Geithner, TurboTax, and Content Management Systems

Geithner was confirmed yesterday as Treasury Secretary, although his confirmation was not as smooth due to tax issues for the years he worked at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  When I was at the IMF's sister organization across the street, the World Bank, the taxes were confusing.  Actually, the most confusing part was how to pay all the taxes -- it was quite clear what you had to do (all those forms/communications that Geithner, the rest of the Bank/Fund employees, and I saw made that clear).  In TurboTax, I had to dig pretty deep, avoiding the simple question-and-answers and going straight to the tax forms.  One year I went to a tax accountant instead of doing my own taxes.  That didn't work out well.  The accountant kept saying if I received a W-2 then I wouldn't have to pay the employer portion of the taxes.  Eventually I prevailed and he figured out how to cajole his system into accepting the extra $.

There are a lot of corollaries with running a CMS:

• The system should make it easy to do the right thing.  A system should nudge us in the right direction. For example with TurboTax, perhaps just defaulting to select the appropriate taxes if you enter a W-2 from the IMF and are a US citizen.  Of course, there are diminishing returns on adding features to systems, but if it is difficult to accomplish doing the "right" thing in your CMS, then many people will not. 
  
• People will make mistakes.  Beyond nudging, if at all possible, you should design your system so that it's not possible (or very difficult) to do the wrong thing.  For instance, if you have a published CSS stylesheet that everyone should be using, then the built-in CMS editor should only allow the authors to use those styles (as opposed to selecting any font).  A next-best approach is to have the system check periodically if everything is ok (rather than at publish time). 
  
• Your users need to at least know what the standard is.  In the case of the World Bank, the standard for taxes was quite clear.  For your CMS, you should publish (where everyone knows where they are) the standards for your Web site.
  
• Some people will be more conscientious than others.  This really is related to everything above since you want to design your system so that it's easier for people to do the right thing.  That said, if you know you have particularly conscientious users (and if you product manage a Web site or an institution's CMS, you should know), then it's probably in your best interest to empower these people so that they encourage others to also do the right thing.
• The experts should know the rules and standards, even if only local standards.  For example, in the DC area tax accountants should know that World Bank / IMF employees (the second-largest employer in DC) who are US nationals need to pay the employer portion of social security.  I trust (hope?) that all of the tax accountants in the metropolitan DC area have now figured that out.  In a CMS system, you may also have local standards, for example for a particular section of a site.  Everyone who works on the site, but especially those who are trainers or Web team managers, should be trained on what is and is not acceptable for a given section.