Now this is not such a bad association in that it stresses that all aspects of the content life cycle are interconnected. The user experience becomes a problem report that feeds into an engineering change that becomes a work order that is implemented over a period of years across an unfathomably large fleet of deployed systems…. In all such scenarios, the user experience can ultimately entail things like the emails exchanged, chat transcripts, voice messages and so on. And you can feel the weight of “records management” breathing down your neck as you realize that these transactions come with potential legal liabilities – sometimes small and sometimes not so small.

So now that I have shaken the hornet’s nest a little, I will say that there are at least a couple of key perspectives on content and that these perspectives, however interconnected ultimately, do align with domains of responsibility and expertise that tend to make us package them as different or special.

I think that one of these perspectives is the user experience of the content. This is not an area where I normally operate although I recognize the contributions of those who do and admire their unique skills. Perhaps we could call this domain “Integrated Content User Experience” or ICU Experience, or slightly less attractively ICUX.

My concern is that if we continue to bury product lifecycle content under “enterprise,” it will never get the attention it deserves because historical we’ve seen how that goes, and if we lump it in with “Web,” we lose the multi-channel publishing aspect, where the corporate website is a single aspect of three or four output channels. Content at the output stage does need to be segmented – different audiences have different needs. But that content should come from a single source and be consistent across the output channels, whether that output channel is documentation, training, or text strings in the software.

You mention content needs to be on a critical path, but in your example, exclude HR: For B2B, HR is on the critical path, a person’s subject matter expertise needs to be inventoried in case they need to be part of a sales process, or perhaps, excess absenteeism due to the xy2 flu rendered work in process to a snails pace at your shop in AZ. How does that effect customer orders?

You too end up cross-siloing and segmenting content towards a client audience. I think for B2B, for content to be unified it has to, has to, has to follow critical path.

For this discussion, the art of UX does not apply, but the science of content should have rules. Before we get into the debate of the other content, do you want unified content?

Your mantra of “cross-silo consistency” is also intriguing. I realize that this is the backbone behind content strategy (or at least a major part of it). In my own job, though, silos and communication walls between depts are ever-present. I’m not sure how one breaks down these walls and ensures consistency or even ensures relationships, but it’s a good goal to have. Part of the problem is that there isn’t any one single person in charge of all the content (unlike what Halverson recommends).

Your post prompted me to push for a wiki version of help I’m creating simply because the message a wiki sends may build more of a trust relationship than static content.

If you’re in a corporate environment where they’re doing content management right—meaning they have dedicated people to identify and manage the content as well as train and manage the people who re-use/repurpose the content—then they already have the dedicated people who can take the next step toward content-lifecycle management.

Imagine the benefits of consistent, re-purposed content across your site, print docs, PDFs, packaging, service agreements, software interface (I think this may be the most difficult one), and wherever else it appears, throughout the entire lifecycle of the content. Well, I guess you have imagined it, which is why you’re proposing this definition.

I wonder how much it matters as well to separate the content into that which is expository, or rhetorical, or written with enterprise buyers in mind, or implementers, or end users. I wonder also how much it makes sense to delineate heavily between documents and structured data.

When we go to author a document, we typically begin with a blank screen. We rely on external sources (read: meatware) to inform us of elements like our intended audiences and metadata (meat-data?). But, for instance, when we write anything affirmative, we’re either stating a fact or making an assertion (hopefully based on facts), which tend to arrange into a well-defined data structure, otherwise known as structured argumentation. I often wonder why the mainstream seems largely blind to the notion that computers can actually be doing this work for us.

For all our wealth of information management tools, in my opinion they and their contents are still treated as disparate entities. What I’d like to see is a type of unified model that will enable people within an organization to connect and manipulate all types of information, from data to content to controls.