Chapter 1. Content: The lifeblood of an organization
Organizations create tremendous volumes of content to support their products, services, and business processes. Getting content out to the right customer at the right time and in the right format is critical to an organization’s success. Not only do organizations generate a tremendous amount of content, they have many different audiences, each with its own goals. Some want you to deliver content to them, others are searching for answers to questions that you’ll provide, and still others want to be engaged in the content process. Making that content available to them means providing your content in a variety of channels including print, Web, mobile, eBook, app, and more.
This chapter introduces the concept of a unified content strategy, including the causes and effects of the content silo trap and the components of a unified content strategy.
Content: Where does it all come from?
A typical organization has multiple content creation groups who design, create, manage, and distribute information. Virtually every department within an organization touches content in some way. For example, marketing and sales produces information designed to convince both prospects and existing customers to purchase their products and services. They create most of the customer-facing content for the Web, including a wide variety of sales and promotional collateral (newsletters, brochures, white papers) as well as other types of content, including press releases, annual reports, and content destined for use on social networks.
Technical publications is another area where a great deal of customer content is created, managed, delivered, and stored. Technical publications departments create content that assists customers with using products and services, including guides, help, and other reference materials. They also contribute to online customer support centers.
Customer service departments respond to requests for immediate assistance from prospects and customers alike. To help service representatives respond to inquiries, customer service departments typically produce and maintain frequently asked questions (FAQs) and problem-tracking databases, and will often contribute to a knowledge center that may be used by both internal and external customers.
Learning groups assist customers in embracing new products and developing new skills through practical, task-oriented instruction. They produce products such as training (classroom, self-paced, virtual classroom), and a variety of eLearning materials (Web, mobile).
Some organizations exist specifically to produce content. For instance, publishers produce trade books, textbooks and associated learning materials, magazines, and journals. Increasingly they’re challenged to produce digital versions of those products such as eBooks, enhanced eBooks, interactive web content, and apps.
While these examples are not all inclusive and not necessarily representative of how all organizations are structured, they serve to illustrate the many possible variations and iterations of content churned into various information products, destined for an increasing array of devices, and consumed by many different audiences.
A unified content strategy brings together the planning and design for all customer-facing content to ensure a seamless customer experience from first contact through purchase, usage, and support. Happy customers who are supported at every point in their content lifecycle are repeat customers. One of the biggest challenges in implementing a unified content strategy is identifying and breaking down the “silos,” which is where we’ll begin.
Understanding the content silo trap
Too often, content is created by authors working in isolation from others within the organization. Walls are erected between content areas and even within content areas. This leads to content being created, and recreated, and recreated, often with changes or differences introduced at each iteration. No one has a complete picture of the customer’s content requirements and no one has the responsibility to manage the customer experience. Organizations fail to understand that content is their product. Content is the lifeblood of the organization. Without content their product or service does not exist. Content is either “tossed over the wall” to the next group in the content creation process or forgotten about in the rush to the next deliverable. We call this the content silo trap (see Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1. The content silo trap.
The effects of silos
The content silo trap is like plaque in your arteries, inhibiting the blood flow to your vital organs. If silos hinder the flow of information, the organization is unable to function effectively or respond rapidly to threats and opportunities.
Content silos result in increased costs, decreased productivity, reduced quality, ineffective content, and unhappy customers. The effects of content silos are numerous, costly, and insidious, as illustrated below.
Higher cost of content creation, management, and delivery
When content is created multiple times, by multiple people, in multiple departments, and delivered in multiple ways, the costs to create and deliver content increase exponentially. Each and every rendition produces additional expense. When translation is added to the mix, costs escalate each time content is translated.
Duplication of effort
Authors work on many different types of projects. They create content that will be consumed by customers on a variety of devices, such as computers, tablets, and smartphones; for different customers, including decision-makers, influencers, and end users; or for different contexts—marketing, sales, support, training, and more. Authors use their domain knowledge to carefully craft content to meet both the needs of the customer and the requirements of the presentation format.
Because they work in deadline-driven environments, authors often don’t share their good ideas, lessons learned, best practices, and finished work with others working on similar projects. They don’t expect others to share these things with them. This lack of collaboration results in errors and inconsistencies in the information provided to customers, which in turn causes confusion and aggravation, and harms the customer experience. Poor customer experiences are costly. They increase support costs, damage brand loyalty, and result in lost sales.
For example, a medical devices company created a mobile web app. The marketing department developed all the design and functionality within their own team. However, they were unaware that the product content team had launched a mobile version of the patient content more than six months previously. The product content team had done extensive usability testing and prototyping of the content to meet patients’ needs. While the mobile app functioned well, there was no coherence between the two mobile applications. They didn’t look as if they were produced by the same company and they functioned differently. The failure to communicate resulted in duplication of effort and confused customers.
Explosion of mobile devices
The content creation world is becoming increasingly complex, with multiple operating systems, differing standards, and an increasing number of devices. Organizations are unable to deliver their content to multiple channels without manually converting the content each time. They don’t have enough resources to manage the daily work, let alone the creation of multiple parallel versions. Content is no longer in sync, resulting in errors and customer frustration.
