Brand Governance

Mergers and Acquisitions are high profile events and the need to seamlessly combine two disparate content stores and deliver a consistent message to users is vital. To achieve success the project team needs to deal with issues such as brand compliance, application of a single information architecture, content model, and corporate taxonomy. These issues require careful thought and should be an integral part of planning for any merger.

So, why then do so many mergers, carefully thought out in terms of strategy, markets, and organization, stumble on the integration of technology and the valuable content of the user community? One reason is that IT assets and important website and intranet collateral are often absent from the due diligence process.

Research suggests that only around one in six of these projects bring in the data or content migration portion on time and within budget. The main reason for overruns is a failure to fully understand the content to be migrated. In other words, the data sources are neither fully known nor completely understood.

Failure to include content within the due diligence process can lead to high profile, post merger quality issues, such as a lack of brand governance and poor link cohesion.

So, what are the key points to think about when embarking on an M&A project involving digital content. Here are some pointers....

-    Undertake a thorough Content Discovery phase to ensure that you understand the size, structure and scope of the acquired property and the effort required to create a unified content store
-    Consider whether your existing hardware and infrastructure can cope with the additional content and increased numbers of authors and consumers
-    Talk to the content owners and make sure they are involved in any decisions that will affect future content usability
-    Produce a plan with key milestones and deliverables to track progress towards a smooth integration
-    Plan to implement a common IA, content and metadata model which can encompass all content
-    Think about the key customer-facing sections of your site

• branding must be consistent
• navigation and search must function reliably for all content
• duplicate, conflicting and non-compliant content should be identified and removed

-    An ongoing content governance model should be adopted to ensure all future content conforms to the organization’s digital content policies

Removing risk from these projects is a Vamosa speciality, but even without professional support, these pointers will help to keep you on the right track. There are many pitfalls for the unprepared, but taking an organized and structured approach actually enables a merger to benefit content quality, as it is the ideal time for content cleansing and removal of redundant and obsolete content.

Although high risk and highly visible, tackled in the right way, M&A projects provide a platform to a more streamlined and efficient digital content store.


 To learn more about the typical barriers to starting a content migration, download the 'Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality' White Paper.

We at Vamosa recently conducted a survey of UK and US private and public sector organizations to uncover: who is responsible for websites; what is involved in the day-to-day management of websites; and how website performance is measured. Over 100 webmasters, IT project managers and web marketing staff completed the survey.

The results provided us with some valuable insights into web operations management, focused on the very real day-to-day challenges.

The survey clearly showed that the web team is inundated with a variety of requests and projects. They are most commonly tasked with publishing content - 90% of respondents handling such requests. Fixing broken links is also a major issue for the web team, with 84% dealing with link cohesion problems. Implementing and maintaining technical standards, such as web accessibility, were also dealt with by 71% of respondents. Finally, ensuring SEO performance was optimized was carried out by web teams approximately two-thirds of the time – in fact SEO and general site performance were the most frequently logged requests that the web team had to deal with.

In addition to the tasks highlighted above, the survey also found that the majority of web maintenance and management is carried out in house, not handled by external agencies. A third of all web teams stated that they were responsible for between 76% and 90% of all task requests while another third of respondents said that their web team was fully responsible for all tasks.  When you consider the daily demands that Web teams are faced with, it is clear that teams need to be efficient in fixing errors before they get out of control.

Vamosa has introduced WebWorxx to put web teams in the driving seat by completing daily crawls of websites. ‘Hotspots’ on the homescreen show where the most common issues on your website are occurring and places them in rank order.  The web operation teams can then create specific ‘focus areas’ designed to address a particular sub-set of the problems identified. Work can then be assigned as a project to team members, to work through the tasks and resolve problems. Notes can be captured against tasks and even marked up on the page where the error occurs - all within the WebWorxx collaborative portal. This means everyone is fully aware of the status of assigned tasks at all times.

