Business Case for a CMS

Why Invest in a Content Management System?

There are many issues that lead organizations to consider investing in a content management system (CMS):

Does it take too long to update content online and deliver it to your customers?
Do you lack consistent branding across your website(s)?
Is outdated, redundant content leading to a poor customer experience?
Does your agency website not show up at the top of search results?
Do you lack a central database of all your Web content that keeps track of changes?
Are you re-creating content for different platforms such as Web, mobile, and mobile apps?

A CMS can address these issues and significantly improve how your agency delivers and manages digital information—positively impacting your bottom line. If implemented effectively, a CMS can deliver these results across your entire organization:

Increased Traffic and Customer Satisfaction

A CMS can help your agency produce more consistent, better content. Better content that’s updated frequently can draw more people to your website and increase engagement and customer satisfaction.

Faster Delivery of Content

Without a CMS, content updates are often done manually and require support from IT staff to post content. Updates take too long or may not happen at all. Having a modern publishing system allows you to get new content and initiatives online faster, so you can see the benefits sooner.

Broader Distribution of Content

A goal of the Digital Government Strategy and other open government policies is to make federal government information available anywhere, anytime, on any device. A CMS makes it easier and faster to deliver content via multiple devices and platforms, such as Web, social media, mobile devices and apps, and APIs. This increases your reach to new audiences and will help you meet rising expectations of your customers.

Higher Quality Control

A CMS enables individual authors across your organization to create content, but access to publish content is restricted to approved people or positions, providing centralized control of online communications across your entire organization.

Increased Sharing of Content

A CMS makes it easier to structure and tag content in a standardized way, which enables sharing and re-use of government information—both within and across agencies. This can open up vast possibilities for agencies to collaborate on related content and deliver a better customer experience to the public.

Increased Productivity

A CMS can automate many content management tasks, such as publishing press releases (see case study from Department of Education) or other recurring content (see case study from GSA). This can save time and reduce operational errors. A CMS allows your content managers to post the content themselves, speeding up the posting process and eliminating the need for additional technical staff.

Improve Site Integrity and Policy Compliance

Improve your agency’s compliance with privacy, security, accessibility, and record-keeping laws with CMS features such as centralized content storage, versioning control, and management controls over content publication. With a CMS, all content is stored in a database with date and time stamps of updates and history of who made changes.

Increases Competitive Advantage

Although federal agencies don’t compete for market share in the same way as industry, we do compete for delivering relevant and high quality content to the American public on a vast range of topics, from education to the environment to health awareness and jobs. A dynamic, changing website—powered by a CMS—creates the impression of a forward-thinking agency and allows quick responses to emerging issues that affect your mission.

Why Your Agency Needs a CMS

A CMS offers many benefits, the impact of which will be felt far beyond your Web team. Streamlined communications and better sharing of information will increase customer satisfaction, and help your agency deliver government information available anytime, anywhere, on any device, realizing the goals of the Digital Government Strategy.

Resources

Business Case for Content Management—article outlining key benefits of deploying a CMS
Business Benefits of Web Content Management—benefits listed include content quality, streamlined workflow, and content reuse
Building a Business Case for Web Content Management—marketing focus but good overview of cost and value of a centralized CMS