I have recently been talking in my presentations about organizations opting to do nothing about their Content problem. When looking at the prospect of rolling out a new Content Management System (CMS), it is a valid option. There is only one issue with that choice.

Each year, choosing to do nothing becomes a worse option.

Let’s take a moment to discuss why doing nothing is riskier now than it was in the past.

Two Starting Points

Every organization that feels the need for a new CMS has one of two situations taking place within their business. They either have a legacy system that is not meeting their needs or they have nothing in place. Most have a blend of these two scenarios, but we’ll make it an either/or situation to simplify the discussion.

If they have a legacy system in place, the problems with waiting are clear. With each passing month, the organization is:

• Falling further behind the technology curve. The current technical limitations become more glaring over time.
• Spending more on maintenance costs. The older a system, and the hardware supporting it, the more it costs to maintain. Talent to maintain the systems becomes harder to find, increasing human capital costs as well.
• Creating more content to migrate. Migrations are not easy. They take a lot of time to execute and with each passing month, there is more Content to deal with when the time comes to change.

If there is no system in place, that means that people are finding ways to work with Content that makes management and governance difficult to accomplish. This will happen with poor legacy systems as well; it just happens with all Content when nothing is in place.

One issue that applies to either scenarios is the losing of any business advantages to be gained from implementing a new system. Each passing month removes any competitive advantage to be gained, or worse, grants another month of advantage to your competitors. If there are discussions about a new CMS taking place, there is a pain being felt that needs to be addressed.

Why It Matter More Now

Ten years ago, not moving forward wasn’t too bad. The replacement system was likely to be as challenging to use as the system it replaced. When people looked for a work-around, they would use email or network file shares.

Now things are worse.

While email and file shares are still used, the cloud has compounded the problem. At least with email, copies of the organization’s Content was still on the company’s infrastructure. It was theoretically possible to find it. Now, with the cloud, it is not in the data center. When a person leaves, that content is gone.

This isn’t just a DropBox issue either. Content may reside in Google, Box, or any of a number of other cloud-based file sharing technologies. While you can decide to use one of these tools in order to prevent that content being “lost”, you are only treating the symptom and not the actual problem.

Why are users deciding to use these tools in the first place?

Don’t Wait

It is becoming clear to me that the costs of doing nothing are going up. Before, you could argue that doing nothing kept you off the 3-5 year buy-deploy-fix-replace roller coaster that many organizations seemed to ride in an endless loop. Now with Content escaping the organization in more ways every day, getting down to the core of your organization’s Content needs is more important than ever.

Do you know where all your organization’s Content is located? Shouldn’t you?