Part 3: Performing a substantive audit: Determining business requirements
7 What does your customer really need?
9 Analyzing the content lifecycle
11 Envisioning your unified content strategy and lifecycle
Customers are the reason for your business’s existence, your products and services, and your content. You need to understand who your customers are and how well your content meets their needs.
Before content makes its way to your customers, many different hands help to produce it. As a result, there can be duplication of effort and stylistic disparities. By unifying content, you can enhance its usability and consistency, and save your company considerable time and money.
However, unified content requires unified processes. You need to figure out how it’s being used, and how it’s being created, published, and stored. We call this discovery process the “Substantive Audit.” During a substantive audit, you examine who needs and uses what content, how that content currently supports the audience, and how it’s produced, as well as the technology that supports your content lifecycle processes. When that’s finished, you can identify how your unified content strategy will work.
When implementing a unified content strategy, start with the customer. Your content is for your customers, and if you don’t understand them, your unified content strategy will fail. Chapter 7, “What does your customer really need?,” helps you determine your customer requirements.
In Chapter 8, “Where does it really hurt?,” you’ll learn ways to identify the dangers, opportunities, and strengths related to your organization. You’ll also learn how to determine the organizational goals you want to achieve.
Just as in a theater production where different processes support the front stage and the back stage, you have front stage processes for your customer and back stage processes for producing your content. Chapter 9, “Analyzing the content lifecycle,” helps you identify what’s working and what’s not so you can address these challenges.
At the heart of your content strategy is the content itself. Chapter 10, “Performing a content audit,” helps you analyze your content for appropriateness, completeness, and clarity. In addition, this chapter illustrates how to audit your content to identify opportunities for reuse. Once you determine how your information is being used and reused, you can make decisions about how you might unify it.
Chapter 11, “Envisioning your unified content strategy and lifecycle,” shows how you can picture your content strategy working and what processes will be required to support the strategy. It will also help you determine some of the challenges you’ll face.