Analyze Before You Act: CMS and Knowledge Transfer

Enterprise Content Management in Information Systems Research

“…Despite years of assertions that technical communicators are well-positioned to play leadership roles in content management design and implementation (Johnson and Fowler 2008;Wick 2000), scholars are just beginning to develop best practices for fitting all of these needs into our curricula, and mainstream textbooks are just beginning to catch on and catch up. A consensus is emerging that not only technical communicators, but all students who work in organizations that use such technologies should be well versed in the theories and tools of writing (Eble 2008;Hart-Davidson 2010).…”

Content Management in the Workplace

“…From the outset of the project, we sought to create a CMS that paralleled, rather than diverged from, the AO's established writing practices. Heeding Johnson and Fowler's (2009) advice to identify the flow of knowledge before introducing a technical change, we worked with AO writers to document their practices and let what we learned drive our development of the CMS. Despite this effort to create a CMS that mirrored existing writing practices, our analysis of the data from writer workflows, profiles, and narratives suggested that the CMS had caused disruptions in the AO writers' work.…”