When you create content, what happens to it? Does it get uploaded to your website, to be forgotten about, or become redundant over time?

Content has a life – and one that doesn’t stop when published. This is an oversight often made by many enterprises and organizations. Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) is the process of taking content through its lifecycle, from initiation to creation, control and consumption. In fact, there are sixteen stages in this lifecycle.

Phase 1 is to initiate, or in other words manage change requests. At this stage, you need to prioritize content, authorize and make decisions as to deleting old, redundant files or creating new ones.

Then you move onto Phase 2, creating the content: authoring, tagging and authorization. Phase 3 is where control is applied. Content is structured and migrated to a CMS. During this process, rules and policies need to be applied to ensure content adheres to both internal and external guidelines (such as branding and legislation).

The last phase deals with the usage of content: its findability, managing your assets, monitoring and maintaining content. At this point you might decide that changes need to be made. Perhaps your content is now out-dated or not needed, taking you back to Phase 1: requests to change content.

Throughout this journey changes must be authorized and rules and policies must be applied. You must be clear who in your organization holds the decision-making powers and what rules what is important for your organization to govern your content.

To help you indentify where you experience challenges managing the life of your content, we’ve created an Enterprise Content Governance Framework. It also conveniently shows where Vamosa tools can be used to automate tasks at each stage.

Web accessibility is becoming more important as businesses are increasingly generating new content. There is lots of good advice and guidelines provided by W3C, Disable Discrimination Act, RNIB, Government etc… that focuses on how to make a website accessible. Good mark-up is the foundation of a usable, accessible and robust website. The HTML and CSS which passes the validation test can be very useful, but this is not the same as accessibility. HTML validators do not check that the ‘ALT’ attributes are relevant, or that link text is useful

Accessibility is very subjective even when using standardized guidelines. I believe organizations should make their documents as accessible as they can, but remain committed to improving the accessibility of any document when and if an issue is brought to their attention. It is very challenging to create content which is accessible to people with different disabilities for e.g. content may be accessible to either the visually impaired or those that are hard of hearing, but may not be accessible to those that are deaf-blind.

I think that it is fair to assume that an accessible web is necessary to provide everyone with the right to freely participate in the cultural life of community, to enjoy and share scientific advancement and its benefits. The web accessibility guidelines are not simply legislative, they are a moral obligation. Looking at a recent example, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Comittee, they stated ‘where practical and possible, we added additional options to meet the needs of those with visual impairments’. Despite this attempt many felt that the site was not a significant improvement on previous Olympic sites – sites which have previously been subjects to human-rights injunctions, regarding accessibility, which they have lost.

This shows that there is still a long way to go before content created and published within the public domain is made 100% accessible to everyone. The UK government has a commitment to make all the local government web sites accessible for every citizen by the end of 2010 and this poses a very difficult but essential challenge

We at Vamosa understand the difficulties associated in keeping content in line with W3C guidelines and thus provide solutions that allow organizations to automatically check and fix any breaches should they occur, ensuring content quality is maintained in line with your organizations Accessibility and HTML standards while adehering to Enterprise Content Governance Standards.

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.