In Part I, we discussed content as the lifeblood of your organization and explored the fundamental concepts of content reuse. Everyone in your organization uses content, often by accessing it on the company intranet. Depending on the type of business you’re in, you also provide content to your customers in the form of brochures, press releases, user guides, web sites, newsletters, and more. But before content makes its way to either your employees, your stakeholders, or your customers, many different hands touch it—they write it, they review it, they revise it, they approve it, they publish it, and they store it. Many different people working on information can result in disparities, as well as duplicate efforts. By unifying information, 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 what’s going on with your content, how it’s being used, as well as the processes to create, publish, and store it. We call this the substantive audit. There are two components of a substantive audit: analysis and recommendations. During the analysis, you examine audiences, information, needs, processes, and technology. You analyze who needs and uses what information, how that information currently supports them, and how it is produced. You also analyze the technology that supports the content life cycle processes in your organization. Following the analysis, you can formulate a new, unified content life cycle, and potentially, write it in a recommendations report that outlines how you will proceed. Part II guides you through the phases of the substantive audit.
When implementing a unified content strategy, it’s good to start “where it really hurts.” In Chapter 4, “Where does it really hurt?,” you’ll learn ways to identify the dangers, opportunities and strengths, as well as the goals you want to achieve in order to move ahead with a unified content strategy.
Chapter 5, “Analyzing the content life cycle,” provides examples of typical issues an organization faces and the implications of those issues for a unified content strategy. Some of these issues may be relevant to your organization, but your organization may have entirely different issues that will need to be resolved before you move ahead.
During a content audit you analyze materials, looking for similar and identical information, as well as for information that is currently distinct but could be similar or identical. Once you see how your information is being used and reused, you can make decisions about how you might unify it. In Chapter 6, “Performing a content audit,” you’ll learn what a content audit is and how to perform one; it also provides examples of content audit findings.
Chapter 7, “Envisioning the unified content life cycle,” rounds out Part II with two examples of unified content life cycles: a larger-scale one for an entire enterprise, as well as a smaller-scale one for a department within an enterprise.