Enterprise Content 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.

The challenges of content governance are constantly evolving as the volume of digital content published increases exponentially every day and new publishing channels emerge. Who, 12 months ago, for example, could have predicted that Twitter would become such a publishing phenomenon?

Vamosa understands this complexity and we know that dealing with the end-to-end life cycle of content in separate parts can make implementing an effective strategy for managing enterprise content more complex.

In response to enterprise needs, coupled with our understanding of the obstacles to enterprise-wide content management, we have launched two configurable software platforms that incorporate this end-to-end approach to content: Vamosa Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) Suite for Documents and ECoG Suite for Web. 

ECoG Suite for Documents

ECoG Suite for Documents has been designed to enable the transformation of document repositories into clean, usable content stores that can be governed by ECoG policies. The suite automates the life cycle of documents, from creation to on-going maintenance, supporting taxonomy and metadata management, versioning, policies for records management and archiving, and so on.

ECoG Suite for Web

ECoG Suite for Web allows clients to take back control of web content by automating policies for all stages of the content lifecycle, from accessibility to tagging and from broken links to ECMS migration, making it findable, compliant and more usable. By adopting a SaaS approach to web maintenance, web properties are monitored 24/7 so any breach of policy is trapped and resolved.

Most importantly for enterprises, the suites offer all the functionality previously available in separate Vamosa products, including analysis, data cleansing and migration but bundled into a single installation that is then configurable to the customer’s environment and specific ECoG policies.

If you use a Document Management System (DMS) to manage document based content you will already know that one of the key issues faced is how to move existing content into the new system.

On paper document migration looks relatively easy. A team of people could spend the next six months copying files and documents from their existing location into the DMS. However in order to achieve an effective document migration project it is essential that you consider:

•    How many files can one person move in one day? A document migration project of only 100,000 pages might take anywhere between 10 to 100 days to complete.
•    What happens during this move? Do you place a content freeze over all of the files and documents for the duration of the migration project? What about moving attached documents and handling internal and external links? How can you incorporate this functionality into your document migration strategy?

A document migration does not simply mean changing a few attributes and then placing the content into a slightly different information architecture. Document migrations involve the wholesale change of properties, storage, information architecture and content lifecycle, therefore document migration projects tend to involve hundreds of minor changes to very large volumes of data. This can potentially become incredibly time-consuming and frustrating. To reduce this confusion and to improve data quality, eliminate redundant, obsolete and redundant information and match the requirements of your new system, you really need a tried and tested method.

Vamosa Consultancy Practice, with their collective experience gained on over one hundred client projects, can assist in implementing best practice content quality processes; such as when selected to undertake the migration of the website and corporate Intranet for the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Working with integration partner, digital media giant Euro RSCG, Vamosa’s solutions and expertise was the obvious choice to deliver a web and Intranet content migration for Defra.

Gregory Roekens, Technology Director at Euro RSCG said ‘We were asked to provide a best of breed and best value solution to Defra’s business content migration problem and Vamosa’s tools and methods have the reputation as the Central Government standard’.

Vamosa Consulting was able to successfully bring control and structure to all documents across Defra’s content stores, providing, de-duplicated and clean content. As a part of an ongoing Enterprise Content Governance strategy, Vamosa ECoG Suite for Documents also uniquely pinpoints breaches of policy for all document governance areas, and offers an automated process to resolve each breach, allowing document stores to be kept up to code.

Corporate intranets are changing fast! No longer are intranets created and controlled by a few select authors and webmasters. New social networking features are being adopted across all industries in an attempt to increase user collaboration and provide a support framework through a modern, feature rich intranet site.

Fears of users running wild and spending their working day tweeting or poking have proved unfounded. In fact, providing social networking features within the organization actually reduces the time users spend on external sites. Evidence also suggests that because users are in a working environment, they retain a professional attitude and don’t abuse the system. Companies are learning that there is a huge wealth of information held within their user base. Blogs, wikis, support forums etc. can all be used to leverage that knowledge and benefit the wider user community. Commonwealth Bank recently introduced a new SharePoint based intranet with social networking functionality and - among other benefits - have had helpdesk calls reduce by 50-60%, massively reducing support costs.

So, all good news then? Well, yes and no. The benefits are obvious: more collaboration from motivated staff interested in contributing to the site, the ability to tap into the knowledge of all users and possibly even a reduction in external browsing leading to increased productivity. It’s also safe to say that a failure to embrace social networking will lead to an exodus from the intranet to the intranet for the most innovative and forward thinking users, who use these tools daily in their private lives and expect to do the same in the workplace.

