Our CMS Is Where Documents Go to Die, and That's Exactly How We Like It
The new Boss wants to understand our content management system. Specifically, he wants to use it to access corporate documentation. This is going to be a long morning.
"Get a strong coffee first," I tell him.
He asks why.
"Because what I'm about to describe is a graveyard. A digital graveyard. For documents."
He's sceptical, in the way that new bosses always are before reality has properly introduced itself.
The system was not selected with any input from IT. This is important context. The committee that chose it was specifically constructed from people unbothered by concerns like reliability, data integrity, or the ability to retrieve anything you've stored. What they cared about was tag highlight colours. How many colours. Whether you could add more. And whether users could have little avatar pictures next to their uploads, because apparently that encourages contribution.
Reader, it does not encourage contribution.
What it does have, in lieu of an actual index, is AI-generated tags and keywords. Sounds reasonable until you hear that these regenerate every night based on keyword frequency and something the system's developers apparently decided to call "theme matching."
Here's how that works in practice. Upload a series of documents about manila folders, which is exactly the kind of vital corporate subject that ends up documented at length. The overnight process tags them with "manila," "folders," and groups them under the theme "stationery." Fine so far. Then the PFY posts a news snippet about traffic congestion in the Philippines. Next morning, the AI has decided "Manila" and "manila" are probably a typo situation, cross-referenced "stationary traffic" with "stationery," and now your search for staples is returning a two-decade-old travel expenses claim.
"Surely you can just correct it," the Boss says.
It regenerates every night. And if you delete the offending document, the system retains the keyword and reassigns it to whatever it considers the next best match. There is no fixing this. There is only accepting it.
He asks why we don't tune the AI to stop it happening.
Why would we want to stop it happening?
The staff are devoted to this system. Half-finished report that was due a fortnight ago and your manager is chasing? Drop it in the CMS. It is, for all practical purposes, gone. Nobody is going in there looking for it. The system is better than a shredder, because at least a shredder creates evidence that shredding occurred.
The Boss mentions a certain Microsoft product that rhymes with "SharePoint." I stop him before he gets there. We don't say that name. We don't say the T word either. Those products have decades of prior art when it comes to making documents permanently inaccessible, and frankly we're not interested in the competition.
Senior management, he suggests, would never accept a system this dysfunctional.
Senior management selected the system. We also make it available to HMRC when they come calling. A forensic accountant generally lasts about three weeks before the CMS has done its work on them.
The real reason nobody replaces it is cost. It was expensive. Exactly how expensive is difficult to establish, because the original invoice is in the CMS. You can download it, but you're not going to get the same document twice. The procurement process generated somewhere north of seventeen versions: letters of engagement, counter-letters, pre-draft, draft, pre-signing, post-signing, countersigned, amended, cross-amended, legally reviewed, and at least one version that refers to another document that supersedes all previous documents and has never once surfaced in any search.
The Boss says he wants me to find it anyway.
I explain that I don't have to. It's in my contract.
He asks where my contract is.
I put it in the CMS myself. Three years ago. It has not been successfully retrieved since.