WebWorxx monitors web properties against a configurable list of policies, dependent on your specific requirements. These policies incorporate a range of typical web operations issues such as:
•    Accessibility (26 Policies)
•    Search Engine Optimization (10 Policies)
•    Brand Compliance (8 Policies)
•    Governance (4 Policies)
•    Data Protection (7 Policies)
•    HTML Standards (2 Policies)

Web teams are clearly under time pressure to complete a wide variety of tasks efficiently and effectively. WebWorxx allows proactive management of day-to-day requirements of web operations management putting the web team back in control.











To find out more about how WebWorxx can support the day-to-day management of your website visit: WebWorxx or download the free 14 day WebWorxx trial now.

When technology provides a revolution in service delivery, unfortunately there inevitably comes a point in the adoption curve when the service provider ceases to perceive the technology as being ground-breaking, and it becomes viewed as a burden or overhead.   The initial competitive advantage becomes a distant memory.  Take, for example, the humble ATM.  Twenty-five years ago, ATMs were innovation supreme.  They delivered 24/7 services to bank customers and allowed banks to significantly reduce the cost per transaction of dealing with customers.  Move forward to the new millennium and the banks started to introduce invidious charges for using the very same machines that had allowed them to become so efficient in the first place.  The ATM becomes a mode of operation rather than a differentiator, a profit center rather than a cost center.

In the second decade of the 21st century we see far more ubiquity in the web – Google trawls trillions of web pages and there are hundreds of millions of websites.  Corporations recognize that their web presence opens up markets at a speed and a rate previously undreamt of.  However, there is a downside to this rush-to-web.  As websites become bigger, more innovative and more technology laden, understanding the real web experience of the online customer becomes a huge challenge for organizations; website governance is now essential.  And the innovative aspects are becoming a dim and distant memory – single point of publication, world wide reach etc.
 
The aspect of the web that is so attractive is also the aspect that makes it so dangerous.  With a frictionless market for information, and a ready audience of consumers, your customers now find that they have teeth.  If the web experience is poor, or if a broken link prevents them from making a purchase, or if a pressure group spots the tiniest chink in your accessibility armor, then countless blogs and forum comments and YouTube videos can appear (in many instances even before the offending company knows that it has sinned!).

From the government agency which has to ensure that all citizens have access to all services online regardless of disability, to the online retailer with a hugely complex content supply chain, there are a huge number of ‘micro-measurements’ that must be applied to every page on every website; then every changed page needs to have this all-seeing review applied as apart of a web operations management strategy.  The numbers can make your head hurt – checking thousands of web pages every day for dozens of mini-flaws is a thankless task, but it is becoming a more and more essential one as the importance of web compliance increases.  To invest tens of millions of dollars into your website, your marketing strategy, your corporate brand, and then provide a second rate customer experience smacks of bad luck if you are charitable; amateurism if you are being realistic.

To find out how you can get back control of your site, so your customers can get a truly impressive web experience every time, checkout the latest WebWorxx video.

On any given day a web operations team can be inundated with requests to change this web page, add this link, ensure the back-end is updated to reflect various changes. The queue of problems stacks up from these requests, but also because many people contribute to a site, so content can be incorrect, duplicated, tagged incorrectly and therefore not findable. Even the smallest inaccuracy or inconsistency in a regulated environment can result in untold problems with major financial implications. Business opportunities may be missed, sales lost and legal liabilities created by published or user-generated content which simply fails to follow the correct policy.

Ensuring that every single piece of content adheres to the content compliance policies and standards of your brand is a 24/7 process that no one can afford to fail. It requires automated software.

Last week we announced our new software tool dedicated to helping web operations teams deliver value for the business, but what does that really mean? Essentially it provides an integrated platform for managing and governing web operation projects. To manage the digital haystack, this tool provides full visibility of any issues on a daily basis to identify problem areas and address these with the relevant people quickly. It can help the web team identify policies and procedures that need to be introduced to minimize ongoing web issues.  It’s an easy-to-use interface dedicated to improving the performance of web operations teams and therefore the effectiveness of a company’s web properties.

If you are a Web developer, Webmaster, Web author, Digital Marketing Manager or Marketing Manager, you can increase both your own and the wider team’s productivity by using this dashboard product. You’ll find that your time is freed up to initiate more strategic web development projects.