The drawbacks? It may be new and cool social media, but it’s all still content and as such requires a governance strategy to ensure that user-authored content is relevant, accurate, standards-compliant and appropriate for internal publication. The Intranet 2.0 Global Survey reveals that only 57% of all organizations have published user content policies and standards. This means that almost half don’t have any user content governance. Especially worrying when the same survey indicates that 87% of organizations have at least one social networking tool on their intranet. That’s a lot of ungoverned user content!

As described by Elizabeth Marsh of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, social media governance is all about mitigating the risks and fostering user trust. You don’t need a separate social media policy. A well designed Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) model will cover all aspects of content, including social networking. The risk of not having a solid governance model is that your organization’s content, including that stored in blogs, wikis, podcasts, status updates, comments and instant messages, will expand in an uncontrolled way, increasing risk and liability.

So, to enjoy the benefits of a popular and productive intranet you should fully embrace collaboration and social networking. Just be sure that you have appropriate safeguards in place. Take expert advice and ensure that you have a content governance model in place that will allow you to reap the rewards in a controlled and risk-free way.

Any enterprise looking to manage content knows it has a challenge on its hands. Not only has the volume of content exploded exponentially in the last few years but so has the rate at which content is changing and users’ expectation of a satisfactory experience, whether on the Internet, or simply locating a file on the Intranet or Portal.

Vamosa announced its new consulting services on Tuesday. They offer a comprehensive approach to implementing best practice Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG), focusing on practical aspects, such as content modelling and keyword tagging.

A Vamosa customer – British Council – summarized the need for such expertise perfectly: “We knew there was a lot of out-of-date content, but with so many pages, it was an enormous challenge for us to undertake an analysis on our own. We chose Vamosa because of its Consultants’ expertise.”

The Consulting services are structured around ten different components to provide enterprises with a start-to-finish content strategy, and the added bonus of providing an independent evaluation to support decisions on CMS vendor selection.

A few examples of the different areas of the Practice include:
•    Content Discovery – a comprehensive analysis and assessment of content to optimize performance, reduce Total Cost of Ownership and resolve problem areas before content users complain
•    Migration Programme Management – capitalizes on the expertise of Vamosa experts to migrate content so employees can focus on day to day jobs and avoid the common pitfalls associated with CMS/DMS implementation
•    Keyword Tagging – Valuable keywords and phrases extracted from content and weighted based on relevance, then tagged as metadata making it easier to find

By engaging with Vamosa for consulting services, enterprises can not only be confident of receiving advice gained on hundreds of customer engagements, but also that these will be executed within a structured ECoG framework.

In his AIIM 2010 Keynote presentation, John Mancini talks about a variety of "disruptive forces" that will transform the CM industry. Among many other factors, he cites the following:

•    A demographic-driven shift in expectations of information management
•    Volumes of data rising faster than available storage
•     A "transfer of experiences... with consumer technologies into expectations for enterprise IT"
•    A pervasive feeling among enterprise users that information is easier to find on the web than in their internal systems

What this effectively means is that the realities of enterprise content management are continually diverging from the idealistic "everything you'll ever need" contention of traditional ECM suites. In chasing the carrot of single-point accountability, organizations have perpetuated an over-reliance on their content management systems, spurring vendors into building generic functionality - which may only crudely represent a customer's specific needs - or super-customized modules which can not adapt to changing business needs. In order for a CM implementation - like any system - to be effective in the modern enterprise, it must recognize two things:

1. It must address the specific needs of its users.
2. Those needs are going to change over time.

Organizations that have historically stemmed the rising tide of user requirements by tacking changes on to their  'all-in-one' systems will find this method inadequate to shore up the coming "data deluge". Mancini believes businesses will then stop investing in legacy systems that do not support the future and will look to the kinds of solutions which comply with the two tenets above: namely, solutions which are cheap, standards-based, and open.

Mancini contrasts applications with platforms, and specifically calls out SharePoint 2010 as a technology which, perhaps non-intuitively, falls into the latter category. Unlike traditional applications, these platforms will not ship with everything you'll ever need, and Mancini predicts a renaissance of process-specific solutions to fill this gap. This largely resonates with the practices of social and new media companies like Twitter and The Onion, who have created utterly unique experiences by bending open-source web frameworks to their will. In a similar vein, Vamosa's Expert Services organization has rolled out innovative solutions in the past two months by combining open-source frameworks like Sinatra and Django with SaaS offerings from Zoho and Heroku.

