“Our IT department gave us VSS and we can’t figure out how to get components out of that. How do you do that?”

“We’re tearing our hair out with Sharepoint and versioning; what is the workaround?”

“Our website uses Documentum and it won’t do what we want. What do we do?”

“We have Interwoven and the interface is awful, so our staff won’t use it. What should we replace it with?”

Each set of circumstances was unique, yet eerily alike.  Each instance involved the acquisition of a software product which was then implemented for an operational unit, without regard to whether the software was suited to the task. The mismatch, in some cases, was painfully obvious; in other cases, the mismatch was more subtle. In many cases, certainly all the instances above, the software is popular, thriving software that has been implemented without a proper strategy. The results: generally some sort of fail.

Bad strategy or no strategy?

During the past decade, acceptance of content management has drastically increased. The idea that managing any significant volume of content requires some technology assistance has been demonstrated a multitude of times, and the adoption of a CMS (content management systems)  is no longer a novelty. Yet the instances of the tail wagging the dog – buying the software before determining the operational needs – continue to be far too familiar to ignore.

When I would encounter an audience member at a later event, I’d ask if they’d ever gotten the problem sorted out. Overwhelmingly, they would sheepishly admit that they had not. They continued to produce and publish content in ways that they acknowledged were highly inefficient and prone to operational risks <link> because they couldn’t convince their organizations of the need to make the changes that, to them, were obviously needed. So what went wrong?

Go cheap or go home. This “strategy” is when the technology group either already has some software – collaboration software, source code control software, or a Web CMS – that they insist be put to use because “we already own the software” or “the software is free.” Not only does this dooms a project to failure, but anecdotal reports show that the operational team is then blamed for the failure. The technology group refuses to take responsibility for having foisted upon them an inappropriate tool. In this case, a stalemate ensues, and everyone goes back to their previous kludgy way of work, with no movement forward, and the technologists smug in their political win.

Don’t get it, don’t care; just do it. This “strategy” is in play when a group has heavily invested in a software application, and is reluctant to investment more time or money to make it work for a different operational purpose. There is equal resistance to bringing in additional software that complements the original uber-application, and no impetus to understand why it is needed. There may have been a strategy developed for the initial implementation, but there is no acknowledgement that different operational needs will require further customization of the software. The idea is that the software should be one-size-fits-all, and if the customization has worked from one department, it should work for all departments. The department whose operational needs aren’t being met is sure to find inventive work-arounds, sometimes taking pains not to let on what is going on for fear of sanctions from the powers that be. Generally, the situation comes to light when a serious breach of protocol comes to light that can be traced back to a work-around that failed.

Connecting strategy to technology

The idea that technology can be implemented without strategy is naïve, at best. The idea that technology or strategy can be implemented without a deep understanding of the content lifecycle is a wanton mismanagement of corporate assets.

Understand your content. The entire CMS implementation is to support, with technology, the production, processing, and publishing of content. It is imperative to understand what the content needs are throughout the entire content lifecycle. Without this understanding, a technology implementation is sure to go wrong at some point because there will be a mismatch between the content requirements and the software assigned to support it.

Know your standards. For any technology to be effective, there needs to be an understanding of how the content can be leveraged. This generally involves connecting systems, whether that is as simple as providing an RSS feed or using microformats, to more robust standards such as implementing DITA <link> to make content system-agnostic or integrating content from one system into another through the magic of XSL transformations.

Understand pertinent technologies. The decision-makers who, with much eye-rolling, confess with some pride that they don’t even know how to use styles in their word processing are who allow bad software implementations to thrive. Get with the program or get someone who can, because the lack of understanding about how to leverage content through technology, more often than not, shortchanges the project or leads to disastrous results. The complexity of systems has grown exponentially over the past decade; it is imperative to understand, at least at a high level, what the various technologies can do and how that can benefit – or harm – your content and, ultimately, your brand.

The concepts I’ve articulated here are not entirely new, nor are they particularly rocket science. Consultants, software vendors, and their savvy clients have produced many case studies demonstrating successful implementations and the derived organizational value. Invariably, their successes all share a common denominator: a strong strategy.

Of course, a presentation is just that. It’s generally an hour-long session, in which a speaker has to pick and choose their facts and explanations to fit within the time frame. Sometimes large issues get glossed over in order to fit in all the great material the speaker wants to present.

CMS-savvy people – internal staff to project stakeholders to consultants and everyone in between – know that there can be inadvertent, besides deliberate, misrepresentations of what a system can do. It’s often a mismatch between a system’s features and organizational needs, and often a mismatch between cost models and budget expectations. So how do you ensure that you’re not  left holding the bag when the software vendor has left the building?

Process.

When you can explain to a vendor exactly what you need from a system – the scenarios and use cases – then you can get the vendor to demonstrate how their system will fulfill that need, how much it will cost for add-ons or customizations, how long it will take to accommodate all of this, and what impact all these will have on the maintenance after an upgrade or two. Without doing all of your homework first, you fall prey to the never-ending escalation of time, cost, and frustration as you discover the shortcomings of a misfit content management system.

