Today's CMS market leaders, Vignette and Interwoven, offer all-encompassing (and expensive) products of mind-boggling complexity, designed to handle every possible workflow with a host of versioning, notification, authorization, and control mechanisms thrown in. Vignette even offers an extended line that incorporates CRM, portal, mobile, and commerce modules. Both companies have large professional services organizations and system integration partners--and you need them to wrestle these monsters into submission.

To see where content management systems went wrong, consider the twisted tale of ERP, which years ago promised to pull the entire enterprise under one big client/server umbrella. At first, the value proposition was that the same business rules should be adopted across all departments using the system--and those rules would be more or less dictated by the ERP software. That was a tough sell, so corporations spent many millions hiring Big Six consultants who took years to rework ERP software to fit existing processes--even when those processes were outmoded, inefficient, or just plain weird. Once all the customization was done, the software simply reinforced the wrong way of doing things.

Now fast-forward to content management, which addresses a new medium that evolved quickly and chaotically. Often, people who spontaneously decided they knew all about the Web made up processes on the fly--involving too many people, or the wrong people, or so many production stages that users spent more time managing content than producing it. Ask people who use a big CMS and you hear the word "overkill" again and again. Why? Usually because these systems were built or modified to mirror the Byzantine politics of corporate Web sites, where everyone wants their own turf and effective centralized control simply doesn't exist.

The moral of this story? Model rational processes before applying software. With a CMS, if you limit access to the right people, you run less risk of duplicate or lackluster content and increase the likelihood the site will be a coherent whole. The result can be a reduction not only in the number of seats, but also in software licensing costs: Dozens of mid-market CMS applications have sprung up that sling content beautifully--they just lack the capacity to handle overwrought workflows you don't need.

The Web isn't that new anymore. Few people still argue that putting large quantities of marketing material online (still the main function of the vast majority of Web sites) requires a hugely expensive, complicated process that defies common sense. If the cost to produce your site is raising red flags--or if cuts have already been made--use the opportunity to streamline the process and explore new software that fits the scale of your operation. The heyday of ERP-style software monoliths and multilevel bureaucracy has passed--it's time to clean house and use tools appropriate for the straightforward job of managing and delivering Web content.

Has your Web production process outgrown its usefulness? Are you exploring alternatives? E-mail Eric or Talk Back below.