A couple years ago there was an article from wsj.com under the Cubical Culture section that struck a chord with me: “Management to IT: We don’t like you either.” As evidenced by the title, the inherent conflict between IT and management is never ending. And even though the article was published 5 years ago, we still see the conflict arise in many publishing and media organizations.

Management today at many companies expect more out of IT organizations than in previous years. It's no longer acceptable to request an 18- to 24-month project life cycle and not show a return on investment quickly. If IT continues to do these types of things, they will render themselves useless and out of a job. The old days of “we can build it better than any product on the market” is long gone.

For publishers I have seen a shift over the past 5 years related to this build-vs-buy mindset. If your IT organization is still touting that they can do it better, cheaper, faster by building a critical system (e.g., CMS) from scratch… run, run away as fast as you can. Given the wealth of tool sets available and the openness of many products on the market, why would an organization ever take the build-it-from-scratch approach? I'm genuinely interested in this and welcome your dialogue in the comments section.

I’m not biased when I make these statements. I’ve seen a renewed interest by publishers to license a product and show a return on investment quickly. This has been our mantra since day one with RSuite CMS. Our goal was to make a highly configurable CMS that can manage any content and be operational in a short period of time (under 12 weeks) to meet core requirements. Yes, there will be some organizations that require 12-month projects to migrate from one system to the next, but overall the trend has been implementing a new system, even for larger projects, in a much shorter time frame. The only way IT will be able to handle this shortened timeline is to license a software product that meets 70% of their core requirements pretty much out of the box such as RSuite CMS.

I can certainly understand why IT organizations at publishers want to build their own CMS. First, it’s fun to build software. Second, it gives more of a feeling of accomplishment than integrating third-party software. Finally, a programmer can have a job for life just making endless changes to the software (ok, that was a cheap shot).

Management today needs to understand that IT does have value and IT needs to understand that management has the right to ask questions. Reducing the stress between these organizations is critical to publishers making the right technology choices and implementing new systems on time and within budget.

Let us show you how RSuite CMS satifies management's desire to demonstrate ROI on CMS investment and IT's desire to play with cool technology.

RSI Content Solutions is recognized on the sixth annual Inc. 500|5000 list, an exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent entrepreneurs.  RSI Content Solutions joins Yelp, yogurt maker Chobani, Giftcards.com, KIND, and famed hatmaker Tilly’s, among other prominent brands featured on this year’s list.

“While I’m personally thrilled to be recognized by the Inc. 500|5000, it really is recognition that we provide our customers with an outstanding publishing solution,” stated Barry Bealer, CEO, co-founder, and president of RSI Content Solutions. “And the team we’ve created is responsible for serving our customers with the industry’s only content management system for publishers and ensuring it meets their quality demands.”

In a stagnant economic environment, median growth rate of 2012 Inc. 500|5000 companies remains an impressive 97%. The companies on this year’s list report having created over 400,000 jobs in the past 3 years, and aggregate revenue among the honorees reached $299 billion.

"Now, more than ever, we depend on Inc. 500/5000 companies to spur innovation, provide jobs, and drive the economy forward.  Growth companies, not large corporations, are where the action is,” explains Inc. Editor Eric Schurenberg.

RSI Content Solutions, a leading content management system software provider, announced the addition of David Saracco as vice president, business development to expand the RSuite CMS sales team and help further develop key publishing markets. He brings more than 20 years’ experience having worked at global publishing companies as well as publishing service and technology companies. David will be based at the RSI Content Solutions headquarters in Audubon, Pennsylvania.

“David brings a wealth of publishing technology experience having held leadership positions at Elsevier Health Science in their production department as well as other publishing service and technology providers throughout his career” stated Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder at RSI Content Solutions. “We expect David to hit the ground running and very much drive our business development efforts in key markets.”

“I am thrilled to join such an accomplished team” said David Saracco. “RSuite CMS is the best content management system for publishers on the market today and I look forward to helping RSI grow the business even more.”

From Wednesday, May 30th to Friday, June 1st, RSuite CMS will be exhibiting at Society for Scholarly Publishing's 34th Annual Meeting in Arlington, Virginia at booth 213.

The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), founded in 1978, is a nonprofit organization formed to promote and advance communication among all sectors of the scholarly publication community through networking, information dissemination, and facilitation of new developments in the field.

Schedule your appointment with RSI today at the 34th SSP Annual Meeting and see how publishers have done the following things with RSuite CMS:

• Secure their content assets in one central repository
• Search, find, and re-use content
• Automate workflows
• Improved editorial and production processes
• Pioneer your digital publishing strategy

 

Tweet @RSICMS from #SSP.

Every once in a while a company finds itself evolving and in need of a makeover. Really Strategies reached that point. The company's new name is RSI Content Solutions. "When we founded the company back in 2000, we were 100% focused on XML technology consulting to publishers and media companies," stated Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder of RSI Content Solutions. "Today, 99% of our revenue is from our software products and related services and we needed to reflect that in our company name."

The name has changed but the dedication to provide world-class content solutions to publishers, media companies, and technical publishers remains.

The new web site reflects the name change and also brings together our three content management software products---RSuite CMS, DocZone Book Publisher, DocZone DITA Publisher---under one url: www.rsicms.com.  Additionally, the new web site highlights more of our customer success stories. When our customers make statements like this, we want people to know!

“RSuite CMS combined with the DITA for Publishers framework is helping us achieve the holy grail of single-source publishing: XML content automatically delivered to InDesign and to multiple ebook delivery formats. The transformations from structured content to designed content have been seamless, allowing our staff to focus on content and product development.”
--Holly Gilly, Vice President for Product Development, Human Kinetics

"RSuite CMS is 200 times faster than our old system. The efficiencies we've gained are hard to believe."
--Keith Lawrenz, Senior Business Analyst, SAGE Publications, Inc.

"We selected DocZone because it is the only DITA-specific CMS available as a hosted solution that met all of our requirements."
--Nancy Thompson, CMS Implementation Specialist, Epson America

"We saw the time for PDF proofs drop from a week to just a few minutes with DocZone Book Publisher."
--Stephen Driver, Vice President of Production Services, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Over the next week, this blog will also have a face lift to reflect our new brand. We'll share more customer case studies as welll as highlight a series of webinars that kick off in April. Thanks for your interest thus far and stay tuned!