Content Management and Sustainability

Many people who work in the internet business are driven by technological and commercial impulses. It can be nice to look beyond these impulses and look at things from a different perspective. When looking at the CMS  market from a sustainability point of view you could say that you see a lot of waste of resources, being money, people, (computing)power, paper (!) and of course time. Let’s have a closer look and see how we can make this market a bit ‘greener’.

Angles

Sustainability has been covered in the media at an increasing rate over the last decade. Propelled by developments such as the running out of natural resources, mass consumption in emerging economies, "An inconvenient Truth" and driven by the ever growing world population. Sustainability can be looked at from many angles. What matters is the lifelong balance that is strived for. Give a little, take a little.

In the corporate world

Small companies and multinationals have also picked up the trend to create a sustainable way of working. Lots of small companies have even chosen this as a unique proposition to distinguish them from their competition. Multinationals jumped on the sustainability train partly because they are forced by governments and also because it’s good for their PR. Thinking in a sustainable way is good I think, but it should be our second nature. Just like using time and money effectively. Using sustainability as a unique selling point can be dangerous and creates bad karma in my opinion. So that’s not where I was heading in case you were wondering : -)

4 Rs

There are three main methods that can be used to achieve sustainability:

• Reduce
• Reuse
• Recycle

These are also known as the “3 Rs”. Once these terms were introduced people quickly came up with a 4th R: Rethink. Rethinking is never a bad idea, so let’s include that as well.

What about Content Management?

When looking at the resources used in a content management system and its users I compiled a top-5 list of things we could do to achieve a form of sustainability while using a CMS.

• Reusing assets: texts, images, documents: all content should follow the principle “create once, use many”. Content Management in general, but of course also digital asset management, document management and all other flavors are your most important assets, so use, reuse and distribute them wisely.  Practically this means you need a central (re)source to keep your original documents/images/etc. and reuse this source to publish various diversions of the content in various formats. Copying or duplicating instead of reusing from source: bad idea.
• Reduce actions & clicks: the amount of actions an editor has to perform to fulfill his/her tasks should be as small as possible. This is all about time, our most valuable resource. (And if it’s our boss’s time it’s even worse)
• Reduce systems: processors and servers cost power and money. Optimize your CMS to use as little power as possible. Optimize your processes and software as much as possible to avoid requiring  4 backup servers in case your main server fails. New trends such as SAAS/PAAS, cloud computing and virtualization are also partly here because all the city size data centers we are building all around the world. They usually have more intelligent fallback mechanisms other than server redundancy.
• Recycle your websites: when launching a new design for your website you should recycle as much as possible. A strict separation between logic, content and presentation is a prerequisite and technology such as an open content repository and modular templates and stylesheets will be your friend.
• Rethink the use of offline manuals and trainings: put all manuals online in a well readable and well searchable format. Saves a lot of paper and has many advantages because the documentation is always up to date and it’s easier to find information.

Matter

I must admit that most of these improvements sound like open doors. But does it matter? Look at your own situation and can you honoustly say that you always live by these guidelines? Most companies and individuals cannot, I'm afraid.

So let's make this work: whether you are developing web applications, or working with a content management system or standing in front of the Hummer dealer…think about the 4 Rs. It’s a mindset, a way to look at things. In my opinion you can never go wrong with this.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Rethink.