Content Governance

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.

Content Migration is complex; it is not simply a case of ‘lifting and shifting’ content from one content management system (CMS) to another. Web content is often inconsistently structured and spread across multiple locations and sites.

With this in mind, there is a growing requirement for content to be analyzed, enhanced and standardized prior to migration. The cost involved in manually reviewing and migrating content can be significant; but it can be minimized through the use of software to perform automatic analysis and migration – a solution recently provided by Vamosa for the Department of Health and Ageing of Australian Government (DoHA).

DoHA needed to migrate from their legacy CMS to IBM WCM within just eight weeks in order to achieve better control of their internet sites. Vamosa recommended a solution that involved an automatic cleanup and enhancement of their content. This process firstly involved identifying all of the content that was required to be migrated.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer Vamosa Expert Services gained a clear understanding of DoHA’s content inventories and content management activities. The results showed that DoHA had 40 static websites containing 50,000 ‘must have’ pages that were to be migrated.

Vamosa Content Migrator then extracted all of the required content, copying it into the staging repository while allowing business to continue as normal for all DoHA’s employees. The next stage of the process involved exposing all of the content to Vamosa’s rules engine, Vamosa Content Quality Builder, allowing all of the content to be modified both for business requirements and to satisfy the requirements of the target system. The content was then loaded into the target system already ‘fit for purpose’ and ready for productive use.

Vamosa Content Migrator was used to simply, automatically and quickly migrate the required web content and linked documents to IBM Lotus WCM in the stated timescales. The Vamosa toolset in the migration process, compared with the manual alternative, lead to the project being completed

    * Four times faster
    * At a quarter of the price
    * With zero impact on day to day operations

Over the last 15 years, the Web has fundamentally changed the way organizations conduct their business. From its simple beginnings, the use of the Web now extends from public-facing Internet sites to knowledge-sharing Intranets, limited-access Extranets, and the ever expanding world of social media. As the Web function continues to broaden, it requires the same management accountability mechanisms and controls that support and govern other aspects of business.

The notion of corporate governance is not new. Many organizations have formal governance controlling core functions such as IT and finance. However at Vamosa we have found that over one third of enterprises have no web governance policy or inconsistent policies on legal and technical compliance for web content.

Some view web governance as a barrier to freeform, organic Web development that has helped the Web move from a curiosity to a mission-critical business tool. However, there is now a mass of uncontrolled data available on the Web and this unstructured growth and lack of governance standards creates risk as the Web presence degrades amidst a cacophony of un-orchestrated development practices.

We agree with Lisa Welchman that the Web is simply too mission-critical to operate in an ad hoc or informal manner. In order to effectively align the Web with strategic objectives, Lisa is a proponent of formal Web Governance must be established and mechanisms implemented to enforce standards must be incorporated into day-to-day web operations management.

At Vamosa we believe it is time for Web Governance; Now and to demonstrate its importance, we will be running a series of weekly videos on this issue.



Web Governance Part, Now! Part 1




Web Governance, Now! Part 2

Check out more on this in our white paper Web Governance and Standards Compliance.
 

We talk a lot on the Vamosa blog about  website compliance and content compliance, the importance of it and the cost implications of a company not complying. But I thought that rather than just take our word for it, it would be good to highlight some recent blogs and articles on the topic…

Gartner Research Report ‘MarketScope for E-Discovery Software Product Vendors’ by Debra Logan Whit Andrews and John Bace

The main areas of cost reduction are on processing data by external service providers and less time and therefore money spent on outside attorney review, as less material is passed to them. These benefits are achieved by defensibly culling the amount of data that is passed on to further steps in the e-discovery process, by allowing in-house attorneys to ‘go back to the well’ and refine their searches, coming up with either more data (to avoid sanctions) or to refine existing data sets to the relevant documents to pass on for further consideration.

ZDNet Blog, ‘Ten emerging Enterprise 2.0 technologies to watch,’ Posted by Dion Hinchcliff. Automated compliance monitoring.

One of the less discussed but more important (and often unstated) objections to Enterprise 2.0, especially for public companies and regulated industries, is ensuring that their use is compliant with all local and foreign laws, rules, and regulations. When any worker can easily disseminate information across an entire organization, or even across the world, some organizations want to be aware of problematic situations before they occur. While social media policy for workers has evolved steadily to provide upfront guidance, many companies still want to ensure they can detect compliance violations as quickly as possible before they become an actual problem. Unfortunately, it’s all too common for FRCP, Sarbanes-Oxley, European Union Privacy Laws, HIPAA, eDiscovery, etc. to be somewhat neglected in E2.0 discussions, where most of the focus initially is on benefit and not potential risk. The good news is that even though most large firms using social media today don’t actively police their users (IBM is a good example of this), I do find that most firms that already have automated compliance tools like CompliantPro are usually covered. However, expect that compliance will become an increasingly important feature of Enterprise 2.0 platforms…

Gartner Blog ‘A Whole Lotta Lawyers’, Posted by Debra Logan

Electronically stored information(ESI) is a HOT topic in legal circles and most lawyers don’t know all that much about it, or if they do, are concerned with making use of it in any way they can, offensively or defensively.  The problem these days is naturally compounded by the sheer volume of the stuff.  With companies being in the state they are regarding the proper management of information, lawyers can no longer conduct exhaustive searches of all that is available.  In large class action suits (think of the tobacco litigation) there are millions upon millions of individual items that might be considered, millions of items to find, and millions to produce.  It cannot be done without technology, certainly.

e-Discovery Journal ‘What is Information Governance?’,  by Barry Murphy

Information is the lifeblood of businesses; you’ve heard term “information economy,” I hope.  I like to talk about information as the fuel on which businesses run.  Taking that analogy further, raw information assets are like oil – they need to be converted into fuel that can make an engine run; in the case of business, that fuel is knowledge.  A decade ago, knowledge management was all the rage, but very few organizations were able to measure the business benefit of implementing knowledge management systems.

Gartner Blog ‘What is Information Governance? And Why is it So Hard?‘, Posted by Debra Logan

These days, there is the added complication of ‘compliance’, an all purpose stick with which everyone uses to beat everyone else and mostly has resulted in even more reluctance to manage information in any way other than simply allowing it to accumulate for fear that deleting it is forbidden by some obscure law or regulation.    Lawyers have been increasingly dragged into the discussions about information governance and that usually complicates matters, rather than makes them simpler.  Most legal counsel do not know exactly what business documents must be preserved, in every case.  If there is pending litigation, its easy enough, and that they do understand.  Otherwise, they lob the ball back into the business user’s court and the circular arguments begin again.

Ensuring content compliance and e-Discovery should be a top priority for every enterprise. With this comes the need to set content governance and procedures to protect your company against the potential risks and financial losses.







Learn more about how you can control your content and acheive truly effective Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG). Download the Making Enterprise Content Goverance a Reality White Paper.

As Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) specialists, we at Vamosa clearly understand the benefits of findability. However we also realize it is all too frequently under-valued or worse completely overlooked by many. We are possibly too engrossed in our day-to-day activities and findability is simply lost in the list of ‘to-do’s’, or maybe it is on the agenda but carries a negative connotation because it’s perceived as search engine optimization (SEO) grunt work. In any case findability is left at the sidelines because we don’t understand where or how to fit it into our process.

At the most basic level, the goal of findability is to connect your audience with the content you create and the things you write, design and build.  When you produce relevant and valuable content, present it in an accessible format, provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability you are ensuring that you break the communications clutter and that you are reaching your audience with your message. Our PDF on ECOG-Framework shows you the process in stages of how to do this.

Ignoring findability is like shouting over static noise, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. To further complicate the chances of reaching your target audience, a barrage of other web sites are vying for the same commodity—attention.

Findability is a complicated matter that touches every sub-category of our industry, and everyone involved with your web estate has a part to play in making it more findable—this includes project managers, information architects, copywriters, designers, developers, and usability experts. Findability can’t be put off to the end of a project and it can’t be fobbed off as SEO.  Here is some content enhancing information to mull over while you think about your web structure, streamlining content, making the language easy to understand, putting the most important information first, and meta-tagging each page with relevant terms. Meta-tagging is a big and important issue with being found don’t let it be the elephant in the room no-one talks about. Get prepared and have a read at this excellent educational article which explains how search engines find your information and all the different ways your content can help your search ranking. Failing to do so may result in your website being a waste of time and money otherwise. There’s more bang for your buck in educating everyone on your team about the benefits of findability, and their role in achieving its goals.

Speaking of bucks, there’s money to be made by finding a place for findability in your web sites life-cycle. The more findable your content is, the more likely it will be the commercial success you’d hoped. Users will appreciate having clear and concise content and it makes finding information about your services and what you ‘offer’ easier, essentially giving the people what they want. It could be what separates you from the competition, and may help your organization win more business.

These bottom-line benefits make findability an easy sell to a production team and clients alike, and can be summed up with a simple equation:

Findable content = Increased ROI

What’s not to like about that?

However in order for findability to be effective, it needs to be understood and embraced by all who plan, design, and build on the web. Despite this, when you consider the possible potential benefits of findabiity, it’s easy to see why you should care about being found.

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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.

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.

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.

At Vamosa, we’ve recently commissioned research to look into enterprises’ website governance policy. The results were not good. Over one third of enterprises have no web governance policy or inconsistent policies on legal and technical web compliance for web content. The research also showed that 4% of enterprises never check content for legal compliance. Basically, there are a lot of enterprises out there that are completely open to eDiscovery cost implications or other legal issues.

And the costs are real. The US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), eDiscovery laws, force 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. 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. Enterprises are not encouraging proper governance of content and as a result are putting themselves at risk.

Having said all this, legal compliance and the fear of litigation in case of compliance failure is driving the growth of the Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) market. This is a good thing as more enterprises need control over their web content and effective ECoG will make it a reality.  ECoG will help enterprises not only achieve, but maintain good content quality to satisfy these key business challenges that are reliant on content.









Check out more on this in our white paper ‘Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality’.

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.

We’ve all heard the horror stories about businesses getting fined massively for not being able to find content, whether it’s structured or unstructured. As board members are increasingly held responsible for the content and IT systems in place, e-Discovery (or eDisclosure) is now absolutely a board level conversation. And this is where Enterprise Content Governance plays a vital role.

Enterprise Content Governance is the act of ensuring your content is structured and controlled so that it enables the business to minimize Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), reduce exposure to compliance risk, maximize worker productivity and protect the organization’s key knowledge assets. Simply put, Enterprise Content Governance is the process of not only achieving, but maintaining good content quality.

With increasing varieties of content being used as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case, multi-national enterprises should prepare themselves for potential e-discovery requests. Yet according to Forrester, two-thirds of businesses consider their e-discovery strategy reactive rather than proactive.

A reactive approach won’t sit well with the courts. To comply with discovery of electronic records you must produce records in a timely manner, not something done easily reactively. With ever growing volumes of content, e-discovery can be time-consuming and expensive if you’re not prepared.

Enterprises need to be ‘litigation ready’ and the board needs to be instigating that conversation. By utilizing ECoG offerings, large businesses and Governments worldwide can implement content management and content compliance policies within an infrastructure of best practice methods – optimizing corporate knowledge, whilst reducing company exposure to legislative risk.

To learn more about how Vamosa can help make ECoG a reality in readiness for e-Discovery, check out our whitepaper ‘Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality.’

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.