A unified content strategy helps you to get a handle on all the content—the intellectual capital—in your organization. A unified content strategy means integrating your processes from content creation to content management and delivery, ensuring that information is created, managed, and delivered consistently, in the way that users need it, without duplicating your efforts. The chapters in Part I explain the basis of a unified content strategy, starting from a discussion of content and where it all comes from, to assessing the return on your investment if you decide to move ahead with a unified content strategy.

Within your organization, you most likely create tremendous volumes of content to support your products, services, and business processes. Getting content out to the right people at the right time and in the right format is critical to your success. Not only is there a tremendous amount of content to get out, you may also publish it in number of different formats and for many different media (for example, paper, the Web, and wireless devices such as PDAs and cell phones). Chapter 1, “Content: The lifeblood of an organization,” introduces the concept of unifying content within an organization, including the causes and effects of the “content silo trap” and the components of a unified content strategy.

Following the discussion of content, we introduce you to the fundamental concepts of reuse. Content reuse is key to a successful unified content strategy; through content reuse, you can make sure that everywhere the same or similar information appears, it is consistent and that you’re not having to reproduce it each time you need it. Chapter 2, “Fundamental concepts of reuse,” defines content reuse and how it benefits a unified content strategy. It explores how other industries have employed reuse for decades to improve their processes and quality of their products and describes the many ways content can be reused (for example, systematic, opportunistic) along with the pros and cons of each method.

Chapter 3, “Assessing return on investment for a unified content strategy,” rounds out Part I by showing you how to calculate your potential return on investment (ROI). ROI is the anticipated savings after subtracting the cost of implementing a unified content strategy. Using a fictitious company as an example, this chapter focuses on where organizations incur costs, how to identify and measure those costs, how to identify and measure savings, and how to identify and calculate return on investment of implementing a unified content strategy.

Once you understand the basis of a unified content strategy, you can move ahead with such things as performing a content audit, building information models, and implementing new authoring and workflow processes. But first, what is content? Read on…