For nearly two decades, I’ve watched higher education institutions evaluate content management systems the same way they might evaluate a word processor.

Can it create pages? Can it publish content? Does it support workflows? Can multiple people edit at once?

Those are valid questions, sure, but they’re also the wrong ones.

A modern CMS should certainly publish content. But saying that’s its primary purpose is a bit like saying Excel exists to store numbers. Technically true, and completely beside the point.

Publishing content is one of the things every CMS does. The question I keep coming back to, in nearly every conversation I have with institutional leaders, is more useful:

What role does your CMS play in helping your organization achieve its goals?

A Website Is Not a Collection of Pages

Most organizations stopped thinking of their website as an online marketing brochure a long time ago, and for good reasons.

Your higher ed website recruits students. It generates leads. It supports current clients, improves search visibility, drives donations, and protects your reputation. In many organizations, it has become one of the most valuable assets they own.

Yet the platform behind it often gets judged as though its sole job is to publish pages. That’s like evaluating an ERP system based solely on whether it can store invoices. Wouldn’t that be missing the point?

I notice this gap most clearly in higher education, where the stakes are unusually high and the web ecosystem is unusually messy: dozens of departments, hundreds of contributors, content aimed at prospective students, current students, faculty, alumni, and donors, often on the same page. Would you consider that a publishing challenge or an operational one?

Organizations Are Starting to Recognize This

One of the more interesting shifts I’ve observed is where responsibility for the institutional website now lives.

Historically, websites fell under IT, because they were viewed as technology. Later, it was moved under Marketing, because they were seen as communication tools. That picture seems to be changing.

More institutions are moving website responsibility into Enrollment Management or other divisions focused squarely on institutional growth. Every institution is different, so I can’t say that this is universal. But the trend reflects a change in mindset.

Leadership is beginning to see the website for what it is: not infrastructure, not a marketing channel, but one of the institution’s most important strategic assets. It’s where prospective students research programs, compare schools, weigh financial aid, and decide whether to take the next step.

Once you see it that way, the conversation changes. Instead of “Can we publish pages?” leaders start asking:

• Is our content helping prospective students make informed decisions?
• Are we reducing friction across the enrollment journey?
• Can we respond quickly as priorities shift?
• Do we know our content is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy?
• Are we improving outcomes, or just maintaining pages?

Again, publishing is only a small part of the actual job.

The Real Job of a CMS

The purpose of a CMS is to help an organization operate its digital presence.

Notice I didn’t say “build” its website. Most websites get redesigned every four or five years, but they get operated every single day.

Every day, content changes, people leave, departments reorganize, policies evolve, programs launch, accessibility standards change, and search engines move the goalposts. And now, AI is rewriting how people find information in the first place. You get the picture. 

Your CMS should help you manage all of that. If it doesn’t, it isn’t solving the hardest part of the problem. It’s simply helping you publish while leaving the operational burden to everyone else.

I’ve seen this play out again and again. An institution invests in a shiny redesign, feels great for about eighteen months, and then watches the same problems creep back: inconsistent content, unclear ownership, and a web team stretched too thin to keep up. In almost every case, the way the platform is being used, configured, or evaluated is, not the platform itself.

Publishing Is Easy, but Operating Is Hard.

Anyone can publish a page. That’s standard. 

The hard part comes later:

• Keeping thousands of pages accurate over time
• Ensuring every department follows the same accessibility standards
• Preventing brand guidelines from eroding under hundreds of well-meaning contributors
• Knowing which content hasn’t been reviewed in three years
• Stopping ten conflicting versions of the same information from appearing across the site
• Helping hundreds of people produce consistent, trustworthy content without constant oversight

These are operational challenges. A CMS should be built to solve operational challenges, not just editorial ones. When someone tells me their website feels “out of control,” this is almost always what they mean, even if they don’t have the words for it.

Governance Is a Feature

For years, governance has been treated as something separate from technology. It was viewed as something you enforce with policies, spreadsheets, and perhaps even stern emails.

I question that approach. Governance is a feature. Or more precisely, the absence of governance features is what forces teams into fragile workarounds no one ever sees during a platform demo.

The strongest organizations build governance directly into the platform:

• Permissions that match how the organization actually works
• Structured content that keeps information consistent
• Review reminders and expiration dates that keep accountability attached to pages
• Accessibility guidance offered before content goes live
• Reusable components, content inventories, reporting, and approval workflows

These are the mechanisms that let a decentralized organization produce good work at scale. 

Too often, governance is described as restrictions, when in fact, it’s about making the right choice the easy one and about educating every content contributor on how to make their content more effective.

AI Has Raised the Stakes

Artificial intelligence has changed how we should think about content management, and it has done so faster than most institutions have adjusted.

AI systems consume page structure, relationships, consistency, metadata, schema, and clear information architecture. Organizations with well-governed, structured content are far better positioned for AI-driven discovery than organizations sitting on thousands of disconnected pages written in a dozen styles by a dozen authors over a dozen years.

AI has also made it dramatically easier to produce content quickly. A contributor who used to write one page a month can now generate ten. That’s a real gain, but also a risk. Without structure, ownership, and standards baked into your platform, all that new volume doesn’t accelerate your strategy. It accelerates your content debt.

Evaluate Outcomes, Not Features

The next time you evaluate a CMS, ask different questions. Not “Does the editor have one more formatting button than the other one?” but questions tied to what you actually want to achieve:

• Will this platform improve the quality of our content over time?
• Will it help hundreds of contributors make better decisions?
• Will it reduce operational complexity rather than add to it?
• Will it catch accessibility issues before content is published?
• Will it prepare us for how people discover information in an AI-first world?
• Will it help us scale without sacrificing quality?

Then go a step further. Ask vendors to walk you through the operational scenarios that keep you up at night. Ask current customers not what they like about the platform, but how they handle governance across a decentralized web team. The answers will tell you more than any feature matrix.

Your CMS Is Part of Your Strategy

Many organizations still treat a CMS as a technology purchase. I think that’s a mistake.

It’s an operational platform and an integral part of your governance strategy, accessibility strategy, search strategy, marketing and enrollment strategies, and your risk management strategy. Above all, it’s part of your ability to consistently deliver trustworthy user experiences.

The tools you choose are never neutral. They encode assumptions about how work gets done and where accountability lives. A CMS that treats publishing as the main event will shape your organization accordingly. Content gets published, but it doesn’t get managed. A CMS that behaves like an operating system produces a different kind of organization, where distributed teams move quickly because the structure supports quality, and alignment becomes the path of least resistance.

Publishing content is one small piece of that puzzle. The organizations that understand this have stopped buying software and instead are investing in the infrastructure that powers their entire digital presence.

That’s a different conversation, isn’t it?