BOFH: Oh no! The CMS ate 500 pages of corporate documentation

EPISODE 17 The new Boss is keen to acquire knowledge.

So keen that he wants a quick rundown on our content management system so he can avail himself of our copious workplace documentation.

"WELL," I say, bracing myself for a long session, "first things first, you'll need to get a strong coffee." "Why?" "Because our CMS is a place where documents go to die." "Surely it can't be that-" "Oh, it's bad.

So bad that no one will ever admit to being on the selection committee that purchased it." "Were you on it?" the Boss asks pointedly.

"What, put an IT person onto a project to select an IT system to store the entirety of our electronic data? Why would you want to do that? No, a selection committee for a project of that importance needs to be made up of people unencumbered by the intellectual weights of reliability, safe data management, and backupability." "Backupability?" "You know what I mean.

Anyway, a selection committee needs to focus on the big decisions – like the highlight color of tags – and how many different tag colors there are.

And whether you can add colors.

Then there's the avatar facility." "Avatar facility?" "Yeah, you know, so your avatar appears next to any document you upload.

Apparently, it encourages people to contribute." "It doesn't sound all that ba-" "Oh, it's bad.

It doesn't have a proper index, because it uses AI to create tags and keywords dynamically." "That sounds like a pretty good ide-" "Yeah.

Though it regenerates those tags every night, based on keyword frequency and lazy theme frequency matching." "Lazy theme frequency?" "Yeah.

Say I upload a bunch of documents, each discussing something of vital importance to senior management, like, I dunno, the decline of manila folders.

AI runs through overnight and creates tags for manila and folders and then a theme keyword of stationery.

"The next day, the PFY slaps in a news item about traffic jams in the Philippines.