Web Governance Strategy

There is an urban myth that HRH Queen Elizabeth II thinks that the whole world smells of paint – due to the fact that everywhere she goes, somebody has been there five minutes before applying a nice white coat of paint to anything that doesn’t move!  I sometimes get the same feeling: whenever I talk to customers, as I’m arriving I can smell the constant state of change! – Mergers, acquisitions, innovation, vendor selection, knowledge management, new web site, new technology, the list is endless.There are many drivers  for business change, and, as my company now has a bit of a reputation for helping businesses to re-align their electronic content to the changed business requirements, I often get a glimpse of the chaos that change can cause.

So how does all this organizational change and findability connect, I hear you ask?  Well let’s think about it.

As discussed in previous blog entries, most content savvy businesses know that search isn’t the panacea the search vendors would like to suggest.  Search and find are not interchangeable terms.  Search is a component of findability; as is content taxonomy, classification, de-duplication, lifecycle management and all of the other information management processes that are needed to tame the beast of the ‘digital landfill’ (thank you AIIM).

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus coined the phrase ‘Nothing endures as change’ or ‘the only constant is change’.  We all know that.  You work your fingers to the bone to implement the next big thing for your business – hundred hour weeks for months to hit your deadlines, and then after a scant few months of use, up pops the change gremlin and all your hard work is squandered because the business has to/wants to change!

That’s when we get the call – ‘we can’t find all of our content’ or ‘the merger means we have a lot more content, and a lot less money to control and manage it with’ or ‘we have to rebrand our latest acquisition by next month – the CEO thinks that it proves the merger has worked’.

This is when the light bulb should flash brightly in your head – ‘if I have processes and policies to ensure that our content is truly findable, and then I can respond to any change request thrown at me’.  Let’s take that thought one step forward: ‘if I understand what needs to be done to make content truly findable, then at the next re-org, merger, acquisition etc, I can make sure that not only are we well positioned for change, but that I will know what has to be done to all of the content managed by my equivalent in the company we have just acquired.  Now it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to work out who brings the value to this new equation – it’s survival of the fittest and in the world of constant change, if you can find it, you can change it.  Elementary my dear Watson!







To get to grips with your organization's 'digital landfill', by discovering the five steps to achieving insight into all of your unstructured content, including information on usage, metadata and storage. Find out what you need to know to make your content management system truly effective.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

In part 1 of the series we highlighted some of the steps that can help you obtain maximum value from your content. In this issue, we will further explore some of the solutions that will allow you to overcome the business challenges associated with the digital landfill.

1) Make Sure Your Content isn’t Duplicated

While reducing the noise on your content store is hugely beneficial you need to go one step further; you must ensure that there are no duplication issues.  A Swiss Bank client once told me that attaching a PowerPoint presentation of 1Mb to an email within that bank increases corporate storage requirements by at least 1 GB and produces on average ten versions of the file.  In one search, a single document could exist in 100 different places. That single fact alone highlights how difficult it is to sort out the knowledge from the noise. By de-duplicating your content, you’ll already be streamlining the process. Anecdotally this can reduce the file count by between 50% and 80% – significant in anybody’s language.

2) Find the Holes within Your Knowledge

Look for existing entities in your classification that do not exist within your metadata – the information you have about your content. Holes provide you with the ability to clean information, ensure metadata management is considered by content creators; and if it’s not to get those content creators in line, by setting out content complaince guidelines. That way you’ll be able to ensure content is relevant, findable and clean.

3) Share Knowledge

Content Management Systems work optimally when the content that they are custodians of is focused, relevant and classified and as a result this content compliance issues should be addressed. You need to assess how your content is being consumed and with this information drive your choice of platform as required. When undertaking a data migration strategy, for example emails, a real opportunity exists to be selective about where you store content. One customer was migrating 120,000 user email accounts from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange. When discussing the migration, it was identified that 70% of the storage requirement was generated by attachments. Moving all of the attachments to SharePoint instantly enabled ‘share-ability’ and de-duplication. You don’t need to follow the obvious route when sharing knowledge, rather choose a platform based upon what your business requires.

4) Maintaining Your Knowledge Assets

It is essential to keep on top of your knowledge. If you allow your content to become chaotic, it’s not easy to repair; if you manage it on a weekly basis, maintenance is much easier. Once your content is at a point of usefulness, where it is relevant and findable, keep it there. If you don’t’ look at it for a year, you’ll then see some major gaps in the metadata, incorrect naming conventions, incorrect storage locations etc. If you invest in a pragmatic care and maintenance program, then spotting minor deviations from the documented standard will be easy to monitor, highlight and resolve, allowing you to continually obtain maximum value from your digital landfill.







To learn more about getting the most from your digital landfill,
download the Five Steps to Discovering the Real Shape of your Digital Content White Paper.

Knowing how to turn the contents of your digital landfill into a knowledge asset presents a huge challenge for any business. In today’s world, most organizations do not realize the actual volume of data living and breathing on their corporate web properties, document management systems and file shares; it is estimated that around 80% of corporate data exists in unstructured forms. There are however a number of steps that can be taken in order to capture, share and retain that knowledge, allowing you to build business advantage.

1) Define Knowledge and Deliver it

In order for companies to create a competitive business advantage it is essential that they have content knowledge, as this is the building blocks for differentiation. To obtain the most relevant information from your content stores you must first define what knowledge is. Knowledge must be up to date, relevant and map onto your prime business objectives. It also must be aligned with the mode of operation of your business; in a distributed, technologically advanced enterprise, there is often no need to produce paper-based information, with all the associated challenges of change control, and inherent costs. Within more traditional, slower moving environments the use of electronic media alone may involve a level of culture change that is unnecessary due to the prevalence of paper based manuals, such as in field based applications of within engineering workshops.  The reality is that knowledge should be independent from the channel through which it is delivered. It should be fit for purpose, and ideally operate across all communications channels within the business.