For example, an organization with a very successful website was receiving a growing number of complaints from smartphone users trying to access it. The site is impossible to navigate on mobile. In response to customer complaints, they develop a mobile app for the iPhone, but when they go to reuse the website content they find that even when the issues of navigation are solved, the content is too long and not modular enough to display effectively on mobile. They begin the process of reworking their content for mobile, but end up having two silos of content, one for the desktop version of the website and one for the mobile version. This situation doubles the amount of effort required to produce a single piece of information. Bad news, especially when they’re also being asked to support content on tablets and other devices. They don’t have the bandwidth to handle another massive project and are finding it difficult to manage the content they have, let alone repurpose it for use on another device.
Poor communication
When walls are erected within an organization, vital information is hidden from all the areas that need it. Poor communication is evident when one group fails to inform another that something has changed, that something exists, that something is wrong, or that something has been discontinued. Poor communication can also occur within a group or department.
For example, a company that sold mobile devices had a very fast product-to-market process. They had been losing ground to the competition, so they put together a marketing campaign to sell a new device at a significant discount. They worked rapidly to get the campaign materials out onto their social network properties, on the radio, in the newspaper, to retail outlets, and on the Web; however, they failed to communicate the promotion to customer service. The morning of the campaign kickoff the phone lines were flooded and customer service representatives had absolutely no information about the promotion. As a result they were unprepared to help customers who wanted to take advantage of the offer.
Reduced awareness of other initiatives
Seldom are content challenges limited to one area or department within an organization. All too often, the problem that negatively impacts one department is the same problem being experienced in another. Because they operate in silos, each group launches its own independent initiatives to solve its issues. Disparate initiatives waste time and money.
The content silo trap prevents organizations from collaborating in significant ways. If each group solves its problems independently, and all the initiatives come to fruition, they’ll likely result in incompatible technology solutions, disparate process changes, and increased costs. In addition, one group may be forced to use a product or to implement a process that’s inappropriate for their purposes.
For example, in one organization, the web team needed a content management system. They carefully specified their requirements, solicited proposals from software vendors, and made a selection. Customer support, which encompasses product content, training, and frontline customer support, also needed a content management system. After careful research, they presented their business case to management for the product they decided to purchase. Because the web team had already purchased a content management system, the company decided against purchasing a second one and told the customer support area to use the same system. While the selected web content management system met the needs of the web team, it wasn’t the right solution for customer support. As a result, customer support was forced to make the wrong type of system fit their needs.
In other situations we see multiple areas purchasing multiple content management systems with combined costs of millions.
Lack of consistency and standardization
When content is created in multiple areas by multiple authors, it invariably differs, resulting in mixed or even incorrect information being produced. This not only causes confusion, it can be expensive, as illustrated in the following example.
A corporation was launching a new product that required both product content and instructional materials. The technical communications team met with both the engineering and product marketing groups to learn how the product worked so they could create a series of deliverables, including the user guide, a reference guide, and online help. The instructional designers from the learning group also met with the engineers and product marketing groups. They gathered the information they needed to develop training materials for the new product.
Because the two groups worked in isolation and failed to collaborate with one another, they created two different experiences for the customer. This lack of collaboration resulted in significant confusion for customers and extra costs to the organization.
Customers suffer
While organizations suffer from the negative impact of content silos, customers are the real victims. When information exists in multiple areas, it often differs in content, style, tone, and message. Customers don’t know which one is correct, most up to date, or comprehensive. When customers encounter these inconsistencies, they become understandably confused. Sometimes confusion leads to aggravation. Inconsistency damages the customer experience.
What causes content silos?
Most organizations don’t set out to create silos; rather, silos are a result of organizational structure and other pressures. Frequently, authors lack awareness of what others are doing elsewhere in the organization. They have a lot on their plate—always too much to do, and rarely enough time to do it in. As requirements grow there never seem to be enough resources available to do what needs to be done. There isn’t adequate time for them to find out what other groups are doing, especially when those other groups are just as busy focusing on their own activities. And so the content silo trap continues.
All this struggling to get things done can result in isolation and a sometimes deliberate desire to “block out” other activities. Authors are often unaware that their actions may have a negative impact on others and actually damage the profitability of the organization.
Lack of awareness, shortage of time, and inconsistent amounts of information are prime contributors to silos within organizations. However, the content creation process itself is one that often occurs in isolation, leading to potential inconsistencies and extra work.
Authors take great pride in the materials they create. They have strong ideas about what’s appropriate for their content areas, how that content should be organized, structured, and displayed, and how it’s different from other content being created in the organization. Authors mistakenly believe that the process of creating content should vary based on the audience who’ll consume the content or the device on which it will be displayed.