Taking this a bit further, I would propose that the concept of the platform is one piece of a larger framework (which Vamosa calls Enterprise Content Governance - ECoG) needed to effectively manage enterprise content. Successful CM architectures will incorporate a constellation of loosely coupled technologies, services, and processes. The businesses that succeed in this environment will be the ones who abandon the pursuit of the CMS holy grail and find a way to command a hybrid of proprietary and open-source platforms, point solutions, and services to achieve their precise objectives.

W3C, WCAG, Section 508, Double-A, XHTML Strict, Dublin Core, EDRM, ISO 9000… if you have a role in managing compliance within your organization – particularly as it relates to delivery of web content for internal or public consumption – chances are high that at least some of these terms are familiar to you. As argued in recent Vamosa blog posts from Moayyed Darugar and Paul Henderson, companies have a legal or ethical obligation to maintain compliance with some accepted standards, which all basically boil down to making sure the right information is disclosed and making sure that disclosed information is accessible. The software tools marketplace abounds with point solutions addressing compliance issues in each of these categories. But in addition to the universal standards, it’s likely that your organization has its own policies and protocols with their own set of motivations. What is your technology doing to address these?

It’s quite likely that your organization has many guidelines and procedures for managing your web and document content which are not reinforced by the technologies used to do that management. If you do have tools in place to address these focused objectives, it’s likely that they are integrated clumsily into your CMS or disjointed entirely… a cobblestone of macros. Even worse, some of the bricks in your road to compliance may be feature-rich applications from which you only need one or two functions; expensive bricks indeed! Taking a blue-sky view of the problem, it should be evident that the way to effectively manage your content’s compliance to both good-corporate-citizen standards and company-specific policies is to do so from a unified console giving you a view of exactly the policies you want to manage, and only those.

In the enterprise, there’s no such thing as a technology problem. There are only business problems to be solved with technology. This means that for a technical solution to be viable, its design, deployment, and usage must be fully aligned with the business issue it addresses. Producing this kind of solution is virtually impossible for a traditional software manufacturer: a precisely targeted solution limits the market, and a generic solution is bloatware that no one wants.  Building a tailor made solution, based on a standard software platform however, is exactly what has established Vamosa as a leader in Enterprise Content Governance. By offering a rules-based engine, Vamosa allows organizations to build robust, custom  solutions to govern compliance to their specific standards, with help on hand from the Vamosa Expert Services Team.

Whether you’re suffering blemishes on your corporate façade or fissures in the foundation of your business Vamosa offers a flexible solution.

Understanding where and what content exists is becoming vastly important within organizations. In today’s digital world, as volumes of content increase exponentially, employees are often overloaded with an insurmountable mass of content, resulting in, inefficient internal and external communications within organizations. This was a problem recently encountered by the Vamosa Expert Services  team when working with Statoil.

Statoil had outgrown its Content Management System (CMS), and was unable to manage the existing and insurmountable volume of content. As a result they chose to work with Vamosa to provide a fast, effective and accurate way of analyzing their content.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer, a full content audit of 150,000 pages of web content was performed in just three weeks. Statoil were able to identify problem areas within the corporate estate and automatically remove duplicate, redundant and obsolete content.

Although the analysis allowed Statoil to bring order to the chaos of their digital content, it was essential that measurements were put in place to ensure content quality was maintained on an ongoing basis.  By implementing an Enterprise Content Governance strategy, which defines who can make what decisions, who is accountable for which efforts, and how everyone works together to operate a website and web management process effectively Statoil were able to achieve control over their previously unstructured content.

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

As unstructured content grows exponentially, businesses need to capture, store, manage, integrate and deliver all forms of content across their enterprise. Knowledge workers  need the right information at the right time to make the right decisions.

Managing unstructured data (web content, email, Blogs, user-generated content) is inherently different, and in many ways more challenging, than controlling its structured counterpart. Controlling this ‘digital landfill’- as AIIM would have it – requires organizations to discover what content they have and understand what condition it is in. Through our extensive experience in enterprise content migration projects Vamosa is only too aware of how frequently organizations are faced with these challenges – for example when we recently worked with IBM.

