The Unsaid Labor Required for Working Inside a CMS or DAM

I’ve been thinking about all the unsaid work involving content management/asset management lately. Here are three I see in my work:

(1) You can edit webpages with HTML, JSON, CSS, JavaScript, or Markdown. A lot of roles seem to meld different types of content management together into one role when really working in a CMS/DAM is more about databases and not editing the front-end view of it like a landing page.

(2) You diagnose web connectivity issues. Even though our work isn’t I.T. per se, we’re asked to have expertise in diagnosing a wide spectrum of I.T. issues. It could be a firewall configuration error, that the software isn’t updated and it broke the system, or that the hardware that predates you joining the org finally gave out.

(3) The CMS/DAM doesn’t actually match technical standards. While some systems let you add subject authorities or have digital preservation measures built in, they’re not true implementations of our standards. I often see this with exporting or migrating data. We find out that the LC Authorities list or ISO-639-3 language codes, for example, are more a data dictionary the vendor added and not something you can validate against changes to technical standards.

What kinds of unspoken tasks do you see for CMS/DAM work? How much support do you get for it?