Maybe you've got a gut feeling that it's time to buy a content management system. Maybe you've gotten a demo of one and gotten general buy-in from the team. Now it's time to justify it financially.
The first thing to keep in mind is that a CMS is a tool. It is a tool that serves two purposes, so there are two angles that can be taken for justification.
First, and easiest, if most mundane, a CMS serves to wring out non-creative tasks from content development. Think about how much time is wasted in content production: routing, tracking, moving, backing up, converting from one format to another, cutting and pasting, rekeying, etc., etc. All of this takes time and an efficient publishing operation will reduce this work to a minimum by using a contemporary CMS so that more resources can be put into making the best content available. If you produce a lot of content, then these numbers may surprise you once you pull them together.
Ordinarily, publishers won't want to rock the boat with this stuff, it just causes angst and is hard for management to relate to hot topics in expanding market presence, competing with other publishing organizations, etc. However, many publishers are feeling angst anyway, and have no choice at this point. Profitability is a serious issue as is well known. But more compelling, publishers are now feeling the weight of these non-productive tasks now that electronic distribution of content has expanded so dramatically - and along with it, manual production tasks. Content must be agile, and this won't happen if production staff or offshore vendors have to touch every piece, every time.
Second, and much, much more interesting, a good CMS can put some forms of content distribution in reach that were never in reach before. In this sense, a CMS can be part of a new initiative to compete in the publishing market. For example, a traditional publisher may want to slice and dice their content to form specialized publications for niche customer segments. A licensee might be willing to pay for certain topics of content, if it can be delivered in usable form. In many cases, this was never seriously considered because it was never financially possible before - there would have been too much manual and editorial labor in finding and organizing appropirate content, and producing it in appropriate forms. But today, with a native XML CMS like RSuite, this is financially possible. And the first publishers to execute well will be able to create specialized demand and win customers.
Maybe you pay for your new CMS through ordinary savings, but take advantage of it by using it to develop new publication types. Whatever your strategy, the technology is here, is now, and for the new generation of systems, particularly RSuite CMS installed on a Mark Logic repository, the technology actually works well enough to be cost effective. We know this because our customers are starting to report savings and interesting new revenue stories to us. All we can say, then, is: go for it!
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