In addition, when creating content, authors often lack the tools or time to search out existing content, perceiving that it’s faster to start from scratch than to spend the time figuring out if content already exists. In a typical organization, content is stored in file systems that allow searching only by file name or file date. This makes it very difficult to search through multitudes of files on multiple servers. To find content, authors have to know exactly what they’re looking for and where it’s likely to be stored. If an organization does have a content or document management system, the content is seldom organized or classified with reuse in mind, so authors may have to search through volumes of incongruent information to identify the piece they want to reuse.
Traditionally, information-reuse opportunities have been difficult for organizations to identify. Generally, each content creation group develops its own processes, and while interrelated processes typically occur for content review cycles, they don’t occur for content creation cycles. Unless groups identify the commonality of their content, content creation processes remain isolated, making it difficult for content to be identified and reused across an organization.
What is a unified content strategy?
A unified content strategy is a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet customer needs. A unified content strategy can help organizations avoid the content silo trap, reducing the costs of creating, managing, and distributing content, and ensuring that content effectively supports both organizational and customer needs. A unified content strategy makes it possible to deliver content to any customer, anywhere, and on any device without having to rework the content at every stage.
You start by analyzing your customers, content, organizational needs, processes, and technology. You examine such things as:
• Who needs and uses what content (what content needs to be created, for whom, and by whom)
• How effectively the content currently supports the customer
• How content is currently created, managed, and delivered
Once you have a thorough understanding of all the information needs within your organization and the processes you currently use to create it, you can determine how to start unifying it, first from the authoring perspective.
In a unified environment, departments and authors need to work together as a team to create content “objects” that can be assembled in a number of different “information products,” for a number of different platforms that run on a number of different devices. Instead of writing entire documents, authors create “components” or modules of content that are compiled into an information product, such as a website, a training manual, or a marketing brochure. Some components of content comprise the “core,” that is, the information that’s reused across information products, while other content components are unique.
Unified content strategy benefits
A unified content strategy is a formal and coherent content strategy. When organizations adopt a unified content strategy, they can rely on content being the same wherever it appears, providing both internal and external customers with a consistent experience. No longer do organizations have to worry about contradicting themselves with differing information; where duplication occurs, it’s the same content. A unified content strategy is also a coherent customer-focused content strategy that enables an organization to meet customer needs at every point in the content lifecycle. And it allows for the support of the ever-increasing number of devices.
A unified content strategy offers several benefits, including the following:
Faster time-to-market
Faster time-to-market is achieved through shorter content creation and maintenance cycles. When following a unified content strategy, authors spend less time repeatedly writing content because they reuse existing content wherever possible, supplementing it with new or modified content where appropriate. Content is no longer recreated for every channel; content is automatically adapted for the device. Reviewers also spend less time reviewing content because they only have to review new or changed content; existing content has already been reviewed and approved.
Better use of finite resources
In a unified content strategy, resources are optimized because the repetitive processes of content creation and maintenance are reduced. And because people are required to do less repetitive and manual work, everyone involved in the content creation process can spend time adding value to content and responding to new requirements.
Reduced costs
In a unified content strategy, the costs of creating and managing content are reduced. Less work is required to get a product to market, not only decreasing internal costs, but potentially increasing revenue. Content is modified or corrected once instead of multiple times, reducing maintenance costs. Translation costs are slashed because reusable content is translated only once instead of multiple times; derivatives of that content are eliminated or reduced.
Improved quality of content
A unified content strategy helps to improve the quality of content. Content is clearly modeled for consistent structure, increasing its readability and usability. Issues of inaccurate content, inconsistent content, or missing content are reduced or eliminated.
Unlimited device delivery
Unified content isn’t limited to one device for delivery. Content can be automatically adapted to multiple devices with little or no human intervention, reducing costs and increasing speed to delivery. When a new device comes along, it’s a simple matter of creating another set of rules that adapts the source content to the new device. Gone are the days of handcrafting deliverables and reworking content!
Scope of a unified content strategy
Your unified content strategy can encompass the content created by a single department, across multiple departments, and between organizational groups or divisions, or it can span the entire enterprise. It may include delivering content destined for single output format or device, or for many devices such as Web, print, smartphone, tablet or eReader. You may choose to start in one area of the organization and then expand your efforts to other departments. No matter which path you choose, you need to determine what makes the most sense for your organization, now and into the future. The remainder of this book will help you to identify your organizational needs, the processes for creating a unified content strategy, and the technology for supporting it.
Summary
Content is created in every area of your organization. Unfortunately, if yours is like most, your content is created in silos, by authors working within a single group or department in isolation from one another. This lack of collaboration leads to increased costs, decreased productivity, reduced quality, and increased errors and inconsistencies of content. Working in isolation without collaboration is known as the content silo trap.
A unified content strategy can help your organization avoid the content silo trap, reduce the costs of creating, managing, and distributing content, and ensure that your content effectively supports both organizational goals and customer needs. A unified content strategy is a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet customer needs.
A unified content strategy results in:
• Faster time-to-market
• Better use of resources
• Reduced costs
• Increased quality and consistency
• Multidevice delivery
Only a formal unified content strategy can ensure that your organization is addressing all the problems of content in a repeatable, systematic manner. Your customers will benefit from a unified content strategy, and your company will too!