2) Adopt Industry Standard Classification Schemes where Possible

Now that the knowledge has been defined it is essential that it is understood how value will be extracted from it. To achieve this, a flexible classification process is required. You should identify all business content within your company and then associate those pieces with an industry or corporate standard classification, thus creating a data map to valuable knowledge.

3) Embrace Long-Term Standards

Industry-wide standard object based classification will provide your business with a flexible organizational solution. If there is organizational change, you can modify your content taxonomy (that is, change the way in which the relationships exist between the objects) rather than having to physically re-classify every object to reflect the changed taxonomic requirements of your organization.  This will help to ensure the knowledge assets are of use and will continue to be valuable going forward as the business changes.

4) Apply Consistency to Your Existing Content to Reduce the Noise

Inconsistent nomenclature, patchy classification, duplicate and near duplicate content creates a significant amount of static noise within your organisations proper information. This noise makes it hard to find anything – normally because you don’t have the tools or techniques to pinpoint a relevant subject area, or because your information is stored in functional silos – in department-specific storage areas, for example.  It is therefore important to reduce the noise within your organization by applying standard classification to your existing content and ensure content compliance standards are in place.










Get to grips with your organization's 'digital landfill', by discovering the five steps to achieving insight into all of your unstructured content, including information on usage, metadata management and storage. Find out what you need to know to make your content management system truly effective.

In a CNET Q&A with Microsoft Business Division President, Stephen Elop was asked how Microsoft will get businesses to upgrade from the older version of SharePoint they’re already using and ‘in a nutshell, what’s Microsoft’s pitch to large businesses this time around?’ Stephen replied by discussing productivity across the PC, the phone, and the browser and the focus on making sure that people can work better together, taking advantage of the social-networking capabilities, the rich cloud technologies and a variety of other things.

He was also asked about the specific features that the average productivity worker will get with Office 2010 that they couldn’t get in either Google Docs or a prior version of Office. Elop commented that for users of Microsoft’s Outlook product for e-mail and various forms of communication, there are all sorts of capabilities that have been introduced to help people more effectively manage their communications, whether it’s ignoring threads of communication that are annoying, whether it is the ability to work with advanced conversation views to deal with complex communication patterns, or the interoperability established between Outlook and a number of the social-networking environments, such as LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook.

The benefits of SharePoint are certainly there and according to Forrester, a third of big enterprises plan to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 within a year, and that in turn will drive the corporate success of the Office 2010. But while Stephen is thinking of ways to convince enterprises to buy, he’s not thinking about or being asked about how Microsoft suggests large enterprises conduct a MOSS migration and migrate all of their content including documents to SharePoint 2010.

Migration is often viewed as an obstacle to enjoying the full benefits of a new product, but it needn’t be and Microsoft should recognise this early or face low adoption.

There are a few steps that need to occur prior to the upgrade to make it smooth and ensure it is a success.  These include content analysis to understand exactly what exists and a process to clean that content up. SharePoint 2010 is being received well, but it won’t solve many of the issues faced by enterprises unless a clear content migration strategy for upgrade is adopted and the required process of content migration is carried out properly.







MetaVis MIGRATOR is a simple tool for migrating content and objects between SharePoint sites, site collection or servers. Whether you are consolidating, upgrading or simply re-organizing your SharePoint environment. Download the MetaVis MIGRATOR business results sheet of have a free trial.

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.

We recently worked with 451 Group  to host a webinar focused on Information Governance. During that webinar, we looked at what information governance is and why it is important to an organization and its content management system (CMS).

I remember a research paper from 451 Group called ‘Unstructured Information or Unstructured Content: the elephant in the corner’. People were starting to flag up the fact that content is amassing within businesses day by day. And not every single piece of content is necessarily under control.

Content governance is about a frame of mind within an organization. It’s also about real life implementation of that governance to ensure that published content is consumed by stakeholders and then controlled as it needs to be. We see content governance as being driven by risk mitigation. Obviously there are legal and industry regulations, compliance challenges, cost control and also the drive to make information findable for knowledge workers. But there isn’t always the drive towards reducing content. Metadata and some tracking capability won’t always optimize what you have.

We talk about ‘quality built in’. It’s about the fact that each and every piece of content has to have some structure built in to ensure it can be controlled under ILM processes. We see the main challenges to governing content as web content and social media.

During the webinar, Kathleen Reidy, Senior Analyst at The 451 Group said that Information Governance is knowing what content exists, where it is located, how long it will be kept, who will have access to it – and then how to ensure it is protected and that policies and standards are used and enforced. She also said that businesses need more intelligence about this content, to decide what happens to the data. Is it a record? Does it go into the archive; does it get deleted? A lot of organizations still say “our users are the best ones to decide.” And that’s certainly true. But you will find more organizations that want a technology safeguard behind that; to ensure retention even when nobody has declared the data as a record. And then how do you make sure that policy continues to be enforced over time? Certainly technology has a role to play there as well.

With Vamosa technology, we can identify the value of content ranging from documents to web pages, where it is located and automatically clean it up, but then govern it. Doing this enables organizations to gain the value from content that they should.

We say to our customers that content management doesn’t always mean content governance. Content governance can be implemented without content management, and more often than not, content management is implemented without content governance. But they do make very good partners. A good content management system is made even better by implementing successful and effective content governance.

Download the transcribed webinar 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

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.

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.

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.