L'offerta internazionale di sistemi di content management (CMS). I risultati di una indagine empirica

Nowadays, organizations are operating in a complex environment, whose complexity is partially due to the exponential growth of the volume of information they have to manage. Therefore, companies are seeking new technical solutions in order to solve the problem of information overload.
Content management systems (CMS) provide an optimal solution by organizing information and, mostly, creating and managing enterprises’ knowledge. Nevertheless there is a big confusion about the functionalities that characterise CMS and about the differences with less performing products.
This paper aims to show the mismatches between companies’ needs and those information management products which are often called CMS even if they are not.
For this reason the authors first do a theoretical comparison between the functionalities of CMS and those of the systems they are often confused with. Then they show the results retrieved by an empirical research on 22 products offered by international vendors.
By using an original scheme, enterprises’ needs in terms of information collection, management and publication and of knowledge management are compared with the functionalities of the aforementioned systems. Then, Content Management products are analyzed, compared and evaluated by using a special table created to point out the actual functionalities of the products offered on the market, despite of vendors’ declarations. The paper conclusions show how, on the demand side, companies’ needs are growing in a confused frame; at the same time the supply side keeps on feeding this confusion bringing down companies’ satisfaction in regard to knowledge and information management.