IBM was required to migrate from their legacy system to Lotus Web Content Management (LWCM) in order to gain control of their digital content. A full understanding of their current content inventory was therefore required to ensure that only the necessary content was migrated.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer IBM conducted a full content audit; which involved crawling all content and nullifying any obsolete or redundant content, ensuring there were no broken links and identifying any outdated pages. Once the appropriate content had been identified, it was enhanced, allowing IBM to remove duplicates and manage version control through automated classification and tagging.

Vamosa Content Migrator was then used to simply, automatically and quickly migrate the required content into Lotus WCM within the project’s timescales. Vamosa solutions allowed the project to be completed up to four times faster than alternative approaches, at a quarter of the price and with no impact on day to day operations.

To learn more about the key implementation steps required in order to achieve a successful migration into IBM LWCM, download the 7 Steps to IBM LWCM Migration white paper.

Moving house is said to be one of the most stressful things to do in life. First, you need to find the new house considering the requirements you need. A 3 bedroom or 4? A big yard or small? Lots of storage or minimal? City or country? Next, you need to negotiate the terms of sale and close on the house. Then comes the actual move. This is the part of the process where you go through the years of built up stuff and decide whether to be rid of it or not. This process often brings to light stuff you haven’t seen for years, broken items you’ve saved ‘just in case’ and some keepsakes. Overall, you are cleansing your household contents.

This same process applies when a corporation approaches its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) decisions. However, it’s a constant surprise these decisions are made without having all of the facts at hand. Knowing answers to questions, such as: how much content exists; how often is content accessed in a week/month/quarter/year; who owns the content; what happens to old content; what content adheres to today’s standards; and when changes are made, how does the change impact on the other content; is the only way to truly understand what is in a corporation’s household content and is an essential part any data migration strategy.

Many ECM novices and veterans most likely have a question mark over what is in the content inventory, so getting to grips with this is often the main problem and is only done when a move is in sight. But content tooling is available and should be used to not just manage content (which most ECM systems already do), but govern it on an ongoing basis. These content tools provide answers to all of the questions that should be known before a content migration is even considered, as you’ll then be better placed to decide on the necessary requirements for the new system.

You wouldn’t move house without taking inventory of your household contents and you shouldn’t make ECM decisions without this analysis either.








Download the ‘Five Steps to Discovering the Real Shape of Your Digital Content,’ 
to learn more or check out the Vamosa Migration Methodology.

When creating or authoring content one important factor that is often overlooked by authors is correctly tagging the content. Perhaps this is a result of authors misunderstanding what is meant by tagging content properly.

There are two main approaches to tagging content; top-down and bottom-up. The top-down approach has been with us for a long time, even before the invention of the Web and is still used extensively today with Web content. The top down approach tends to be more hierarchical and involves the use of a taxonomy. The bottom-up approach is however much less structured and allows for the tagging of content by the author without limiting them to a specific set of terms to describe the content. This form of tagging content has proven to be very popular in the Social Media sites such as Twitter, Flickr and delicious.

The hierarchical top-down tagging approach tends to be used for enterprise content, where audit requirements for regulatory compliance are more onerous. Corporate, Industry and Government taxonomies are increasingly being used within implementations of Content and Information Management Systems. Taxonomies are used to classify and help in the retrieval of unstructured data within the organization. The taxonomy, if designed correctly, should help to create a map of the content. The main benefit of this, over the bottom-up approach, is  it allows users to find the relevant information quickly. Taxonomies achieve this by supporting the broadening and narrowing of topics, which allows users who are not sure what information they require to zero in on the information relevant to them.

We can see, therefore, that it is important to tag content correctly as this allows for effective and efficient retrieval of information. The problem that exists within many organizations is that there is a slew of digital content published across hard drives, intranets and CMSs that is not tagged correctly and this volume of content is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. Often, organizations  have a well designed taxonomy but authors are either not using it at all or are not using it correctly, leading to content being hard to find, content being created multiple times resulting in unreliable information being found.

In order to combat this all too frequent enterprise failing, it is essential that content is not only tagged but that it is tagged correctly to ensure that when content is found it is relevant and of use to the person requesting the information. To ensure that content is not only tagged correctly at source but that it also conforms to all of the other corporate standards, an Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) strategy should be implemented. Many organizations are currently considering a move to SharePoint 2010, which has limited support for enterprise-level taxonomies and organizations may want to consider solutions to control; tagging standards at the desktop as part of their project implementation.

Through truly effective Enterprise Content Governance – businesses can optimize their existing investment in enterprise content management systems through proper control of content, while reducing costs, improving corporate efficiency.

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.

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.

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.