Do you understand your content lifecycle? Do you even have a content lifecycle? A content governance model, such as Vamosa’s Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) framework is built around control and governance of content from creation, through consumption and on to retirement/archival or deletion. Implementing a governance model will make a huge difference to overall content quality, with streamlined processes resulting in a high percentage of well tagged, standards-compliant and relevant content. There are other benefits too: including cost reductions from increased efficiency; and reduced maintenance and storage requirements. The big question for Records Managers, Web Content Managers, Librarians and other professionals is ‘How can I start to apply this framework and regain control of the information in my organization?’.

Content has always been difficult to control due to its diverse nature and it should be no surprise that it’s not going to get any easier. This article from the eDiscovery Journal raises some of the issues facing organizations in the Web 2.0 era. Not only is legislation being tightened around how information can be used and how it should be retained within organizations, but the number of ways that information can be created has increased dramatically. In addition to the content residing within Content Management Systems (CMS) and email servers, organizations now have to consider the new breed of collaboration and social networking tools that are growing rapidly within the workplace. User-generated content featured in instant Messaging, Blogs, Twitter, Google Wave, Buzz etc. all make it possible for information to exist in a wide variety of locations, yet still “owned” by the company. This type of information cannot be managed or controlled using traditional methods.

Failing to appreciate the need for governance introduces risk and is one of the reasons why enterprise organizations find themselves in a situation where they lose control of their content. There is often no real understanding of either the quantity or the value of information existing within the network. Misleading information can seriously damage a company’s brand and customer service, while duplication can result in increased storage and infrastructure costs. Ultimately, this lack of control leads to an increase in the so called “digital landfill” and the first thing to suffer is content quality and, in due course, the end user experience.

So, where do you start? The first stage of the ECoG governance model is “Initiate”. This really is the stage where you have to plan your strategy and think about the content you need – whose going to use it and when; what are they going to do with it – and also what you can live without. Retention of obsolete or irrelevant information is one of the biggest factors contributing to uncontrolled growth of content within organizations. The Initiate phase fits extremely well with the implementation of a CMS for the first time, or as a ‘take stock’ point ahead of migration into a replacement CMS, but it can also be undertaken on the back of a thorough analysis of existing content. This is the perfect opportunity to rationalize content and ensure quality and relevance are high before populating the CMS. A CMS will only manage content, it won’t deliver governance. For that you need a strategy and policies covering the end to end content lifecycle – ensuring that you not only obtain a high level of content quality, but maintain that level, in order to maximize the value of your information assets.

The boardroom is a busy place with every department competing for resource and time from the decision makers. But often, content is not discussed or not a priority for the board. However increasingly, these decision makers are on the hook for the content stored within their company, or that appears on their Web properties; whether or not anyone in the company created it or even knew about it.

The need for businesses to protect costs and competitive edge has never been greater. That’s why now is the time for organizations to control and structure their content properly across the enterprise and for the board to recognize the benefits for the business and its agenda.

Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) is central to businesses optimizing their existing investment in enterprise content management systems, while reducing costs, improving corporate efficiency, ensuring compliance and reducing their carbon footprint. More specifically, ECoG addresses the following board-level issues:

• eDiscovery - Effective ECoG lowers the risk of being unprepared, and ensures that access to electronic content doesn’t end up being extremely costly.

• Brand Governance – Brand compliance is hugely important for today’s globalized organizations to ensure their competitive messages are consistently communicated to key (and often geographically distributed) communities of interest.

• Reduced Storage – Burgeoning content and the constraints of compliance are inevitably going to have an impact on storage. And while the unit cost of storage is starting to decrease and technologies such as virtualization are coming to maturity, more work can be done to reduce the amount of storage a business uses. In the process of migrating over 100 organizations from one Content Management System to another, Vamosa has found that as much as 50% of an organization’s content is typically redundant. Remove this content, and 50% of a company’s server farm can be freed up, offering a huge saving on operating costs.

