A new CMS every 3 years?

In a distant past (1999 – 2002) I worked at a CMS vendor. In those 3 years I travelled around Europe and experienced a few customers with projects that did not end up meeting expectations and consequently sooner or later they decided to change CMS (again).

After a short stint in a different market (content security), I founded my company back in 2003. Initially I did mostly consulting. In my first speaking engagements in my new vendor-neutral role, I repeatedly mentioned that the CMS industry was young and immature. Back in 2003 I remember industry pundits saying that on average organisations change their CMS every 3 – 5 years.

Fast forward to late 2008. It has been more than 5 years and as an organisation we help many enterprises around the world selecting the right CMS. This year it will be about 20 public or private organisations alone and very few of those have had their CMS for more than 5 years. When I spoke at Geneva Web Group in early October, the audience seemed shocked when I started my presentation by saying that they should not plan for their CMS to be used longer than 3 years. Earlier this week I talked to the CIO of a large Danish company which selected a commercial CMS in 2004, but in 2007 migrated to a home-grown solution and are now again working on selecting a new CMS.

I’ve certainly learned much over the last 10 years in this industry. The CMS marketplace has also matured somewhat, but here’s the main reason you will probably change your CMS in 3 years:

• Your requirements will be substantially different in 2012
• You might realize that your current CMS has too many shortcomings
• Upgrading to a new version might be more expensive than changing to another CMS
• Your CMS vendor might go bankrupt, get acquired and consequently product development might stop

Selecting the wrong CMS will only make matters worse, but my key advise here is to set the right expectation and also avoid strategic enterprise deals.