Part 2: Where does a unified content strategy fit?
3 Enterprise content: Web and beyond
It’s easy to talk about what a unified content strategy is, but where does a unified content strategy fit into your organization and why should you use one?
In Chapter 3, “Enterprise content: Web and beyond,” we discuss the implications of what content means for organizations today. For any organization, content is created by more than one content creator. These creators design, create, manage, and distribute content to customers within and outside the organization. And as delivery methods such as web pages, print, and mobile apps evolve, customers are expecting to be able to do more with content and on multiple devices. In response to those demands, and in recognition that content is a strategic asset, organizations are finding new and different ways to use and leverage that content.
If today’s publishers are to survive and thrive as new technologies for delivering content appear, then they have to adapt quickly and adopt digital publishing best practices. It’s no longer “good enough” to simply convert a printed book to a PDF and hope for the best. Customers are demanding device-independent delivery processes that will allow them to consume information when and where they want. Chapter 4, “Publishing,” discusses the issues that publishers must think about as they prepare their content for multichannel delivery.
The good news is that multichannel delivery is not new; people in the technical communication industry have been developing content using this delivery strategy for years. Technical communicators call reuse “single sourcing,” which is a method of reusing content where content is written once, stored in a single source location, and reused many times. In Chapter 5, “Product content,” we explain how product content can be created and managed with a unified content strategy.
Teams that build learning materials also benefit from the adoption of a unified content strategy. With tight budgets and timelines, instructional designers need to be able to provide multiple types of training materials for multiple learners. In Chapter 6, “Learning materials,” we discuss the advantages of using a unified content strategy to develop reusable content for multiple channels.