• Corporate efficiency – And there are more significant, farther-reaching benefits to be had from effective ECoG. ‘Collaborative working’ and ‘knowledge management’ may be industry buzzwords, but the concepts they represent should be taken seriously by every organization. The ability for a company to capture, share, organize, find and use its knowledge efficiently has a direct impact on its ability to be productive, competitive and ultimately, profitable – yet not all organizations are properly equipped to do this.

To be able to control and structure content properly across the organization – i.e., to achieve effective Enterprise Content Governance – organizations need to improve their content quality. The board needs to understand this importance and put proper resource into achieving effective ECoG. To learn about the five significant steps in the process, download the whitepaper here.

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.







To understand further how you can achieve effective Enterprise Content Governance and  improve content quality in five steps download the Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality White Paper.

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:

Issue	Solution
Branding of properties	The role of Vamosa Consulting Practise and Vamosa ECoG Suite for Web
Systems Consolidation	Vamosa's ECoG Suite for Web and interaction with Vamosa's Consulting Practise
Redundant and Reassigned Content	Using Vamosa ECoG Suite for Web to eliminate waste
Portal Integration	The deployment of Tagging technologies and how they integrate with Vamosa ECoG Suite for Web
Governance Frameworks	How to implement Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) to extract real value from your content

To learn more about how to overcome these M&A challenges and how to ensure brand governance is maintained visit the Vamosa M&A page.

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 and ensure brand governance standards are adhered to. Taking advantage of Vamosa’s policy-driven rules engine, our Consultancy practice can design and configure a tailored package of content policies using Vamosa's ECoG Suite for Web, 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 ECoG Suite for Web – 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 ECoG Suite for Web 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.








To learn more about CMS consolidation and CMS Migration, down the Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success White Paper.

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.

Challenges of Governance

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?

Who has Control of Content?

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.

Who is Responsible?

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.

To learn more about implementing an Information Governance Strategy, download the Web Governance and Standards Compliance White Paper.

Charles Darwin came up with an interesting theory back in the early 1800s: a theory that has stood the test of time. It remains pretty contemporary, doesn’t it?

The idea that species propagate and thrive as a function of how well they are adapted to their immediate environment is maddeningly simple. Yet, it was major challenge to the thought leaders of the time.

Charles Darwin was a man of many talents. He is remembered today mostly for one achievement, and his true brilliance lay in his vision. He saw a pattern in evolution, he noticed the process of survival and came up with a concept which, latterly has been referred to as ’survival of the fittest’.

Taking a step back, what does Darwin’s theory of natural selection have to do with Enterprise Content or Information Management? Exactly what it had to do with selective retention of species! Content, Content Management Systems, Content Governance and Content Migration solutions are all subject to these laws. Given enough time, nature will play its part and the best adapted to its environment will survive.

In the recent decade, we have been through an information revolution of sorts. We have a slew of CMS vendors out there, at different levels of maturity and suitability. The rate of their evolution is a complex function of market forces and hard to predict. You may migrate from a system today to what seems most promising for your future. It is entirely possible (and not that uncommon) that you may have to go through the same process in as short a period as 2-4 years.

To take the lead from Darwin, what pray is the next, natural evolutionary step -the criteria that are not a CMS differentiator today, but are likely to be in 5 years time? I would like to suggest that it will be building metrics and features to provide a robust content governance infrastructure. After all, the quality of your message should be at the core of your desire to advertise it. This is a fast growing field, with many vendors producing applications with a smattering of the features necessary to support Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) goals. It is an exciting landscape; however there seems to be but few players with a laser focus on the ECoG objectives. So, next time you look at your content strategy, ask yourself these questions:

• Do I have a way to ensure my content conforms to my corporate brand guidelines?
• Do I have a way to ensure that my content is setup to best position us for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content conforms to the latest HTML standards?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content adequately protects sensitive, corporate data?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content does not use any inappropriate language?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content conforms to accessibility standards?

Most CMS vendors have their hands full with different questions, and are not able to provide satisfactory answers to these for a while to come. Good luck with stepping back and asking questions that will help define a content strategy that is stable, robust and built for survival!


