Cost Savings
Manual web maintenance is slow, costly, and a great drain on managers' precious time. As a consequence, changes are made infrequently, perhaps as a total re-build exercise for the entire site, or an entire section.
Below, we look at the costs for each stage of the process:
| Activity | Manual Expenditure | Saving Using Web CM |
Gathering Contributions | The seeking out of contributions and then collating them, usually undertaken by an administrator. | Contributions are entered directly by authorised business users, without the need for intermediary resources. |
Preparation | The conversion of content into a form suitable for web presentation. Often this is outsourced to a design agency. | Content is applied to pre-built templates by non-technical staff, and may be an automated process. Savings in outsourcing costs can be considerable. |
Approval | Reviewing, proofreading, activity chasing, version tracking etc. Highly disruptive and demanding on mangers’ time. | Workflow makes the approval process fast and efficient, automatically tracking progress and greatly reducing time and effort. |
Publication | Technical maintenance, such as navigation controls, metadata, page linking etc. May be the ‘bottleneck’ in the process, performed by an internal or external web specialist. | Business users themselves can continuously make changes, preview their impact and update the site, without technical intervention. This eliminates the dependency, freeing up I.T. resources for other tasks. |
Administration | Managing and maintaining all the website’s resources, versions and user access security. | All resources are placed within a repository under version control and user enrolment functions simplify security maintenance. |
Subsequent Access to Information | The cost in time for employees, partners and customers to find relevant and timely information. | Fast and efficient information retrieval is achieved through collating content and automating navigation and search facilities. Many organisations cite this as the single justification for their intranet systems. |
