Program

The State of the CM Union - 9am - Noon

 These are exciting and challenging times for the Content Management industry - vendor consolidation, fundamental changes in the way people engage, the ubiquity of tools like SharePoint, the debate over the very definition of what makes a CMS - all as the discipline of managing content matures and emerges from IT.

We get the ball rolling on the pre-conference workshops with representatives from the CM Pros Board (including Scott Liewehr and Ian Truscott) and leading guest speakers (including Lisa Welchman) to look at the big picture of what it means to be a CM professional today. We’ll take a look at the trends and offer our perspectives.

We'll also be revealing the results of our survey, 'CMState' - where we've called upon the 13,000+ members of the CM Pros extended community to tell us what's really affecting them, their organizations and their industry. We believe it to be the first and largest survey of content management professionals of its kind.

We won't just be talking about the technology, the vendors and the strategies, but also about our profession - what it means to be a content management professional. We'll talk openly about our industry, and how the CM Pros organization can help and what we have planned. As our industry moves and reinvents - so must we.

In this session we will:

• Exclusively reveal the results of our CMState survey; what are the real trends and challenges our industry is facing - in the words of the people facing them
• Dissect some of those challenges and trends with thought-provoking presentations and workshop activities
• Help you connect with your profession as a content management practitioner
• Give you a primer for the rest of the conference - the sorts of questions we think you should have in mind as you enter the sessions and network with your peers

We look forward to you joining us. In the meantime, how about participating in our survey? It's open to all and we'll send you the results in a whitepaper - http://www.cmstate.com.

Proving the ROI of a CMS - 1pm - 4pm

One of the most critical, complex, and widely overlooked steps of content management implementations. Everyone is facing challenges in getting content management initiatives approved.

Turn that challenge into opportunity by learning to effectively calculate the costs, savings and return on CMS investments. We will visit aspects from the simple (e.g., time savings) to the more complex (e.g., lifetime value of a customer and driving better lead conversion) in order to determine a demonstrable ROI. 

There's more pressure now than ever to have your websites perform. Money is scarce and any dollar leaving must come back in multiples. So how do you prove an ROI with a Content Management System (CMS) and get your site performing?

These are just some examples of the overall measurement metrics to be considered that deal with tangible increases in revenue or reduction in costs:

• Can getting the right message to the right audience at the right time help increase sales?
• Can putting ownership of the content in the hands of the reduce time to market, increase sales/marketing success and/or reduce the cost of IT involvement/cost in making updates?
• Does IT spend time on non-value added services (e.g.,) that could be better spent on business building projects?
• Can offline process be put online to reduce operational expenses (e.g., paper-based forms with man hours to collect and process moving to online)?
• Does an online presence reduce the amount of data processing errors from offline processes?
• Can training time be reduced

There are also less tangible benefits of a CMS:

• Improve your brand’s consistency by utilizing a CMS template approach and locking to a style guide
• Content re-use can improve messaging across different methods (e.g., website, email campaigns and print)
• Understanding user behavior can improve the overall user experience
• Enhanced customer satisfaction by better controlling the user experience