In order to ensure you have a well define content strategy before migrating to a new CMS, download the 'Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success' White Paper.

At Vamosa, we define ‘Information Governance’ as the set of policies and procedures designed to govern a piece of information from its inception through to its destruction. Information governance activities include: the design and implementation of formal policies that define how information is stored and shared among employees and stakeholders; addressing preventable risks to sensitive information; better preparing for new compliance mandates; ensuring quality, compliance and protection of information; and increasing the business value of information.

The 451 Group’s article ‘The Rise of Information Governance’ (August 2009) similarly defines ‘Information Governance’ as the practices and technologies involved with proactively managing what information is retained, where it is stored and for how long, who has access to it and how it is protected.

Information Governance

Whatever the definition, ‘Information Governance’ needs to be a priority and included as part of enterprises’ wider compliance strategy i.e. regulatory compliance – national or industry-specific compliance mandates – technical compliance, for example, Web accessibility; and compliance with corporate policy, such as brand guidelines, recruitment practices and so on. One of the significant challenges is translating these ‘Information Governance’ policies into day-to-day behavior, particularly when it comes to unstructured data.

Managing unstructured data (web content, email, Blogs, user-generated content) is inherently different, and in many ways more challenging, than controlling its structured counterpart. This is why we have coined the phrase ‘Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) to focus attention on this often uncontrolled ‘digital landfill’ as AIIM would have it.’ Effective Information Governance is impossible without controlling and structuring your content and that’s exactly what ECoG does for organizations.

Enterprise Content Governance

Enterprise Content Governance is the act of ensuring your content is structured and controlled; it’s the process of not only achieving, but maintaining good content ‘quality’ in order to satisfy key business challenges. This is where our definition and the process of ‘Information Governance’ differs slightly from 451 Group. Being compliant doesn’t just mean you’ve proactively managed content, but that you’ve controlled and structured that content from its inception and then monitored and maintained it throughout its lifecycle so that you can truly stand by its quality.

To learn how to start to get a grip on the uncontrolled data in your organization and implement policies to keep it under control, download the Rise of Information Governance White Paper.

The Obama administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government with the purpose of ensuring public trust by establishing a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. This isn’t a blog to discuss the three points, rather to focus on the system of transparency.

Obama's Memorandum

Obama’s memorandum states:

Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

The Challenge for Government

The words ‘find’ and ‘use’ presents a challenge for government. The challenge is that Web content needs structure and control to allow findability and usability – which is provided by having a proper taxonomy and supporting metadata; but over time as more and more content is published its quality deteriorates because policies are not automated, and therefore not implemented,and the less structured and controlled content becomes.

The Directive establishes guidelines for each agency to launch an open government Web site that engages the public on how federal agencies can advance a more open agenda. And that Web site must also show the status of each agency’s efforts in adhering to the directive. But this means agencies have a lot of work cut out for them within a short period of time – 120 days to be exact.

It’s unlikely that all government agencies have a grasp of all the content that lives on their Web site, let alone the quality of it, how their brand is represented, what is findable and if it is compliant with government guidelines. Before work can be undertaken to even make government content more transparent, they need to solve this problem.

Enterprise Content Governance

This is exactly where Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) fits and why it is a necessity. ECoG is the act of ensuring content is structured and controlled and there are five significant steps each government agency must undertake to achieve Obama’s Open Government Directive and content governance.

•  Firstly, a Web content analysis must be undertaken to discover what content the agency has and where it is stored.
• Secondly, it must be enhanced to improve on the condition of the content
• Thirdly, it must be standardized to ensure content can be re-used
• Fourthly, it needs to be findable, by being located within the Information Architecture in a suitable repository
• And lastly, it needs to be monitored and maintained in real time against the organization’s quality policies to ensure the quality standards that have been established continue to be met

The Open Government Directive is definitely a step in the right direction to help improve the quality and effectiveness of Web content. But it needs to be done right, following a structured system so that agencies are fully compliant, but also for the American people to find, understand and use their government’s information.







To learn more about the steps required to implement an Enterprise Content Governance strategy download the Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality White Paper.