In Part 1 of this series, we highlighted the hidden challenges of merging digital content in the context of an acquisition. Acquired content often undercuts unsuspecting organizations by delivering blows across a range of exposed areas: from the content itself, to the technology on which it is served, to its audience – whether employees or customers. In this issue, we explore some of the solutions Vamosa provides to help organizations overcome these integration challenges and achieve their acquisition objectives.

Branding of Acquired Properties

The most obvious way in which acquired content negatively impacts an organization is by eroding its corporate identity. This is most apparent in the case of branding assets: logos, color palettes, and font choices, but many more signals of incomplete integration lurk below the surface. These signals may be acute but unobtrusive – contact email addresses pointing to pre-acquisition domains, obsolete product names – or subtly pervasive – material at sharply different reading levels, non-compliance with adopted accessibility and web standards. Through a combination of services and technology, Vamosa allows organizations to close the brand gap. Taking advantage of Vamosa’s policy-driven rules engine, our Consultancy practice can design and configure a tailored package of content policies using Check and Fix and Content Cleanser products, precisely targeting an organization’s most pressing content issues.

System Consolidation

It’s easy for companies to make a connection between public content and sales, but the burden of supporting post-acquisition content has deep implications for costs as well. While there are clear – and important – differences between content management systems, all are designed to facilitate the flow of information in a collaborative environment. That’s fine as a concept using one CMS but when you have multiple Content Management Systems – be careful, it can actual restrict collaboration. Reducing the number of content management systems required by the combined organization benefits both production and consumption; at a business level, this translates into elimination of sources of waste: licensing fees, hardware, lines of application code. Vamosa’s Content Analyzer and Content Migrator products – with or without the deployment of our Consulting practice – allows organizations to accurately size their potential savings through systems consolidation, and then achieve them through migration into a unified platform. When decommissioning systems is not an option, Vamosa’s Content Cleanser can apply metadata dimensions to content in place, enabling portal integration to make content findable or push it directly to relevant consumers.

Users of Content – Enabling Access

Lastly, acquisitions yield major challenges for the users of content. In the context of restructuring a company, it’s common for content ownership to change as departments are split and merged, and much of the content itself – internal HR documents, mission statements, functional group sites – is likely to become redundant or irrelevant. At an access level, reorganization manifests itself in changes to security groups. People often focus on security’s role in preventing information from getting into the wrong hands, but it’s just as important to ensure that new employees are quickly granted access to company information; neglecting this basic privilege is likely to precipitate a morale nosedive. Vamosa’s family of products and services allow business to quickly identify and eliminate swaths of redundant content while at the same time updating links to point to their corresponding active pages. Additionally, Vamosa’s ability to reassign content to new owners or groups ensures that information is editable by and available to the proper channels, breaking down barriers to collaboration and empowering an organization to be greater than the sum of its parts.

As I explained in my last post, having an effective information and content governance strategy is key to achieving compliance. However, implementing this strategy requires careful thought and planning.

Today’s web content landscape presents further challenges for organizations’ attempts to implement a governance model.  With the wholesale adoption of social network software and the implementation of web 2.0 standards, the web operations management team is overwhelmed with attempts to maintain even a modicum of control.

With content being derived from multiple sources and external feeds as well as the tremendous increase in end user contributions, through social networking software such as instant messaging, blogs, corporate intranets etc it is virtually impossible to enforce corporate governance standards at the point of content creation.  Similarly, the slow adoption of storage and access standards such as JCR and CMIS present governance challenges due to the dynamic nature of the content being published and the lack of capability for demonstrating what was actually being published at a specific point in time.

All of these challenges mean that the only true point of review for web governance standards is at the point of consumption, at which point the complex composite content is actually rendered.  However, the sheer scale of monitoring hundreds of thousands of pieces of web content against dozens, if not hundreds, of standards (covering accessibility, brand and regulatory compliance as well as findability and search engine optimization requirements) means that the web operations team often cannot address the issue.  So now  the scale of the task is becoming clear. The good news for web operations however is that there are new generations of online monitoring applications that specifically address the complex requirements of web content governance. How does this work?

Well the first step is to establish who has control of content within the organization. Is it the marketing and communications team, the web department, or the IT department (or a combination)? Ideally everybody within these functions of the business should be involved in the decision-making process when implementing new policies and standards for compliance, not just management. By including these departments in the process you will help to ensure a better understanding: each person will know what the standards and policies are, which department is responsible for what and what their individual contribution is. This collaboration between brand managers, web authors and IT staff, will ensure that governance is both achieved and, equally importantly, maintained.

When setting new policies and standards for governance, companies need to be aware of and sensitive to the impact on their employees’ job roles, which will change, as highlighted by Lisa Welchman, co-founder of consultancy firm WelchmanPierpoint.  For instance, it may now become the responsibility of the web author to ensure governance and content quality (through the use of an automated process), rather than the IT manager; a different job than that which is outlined in their contract.

It is essential that enterprises are aware that governance does not only apply to internal documents or content on their website; rather that it needs to be applied to their entire web presence.  Any content published on the web needs to be governed. In today’s digital world and with social media becoming an increasingly important communications tool, it is essential that content is monitored and its quality maintained.

While sitting with a customer recently I feared I was sounding like a broken record.  I wrestled over should I let this topic go that did not sit right with me?  As a supplier to this important customer, was it my duty to agree to a requirement that I knew would result in business resistance or should I highlight the consequences of implementing the perceived solution?

