People are unwilling to change unless there is a very good reason for that change and they can see the benefits. Identifying the benefits means first identifying your pain, issues, and consequences. What are the real issues facing your organization? What is the impact of not addressing these issues? (Refer to Chapter 4, “Where does it really hurt?,” Chapter 5, “Analyzing the content life cycle,” and Chapter 6, “Performing a content audit” for information about identifying the pain, issues, and consequences.) After you have identified your reasons for change, communicate your findings to everyone involved.

Reach out to people within the organization and listen to what they have to say about the issues and the solutions. Be sure to thank them for their input. When you have summarized their input, go back to them and verify that you understood them correctly. Then as you move into design, testing, and implementation, involve them and ask them to assist you in determining whether your design correctly addresses their issues and needs. If you involve people early on, really listen to what they have to say, then show them that you are addressing their requirements; they will be among your strongest supporters.

Communication is critical to the success of change. You need to communicate the reasons for change, your plan, and the project’s status. Projects that are developed “under wraps” are viewed with suspicion. Lack of communication results in anxiety and starts rumors. The longer that information is withheld, the more anxious people become and the harder it becomes to convince them of the need to adopt the change. Plan to communicate as early in the project as possible and continue to communicate throughout.

You need to communicate:

Communication will help people to understand what is going on and why, but it will not necessarily convince them to participate. The best way to convince people of a change’s value is to have “one of their own” communicate the excitement and possibilities. To do this you need “change agents.” A change agent is someone who is not necessarily part of the assigned implementation team, but who will be a user of the new system and methodologies.

The best way to create change agents is to bring together a group of representative users who have shown an early understanding of the problems or who are open to change. Help them to clearly understand the pain, issues, and dangers you are aware of, and have them voice their own ideas. Take them through a short content audit exercise to help them to see the possibilities. Discuss their specific opportunities and the ways in which this change will apply to them. Discuss how they can share their learning with others on their teams. Make sure you address all their questions and concerns. When they have an understanding of why this change should happen and are excited about the change, they will begin to communicate this to others on their teams, easing the transition to the unified content strategy. Make sure that you help the change agents to prepare a consistent message to take back to their teams. A consistent message reduces the possibility of misinterpretation.

The broader the scope of your unified content strategy, the more likely you are to have disagreement. A champion (someone high enough up in the organization to effect change) needs to endorse the cause and ensure that different content areas understand the need for change and buy into it. If a group resists the change despite having their concerns and questions addressed, the champion may have to insist on them adopting the change or make a change in personnel to facilitate adoption.

People find it hard to believe that content somebody else created could possibly meet their needs. After all, it was written for a different purpose and media, and the author couldn’t possibly know their customers/audience/requirements.

In some ways, this is true. If content is written for a different purpose, audience, or media without considering how the content can be reused, it won’t work. However, content can be reused if it is:

In some cases, the content can be reused identically; in other cases, it must be modified, resulting in derivative reuse. But regardless of the type, reuse is possible.

So how do you convince people of that? The best solution is to trust that “seeing is believing.” Bring together different groups who create similar content and work through a mini-content audit exercise with them. It’s a good idea if you have an understanding of where reuse is possible and select appropriate materials in advance so that the analysis can be rapid. Having different groups identify the potential areas of reuse is an eye-opener. Many people are unaware of just how much content is reused or could be reused. After they see the volume of potential reuse they are usually convinced that reuse is possible.

The media issue may be more of a hurdle. Prepare for this one in advance. Create an example using some material that was written differently for different media, but that could be written the same for all media. Show the group the original materials. Show how the content could be written for multiple media. Show them the content in each medium (for example, in paper, then on the web) as it follows your current design templates. See Appendix B, “Writing for multiple media,” for more information.

It’s not unusual for different departments and different business units to have their own values and ways of doing things. Many organizations even encourage different parts of the organization to compete with each other. They may not talk to each other and cooperate.

In this case, the enterprise project coordinator needs to find a balance between similarity and diversity. The overall business needs must be identified and communicated to the different areas. They are all in business together and the focus should be on their businesses’ competitors rather than on competition with other departments.

However, even when departments compete with each other, find out what their commonalities are and share them. Let each department or business unit focus on what is unique and optimize those unique qualities.

You might also consider adopting variations on the solution to meet the needs of different areas. For example, one area may use a full authoring tool, another area may use templates and forms, and yet another may use modified traditional authoring tools. This makes it easier for each area to author in a way that supports its own processes.

It’s okay that processes may be different in different areas. As long as the result of these processes is the same—effective reusable content—different areas can continue to follow different processes. It is not necessary to create one unified process for the whole organization.

Authors often feel that they will lose their creativity if they are forced to write structured content and write to models. First you need to identify what they consider creativity and what value is being added to the content through that creativity. Frequently, creativity is the work authors put into the layout rather than the content. It is true that in a unified content environment, authors no longer have creative control over format and layout. However, authors who enjoy layout and design may want to participate in the design of templates and style sheets in addition to creating content.

For authors who enjoy the content creation process, point out that they can be more creative in their writing because they no longer have to worry about format and layout. Their creative efforts can be put into designing the most effective information products possible and ensuring that content is readable and usable.

Others may greatly welcome the structured content and models, because doing so frees them up to do what they do best: creating content, which some consider to be their “real” job.

For teams such as marketing, where unique design and layout are integral to the effectiveness of information products, consider enabling authors to modify the style sheets. Take care to ensure that the structure of the content remains consistent with the models so content can be reused, but give authors the flexibility to change their style sheets and develop materials to meet their customers’ needs. Alternatively, consider enabling authors to pick from a series of format elements so they can specify to a certain extent the “look and feel” of the content, by media.

Developing a unified content strategy is a lot of work. However, the work comes at the beginning, not throughout the content life cycle. After your strategy is implemented, the average author will have a reduced workload. When speaking with authors, don’t overemphasize the amount of work it takes to implement the strategy. Instead, emphasize what they will save in working this way, and how much time will be freed up when they don’t have to create everything from scratch.

For management, who should be concerned about the amount of work a unified strategy requires, emphasize that all new methods and systems require up-front work, but the investment is returned later in benefits and reduced costs.

Companies and departments never have enough time, money, or resources to do all the work they need to do. Less work in one area means more time and resources are available to do work in another. Rarely are jobs lost. More frequently, organizations reorganize the workload and pursue projects and initiatives that they didn’t have the time, money, or resources to do before. You can do more with the same resources.

The traditional role of a project manager is to identify the project requirements, create a plan and schedule to meet these requirements, identify and manage resources, and manage the project from idea to implementation. Typically project managers work within one area of the organization, on one project. As such, they are responsible for and measured against the success of their project and their project alone, and they are therefore likely to veto anything that is not on their critical path. They have not had to take into account the requirements of other projects, nor has it been their responsibility to ensure the success of other projects. Instead, they stay focused on their own project to ensure its success.

In a unified content environment, you need an enterprise project coordinator to work with each of the project managers to ensure that the unified content strategy is being effectively addressed. In particular, the enterprise project coordinator needs to communicate the concepts and advantages of reuse on an ongoing basis to facilitate agreement among project teams.

The enterprise project coordinator must also be able to oversee many projects and determine the unified content strategy required to address both the needs of all the project owners and the needs of the organization as a whole.

The enterprise project coordinator requires a skill set that includes the following:

In a traditional authoring system, many authors are responsible for creating the multiple media output for their content. In a unified content strategy, the system handles this automatically. An information technologist is required to handle the system technology.

An information technologist is skilled at implementing content models in the various tools, including programming and supporting style sheets to meet specifications provided by the information architect.

Information technologists should be well-versed in a wide variety of tools and technologies, including XML. Specifically, they should understand the tools and technologies you choose for your system. The role of the information technologist can be assumed by an existing author or a member of the IT team.

Their skill set includes designing and developing:

Business owners or analysts are very important to an effective unified content strategy. They determine the requirements of the business and frequently the customers’ needs as well. Their role is to ensure that products, services, and content are designed to effectively meet the customers’ needs. However, they must also ensure that any strategies and solutions meet the needs of the employees, the individuals tasked with creating the products, services, and content.

Too often organizations bring in a technological solution to business problems. It is critical that business owners or analysts participate in the effective design of your unified content strategy. Their role is to ensure that content meets the customers’ needs and that the unified content strategy meets the authors’ needs.

To support a unified content strategy, business owners or analysts should expand their skill set to include:

Information architects play a key role in analyzing and designing content. They are responsible for building the information product models, element models, metadata, reuse strategies, and architectural models. They may also be responsible for designing the information retrieval for both authors and users. Accordingly, they should have a keen ability to design information for ease of use by content users and ease of reuse by authors.

The role of the information architect can be assumed by an existing author or business analyst; in fact, information architects are becoming more common on web site development teams. Existing web site information architects can expand their role to include the architecture of reuse and content for multiple media. New graduates of information science and library science programs also make good candidates for this role, as do senior technical writers with an extensive background in information design.

Regardless of who assumes the role of information architect, their skill set must expand to include:

Creating materials in a unified content strategy separates the creation of the input (content) from the output (media or information type). This means that authors, as proficient communicators, can now rely less on the tools that are used to display the final information.

Authors no longer have to worry about applying styles or becoming involved in the formatting of the information; now the authoring and delivery systems handle the formatting automatically. Instead, authors can concentrate exclusively on the content they create and combine.

Authors identify the building blocks of information and how the blocks will fit together. They also identify opportunities for content reuse and write applicable content elements for single sourcing. Accordingly, their skill set must expand to include:

In a traditional authoring environment, authors own the content they create because they are also responsible for creating a specific information product. However, in a unified content strategy, content can be used in many different information products. The concept of the content owner needs to change to accommodate this.

In a unified content strategy, the person who authors the content still owns it; however, that person may not own all the content that comes together to create an information product. There may be many authors, all of whom may not be responsible for creating an entire information product. Rather, they may be responsible for creating content about a certain subject that goes into many different information products.

In addition, the unified content needs an owner, someone who can oversee the creation of all the content related to a particular product, service, product family, or any other associated content set. The unified content owner facilitates the collaborative authoring process and ensures consistency and quality of the materials.

The role of the unified content owner can be assumed by an existing author, a business owner or analyst, or a project manager, reporting to the enterprise project coordinator. The skill set required by the unified content owner includes:

Standards and consistency are important in creating seamless unified materials. In a unified content environment, it is particularly important that editors not just look at the words, but look at how the information is used to ensure it is written effectively for reuse.

To support a unified content strategy, editors must expand their skill set to understand: