User Centric Content Management
Some content management practitioners are suspicious about words such as 'knowledge' and 'abstraction' .
They can become very defensive when a technical discussion revolves around intangible concepts, because it's like entering a metaphysical dimension which cannot be grasped, and that can be perceived as distant, alien even, to real IT issues.
Of course 'the user' is important, but it's kind of an indirect consequence, a byproduct, or a spectator, rather than the main actor.
Maybe this is why in a poster that ‘aiims’ at representing and depicting the content management universe, the user is not contemplated.
Maybe this is why, irrespective of how good a poster is, it always appears awkwardly flat.
Because relevance, context and impact of each entity are determined by the user and its usage of the content
When users are not represented, and usage not sufficiently defined, then technology becomes the self referencing and self gratifying exercise that so many IT people live on.
Content lifecycle phases and their supporting technologies, should be represented differently depending on which category of user is being addressed.
When the user is placed at the center of the world, the entire perspective changes.
All around the user, is content, in various manifestations, each admittedly with lots of quirks.
Everything else that exist - from protocol to repository, from script to tools - must be positioned in relation to usage , and aimed at supporting the content-user interaction.
A systematic analysis of this vision, enables the expert to determine the weight and impact of CM technologies and tools, and a dynamic the pattern that, otherwise, remains elusive.
Synchronizing all the components of a user centric model reveals usage patterns that demonstrate and quantify the effectiveness, or lack of effectiveness of the technology tools and techniques adopted.
Content Management is elusive, because of its extreme complexity deriving from new tools, new behaviours, and unprecedented patterns of interaction between users and technologies require a sophisticated modeling tool to be determined in their state of flux.
Key to User Centric Content Management Model, is the right identification of various user classes, and their simultaneous representation to which correspond different patterns of interaction, and different supporting tools.
This 'multiuser environment' is not sufficiently addressed nor specified in typical implementations.
Key elements of a User Centric Content Model
Classes of Users (attributes, behaviours, skills)Classes of Content (file types, structured, unstructured etc)Usage (user - content interaction) Policy (rules, protocols, procedures)Technology (architecture, tools, standards) Each class of user will yield a different usage pattern, each pattern should be the basis for requirements specification. Requirements, lets not forget, are implementation independent.
Whatever satisfies user requirements economically, should be shortlisted as a possible technology choice, everything else, should be avoided or minimised.
Essential Classes
Content (superclass)
Various classes of usage depending on the user/content interaction, each usage should be modeled and represented differently
Usage determines: policy and technical requirement specification
Architecture is the overall representation of all patterns of usageAll other entities should be a function of the essential entities above, and their relationships to each other should be modeled based on the emerging dependencies where the causal relationship is 'Usage'.
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