Byrne Tony Byrne

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Major consolidation of UK gov't websites

11-Jan-2007

Tags: Web Content and Experience Management, Building Business Case, Industry Standards, Marketplace at Large, Content Manager Enterprise Edition, Government

The UK government CIO has just announced an audacious plan to collapse more than 551 (out of 951) government websites down to 26. The other 400 will come under review too. Doubtless this will save on hardware and software, and perhaps fulfill the long-desired (but rarely realized) dream of Web CMS as a shared service. In my experience, publishing processes are harder to standardize than more operational processes, and this puts a premium on the flexibility of any common platform to satisfy diverse use-cases. (I've argued separately that CMS tools typically excel at only a handful of scenarios.) Nevertheless, at the end of the day you have to justify consolidation in terms of value to the customer. The key issue here is metadata normalization, and the UK is ahead of most other governments in this regard. Not surprisingly, CMS vendors are positioning themselves among the favored list of government suppliers in what has now become a higher-stakes marketplace. Mediasurface has already pinged me with its own take... [Update: AIIM's Atle Skjekkeland says that Norway has taken this a step further.]

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