CMS - Laying the Foundation

We're about a year into our content management system (CMS) implementation and there are questions on what benefits we have had. In thinking about it, I can honesty say, as of today there has been very little apparent benefit. We have got the system up and running, organized files, migrated them into our system, digitized reports, and most importantly have not crashed our business processes in doing so (the last is probably the most important). The benefit has been in laying the foundation. From this foundation we can now build the house.

I just left a meeting with our IT folks. There was a lot of excited conversation and plans for the near-term implementation of workflows, external document sharing, and web content management (both for the intranet and internet sites). We've also had discussions on long-term items like customer information systems, business process management, and file retention management. The fact that we built such a strong foundation allows us to consider or move forward. From these items, we'll see the benefits of the CMS.