the IT head, "We've created a world-class system." The head reports to the CEO, "Sir, for only three million, we've created a world-class system," and he scribbles the URL (that the company needed to purchase from a domain name "investor" who was expecting the call) on a piece of paper. The CEO comes proudly home and shows the paper to his daughter, who's busy surfing the Web. "Here," he says. "We have a Web site, too." His daughter pulls herself out of her immersive multiplayer Web game. She types the recently bought URL into her browser's Address text box. Up comes the great new site. It consists of a blank page with the following words in the upper-left-hand corner:

. . . . . Text Goes Here . . . . .

Most IT groups just don't have the mindset or skill set to deal with content. Yet, as my story shows, their companies are calling on them to do just that. Dumb organizations expect that IT can just figure it out and produce electronic publishing technologies. Smart organizations build alternative groups that pick up where the IT group leaves off. The smartest organizations recognize that the very nature of IT is changing and are building a new awareness and skill set in their IT groups. Fortunately, such a new department doesn't need to change its name. It only needs to fully embrace its current name. For a long time, computers were called on to deal only with data, and you could blithely imagine that data was information. Information Technology groups grew up in this environment. Today, as any CEO's daughter knows, information is a whole lot more than data but no less important to the organization.

I believe that, to survive, IT groups must take their part of the responsibility for Web sites and content management systems that create sites and other publications. What's their part of the responsibility? It certainly includes installing and maintaining the data systems behind the CMS and its electronic publications. If, in addition, IT groups can rise to the challenge of dealing with information and not just with data, they could be the right place to put overall ownership of a CM effort. After all, why shouldn't IT groups be as much about information as they are about technology? Interestingly, the groups that are called ICT (Information and Communication Technology) have an even more significant name to live up to.