Part 4: Developing a unified content strategy
12 Content modeling: Adaptive content design
17 Change management and governance
Developing a unified content strategy involves creating models for your content, determining how you want to reuse content, defining how people produce content, making it easy to find content, creating usable content, and managing all the change that has to take place in your organization.
In Chapter 12, “Content modeling: Adaptive content design,” we discuss the basis of content modeling and how your content must be consistent in writing style and structure. We explain how you must store your content so it can be reused and delivered when and where it’s needed.
A unified content strategy is only successful when content can be reused. In Chapter 13, “Reuse strategy,” we explore the impact of manual reuse and automatic reuse and what kinds of decisions you have to make to determine how you are going to reuse your content.
Workflow, in the context of a unified content strategy, defines how people and tasks interact to create, update, manage, and deliver content. Without consistent and effective workflow, your unified content strategy will not work. Chapter 14, “Designing workflow,” describes the concept of workflow and its benefits, and takes you through the basics of designing a workflow to support your unified content lifecycle.
Finding and labeling your content is also critically important to a successful unified content strategy. In Chapter 15, “Designing metadata,” we explore all the descriptive information that’s required to manage your content, so people and systems can find content when it’s needed.
In Chapter 16, “It’s all about the content,” we focus on creating the content—why you need to separate format from content, why you need to determine structured writing guidelines, and the advantages of collaborative authoring.
And finally, in Chapter 17, “Change management and governance,” we discuss the behavioral changes that are required to keep a unified content strategy on track. For a unified content strategy to be adopted successfully throughout an organization, behavioral change has to occur at an individual level and at an organizational level, all of which requires planning and commitment.