I recently presented a deck on content governance for improving efficiency and velocity of large projects: http://bit.ly/abIu7Y One of the most valuable contributions content governance can make I’ve found is in the realm of enforcing good information architecture practices, particularly by establishing domain object models for each content type and then enforcing them across projects.
Also, instituting content governance presents organizations an opportunity to conduct some meaningful knowledge management by sharing knowledge across teams while creating and spreading consensus. Since most people bristle at the idea of suffering through compliance reviews and spend far too much time striving to pass audits and not adding more meaningful value like improving content integrity and time to market, I feel it’s the responsibility of those conducting content governance to ensure the success of those who must comply. Provide users the tools they need to comply, don’t leave them to their own devices. A user-maintained visual style guide on an intranet is a must-have. Smart organizations will leverage native talent and use crowdsourcing here.
The first issue listed in this topic, findability of content, touches on this but is but one facet of a content model and not necessarily the most critical, though some frustrated content managers would no doubt disagree. Other IA facets that need you should keep in mind in both governance and content modeling are content reuse, multichannel, personalization, and regulatory compliance. Since this discussion is about content governance I won’t get into the IA aspects here, but without proper IA at the beginning content owners will likely find themselves hamstrung on one or more of these and all the governance in the world won’t solve the mess.
Done together, proper information architecture and a sufficiently empowered content governance mechanism in place to ensure compliance through enforcement are a powerful but inexpensive tool that can yield meaningful, noticeable and recurring results to a company’s bottom line.
How so? By making content governance a part of a company’s organizational learning. The knowledge represented in the content standards can be leveraged as a strategic asset by sharing the knowledge via the before mentioned visual style guide. This helps people and groups to learn and share valuable content insights to avoid redundant work, to avoid reinventing the (content) wheel with each project, to cut training time for new employees, to keep intellectual capital as employees turnover, and to more quickly adapt to changing technologies and markets.
Just as there’s more related to content management than pushing content to the site, there’s more to content governance than enforcing content models. If content management is truly 20 percent technology and 80 percent process as they say, then modeling and governing your existing workflows, practices and infrastructure and maintaining that information where people and groups can access and easily understand is just as crucial. Being able to explicitly see how changes to tools, content models, and process are likely to affect people’s jobs and impact projects and the business is powerful and saves money. Only when you can see across the full spectrum of content, workflow and systems can you genuinely streamline workflows and do any true optimization for time to market. Remember, optimize the whole, not the parts.
I’ve seen companies not just turn around failing content management teams and systems but make their content and the systems and processes supporting it a competitive advantage by embracing content governance coupled with sound information architecture as its foundation. And I’ve seen content and its management become a burden and hindrance to success when they governance and architecture.