With resources readily available, through the internet, it is more common to come across customers who have already ‘self-diagnosed’ what they require from you even before any engagement has taken place.  With over 11 million hits coming back on the internet when you enter “content migration” into Google, the logic as to why this is such a popular search term for 2010 is apparent: the trend demonstrates that customers needs to find out more about content migration before approaching a CMS vendor and prior to selecting the best practice migration approach in order to ensure the best solution is delivered. ‘Surely’ – they tell themselves – ‘I can apply the same logic to selecting the best migration vendor as I would to (say) purchasing a car or house?’

Here lies the challenge for both the customer and the vendor; self diagnosis can be dangerous for both the success of your project and the future health of your web content; as the challenge of migrating content is a complex one.

I believe what sets Vamosa apart is how seriously we take our responsibility to perform a relevant and credible diagnosis for all customers.  All symptoms are identified before we progress to designing a solution.  During this diagnosis we discuss the consequences of such decisions and allow the customer to see potential negative effects for their end customer and also the impact this might have upon the acceptance of their new portal environment.

For this particular client, the self-diagnosed solution was to manually clean up 90% of their content post migration. However, the recommended solution was to clean up this content through an automated approach prior to the migration, helping to save both time and money.  The result for me was helping a customer with surfacing critical issues prior to the migration.  Finding the correct parameters to resolve these issues helped them to achieve a successful project. This is the way I have established long lasting relationships with all Vamosa customers during my seven years at Vamosa. Trust and understanding are key to a successful project.

For some time now I have seen Information Governance push its way onto the CIO’s agenda driven by issues such as eDiscovery and the high cost of information mis-governance. All businesses rely on information – and are increasingly generating new content (unstructured information) as documents, Blogs, Tweets and other digital assets. Furthermore, an organization’s web presence is its ‘shop window’, exposing them to new risks.

In today’s digital age many organizations are facing the challenge of compliance (or lack of it) with internal and external policies and regulatory standards. Enterprise content management (ECM) systems are often touted as the cure-all for enterprise content woes but they are often used as little more than a stockroom. ECM systems support the content publishing process, but not the process of providing structure and control to enterprise content.

They do not make content more findable, or reduce duplication, impose order or content quality. What is needed is a way to govern content to ensure the company stays on brand, maximizes operational efficiency, reduces risk through adherence to regulatory standards and automates its content quality processes that are too large and complex to complete manually.

Gone are the days where staying on brand was the sole responsibility of the Marketing Manager. It is now a board level issue. So too is governance, risk and compliance (GRC) which, as well as becoming a more familiar acronym, is amongst the top board level agenda items. Why? In late 2006, new amendments were made to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) regarding electronic discovery of evidence. Known as ‘e-Discovery’, these amendments force US companies in litigation to present a whole array of electronic evidence data to lawyers, from email to instant messaging chats and accounting databases.

Yet companies are struggling to do this – and are paying hefty fines as a result. In 2008, failure to comply with FRCP data discovery demands in litigation cost financial services firm UBS Warburg $29 million. Pharmaceutical company Merck , meanwhile, was forced to hand over an astounding $253 million for the same reasons. In fact, a well-known international fast food company allegedly spends $100,000 dollars in fines every day because it cannot respond with the right information in time. These costs are real, and extremely damaging.

FRCP compliance – and compliance with SOX, HIPAA and various SEC and other government regulations, come to that – isn’t just a matter of handing over information to regulators. If that information is badly organized it can also cost a business dearly. Every electronic document, web page, file and folder could contain potentially relevant matter relating to a litigation request. A recent HP survey found that the greatest concerns regarding e-Discovery are risk (of not having an appropriate strategy in place), lack of infrastructure and the potential cost of facing a ‘hold’ order.

Effective information and content governance has to be part of a successful e-Discovery strategy to lower the risk of being unprepared, and ensure that access to electronic content doesn’t end up being extremely costly.

Research shows that 85% of acquisitions are a failure in the eyes of the acquirer and one of the most common reasons: a lack of post-acquisition planning.

Buying another company and truly integrating it into your business is an operational challenge. Acquirers need a precise view of the shape and size of the integration plan and the more detail you can articulate then the quicker those acquisition benefits can be realized for your shareholders.

Many integration issues have been addressed in copious lines of print: sales channels, commission structures, accounting systems, headcount strategy, reporting structures, contracts, tax rates, surplus assets, IT Systems – the list is endless. However there is a new area emerging that is dangerously invisible to the Board – Digital Content integration. The world’s digital content is doubling every year and the lack of Governance applied to enterprise content is having a serious business impact on corporations worldwide including: expensive e-discovery audits, executives searching for, but not finding content, inability to migrate and merge content, duplication of content, conflict or breaches of corporate standards, or even a complete lack of standards altogether.

All of these issues are only compounded within the pressure cooker environment of a merger.

We have listed below the top big 8 issues we come across in our work at Vamosa:

1.    Content acquired ruins your consistent messaging and corporate identity.
2.    New logos are placed all over the new web properties you acquired.
3.    Numerous competing Content Management Systems (related to systems that perform the same tasks) results in inefficiencies such as high operating costs.
4.    A significant (could be as high as 60%) amount of duplicate content keeps the cost of content ownership high.
5.    Content needs to be reassigned as organizational structures change above it.
6.    Portal integration should follow quickly after the targeted company has been acquired. However integrating unfamiliar content into an existing portal can stunt integration.
7.    Ownership of an Enterprise Content Governance framework is essential to give leadership to content authors.
8.    Staff morale can drop rapidly within an acquired company if basic content retrieval, intranet usability and the quality of web sites deteriorates.

In future editions of this blog series we will explore some practical, in-depth solutions. As a taster – here are the headline solutions: