Enterprise Content Governance

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:

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