Inorder to achieve this level of control, every piece of information an organization is-sues has to originate from within the CMS database, and thus everyone writing forthe organization has to get used to creating, storing, sharing, and publishing withinthe system, which means that nearly everyone has to change his or her writingpractices to fit inside the CMS’s framework. Changing the way people work is animmensely difficult task, especially if the changes most clearly benefit the organi-zation while doing nothing clearly beneficial for the individual users.

while the separation of form fromcontent is not a new concept, “no content is [truly] free of presentation” and that“[c]ontent and presentation are never separated.” Within the content managementcontext, therefore, Clark suggests understanding this separation in two ways: (a) ascontent being complete texts, and presentation being output structure, navigation,and visual style; and (b) as content being content modules, and presentation beingoutput structure, navigation, visual style, and genre definition.

The most important part ofthis whole puzzle—the end user, i.e., technical communicator—is often left out ofthe process. The very expressioncontent managementexcludes any idea of writingor communicating and focuses on information independently of the people whoproduce or consume it.

No longer can writers think in terms of texts or even publications. They haveto start thinking in terms of asset management: the strict separation of form andcontent to allow for seamless repurposing of content, data mining, reduplication ofeffort control mechanisms, and writing in a collaborative environment with multi-ple authors and multiple purposes feeding off of and contributing to a conglomera-tion of assets that collectively make up a content archive.

For a content management system to be successful, Hall (2001) argues, two im-portant factors must be emphasized: end users (documentation specialists) anduser needs.

What also gets lost amid all this focus on technology (systems and soft-ware) is the content—“not just any content, but useful content”

Another factor contributing to the difficulty of CMS implementation is thatmost content management systems take a systems-based approach toward manag-ing content/information/knowledge at the cost of considerations for content anduser needs. As Jefferey-Poulter points out, most CMSs do not allow for a widerange of exception and improvisation and may eventually demotivate users

The purpose of CMS software is to cen-tralize all communications practices, to standardize layout and design, and to in-crease efficiency when it come to distributing information, ensuring that the com-pany stays on message and does not issue redundant or conflicting statements. Inorder to achieve this level of control, every piece of information an organization is-sues has to originate from within the CMS database, and thus everyone writing forthe organization has to get used to creating, storing, sharing, and publishing withinthe system, which means that nearly everyone has to change his or her writingpractices to fit inside the CMS’s framework. Changing the way people work is animmensely difficult task, especially if the changes most clearly benefit the organi-zation while doing nothing clearly beneficial for the individual users.

We started our work on this special issuewith a rather ambitious mission—to bring together some diverse perspectives oncontent management and CMSs, to both theorize and operationalize the contentmanagement practice, and to rationalize our participation in the broad domain ofcontent management discourse. Grounded on the premise that technical communi-cation requires information and knowledge management, this special issue is oneof the first systematic and deliberate attempts to extend our perspectives, both the-oretical and practical, about technical communication from the relatively staticsphere of document design to the more dynamic horizon of content (informa-tion/knowledge) management.