Perhaps the lack of attention to content lifecycle is a reflection of the lack of attention given to the topic on the Web. In fact, a Wikipedia search on the topic of the content lifecycle sent me to the topic of Content Management, where a brief mention of content lifecycle management involves “content distributions [sic] and digital rights” – if only it were that easy. The German version of Wikipedia has an article on the content lifecycle for Web content, which seems incredibly simple (Create > Publish > Archive? Really?) and is also tied to a content management system.

But, I’m telling you, this is wrong, wrong, wrong. At the risk of sounding like David taking on Goliath, I want to spend a couple of articles talking about the content lifecycle, and clearing up some common misconceptions. I’ll discuss  content without the attachment to a CMS, proprietary software, tools, or methodologies. It’s all about the content, front and center. Defining a content lifecycle What is a content lifecycle?

Just as in the information architecture world, there’s “big IA” and “little IA”, in the content world, there is “big content management” and “little content management”. The “little content management” is about getting content to work within a content management system; “big content management” is about having a content strategy to create a repeatable system that governs the management of the content, throughout the entire lifecycle.

The content lifecycle covers four general areas: the strategic analysis, the content collection, management of the content, and publication, which includes post-publication maintenance and a loop back to analysis for the next cycle. This lifecycle is present whether the content is controlled within a content management system or not, whether it gets translated or not, whether it gets deleted  at the end of its life or revised and re-used.

The critical aspect of the lifecycle is that it begins with the analysis quadrant. The saying, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there,” certainly applies to the lifecycle  of content that begins without a strategy. You can change how it produced, how it’s managed, which tools you use to control it, translate it or not, cut aspects out of it or not – if you have no strategy, you have no real rationale for the content you produce.

The other three quadrants are the tactical aspects of the content lifecycle.  They may not have the same allure as the strategic side (at least, not for me), but they are important, nonetheless. It’s where the rubber hits the road. Without the strategy, you may end up in an aimless wander, but without the tactical side, all you have is a good idea.

Next week: Dispelling the Top 10 Myths about the Content Lifecycle

So when it came time to changing the answering machine greeting message, I followed the instructions only to discover that there is no option to select. I tried all the little tricks to see if the option got hidden elsewhere in the menu tree, but it was definitely missing. Well, that’s fine; I will tough out the pain of contacting customer support, through the phone number in the back of the book. The phone number works in Canada – always an iffy question – so that’s encouraging, and after listening to all the preambles, I press 1 for English, enter my product number, and go through the various menus but there is no option for “menu items are missing”. It seems that all the options end up the same way, leading to an end point of “visit our website at …”.

Now, gigantic corporations all have us trained to despise having to call in; in other words: Don’t you think I’d have checked the website first if I thought I could find the answer on your website? It would have been so much easier: go to the site, choose the model number, and  But of course, the user experience was quite painful. Here is an encapsulation of the frustration points:

1. After doing a Google search for AT&T 84209 (the model number) phone, I kept getting routed to the att.com site, which was obviously US-based, and geared to telephone service subscribers.
2. I redialed the number from the instruction book and was given www.telephones.att.com as the URL. Typing in 84209 got me to a shopping area. Do I want to buy a replacement cordless battery? I must say that if I happened to know the model number of a phone I wanted to buy, I’d be in luck because the second shopping option is to buy the very phone that I’m getting annoyed over.
3. There are links to the manual and Quick Start guide, which I consulted and had the same incorrect information.
4. Filling in the Contact Us form field promises to net a response within – depending on which of the messages you believe – 72 hours (on website), 2 days (on-screen auto-reply message), or 3 days (auto-reply email) but I doubt that I’ll get a meaningful answer. It may be too late anyhow, as I’ve run about the house, disconnecting telephone bits and bobs and tossing them into a bag to return to the store.

Now, I admit that my question is not one of the top ten questions, and it might be embarrassing to put it on the automated reply options (Press 8 if the interface  doesn’t work as per instructions.) but surely someone has asked this question before, and somewhere, a content developer has tackled this discrepancy. The point is that there needs to be a strategy around content that goes beyond the basics. Now that I’ve calmed down and revisited the situation with an industry insider’s eye, the support site is lovely – beautiful colours and the navigation to the FAQs is quite simple. But when a customer is searching content, and can’t find it, then all the other niceties fall away. The laser beam focus on finding the content, which is needed to complete their task, overrides all other aspects of the user experience. Task-based analysis at its best.

So to AT&T, I would ask: if one of your questions is “Who is Charlie Johnson and why is his name displayed on my phone?” surely the question of missing menu items could be addressed, as well? This site is a classic example of focusing resources on the usability side of the support site, but not having a content strategy befitting such a site.  In this case, I did receive an email a few days later, referring me to a “real person” in another department, but by that time, my answer was, “Thanks, but too little too late. I’ve exchanged the phone for another brand.”

Seeing as how returns of electronic consumer products is a multi-billion dollar problem in North America, companies could definitely benefit from having strong content strategies, not just on their website, but across the product line, from instructions to training to their support site.

• October, New Orleans, LA: Lavacon
  A conference for techcomm managers and project managers, this year’s theme is professional and career development. If you sense a career change in your near future, or are out of a job and want to move to a field with a future, I’m presenting two sessions. One is on content strategy; the other is on managing your personal brand online.
• October, webinar: Leveraging Content Assets on a Tight Budget
  Part of Aptara Corporation’s Thought Leader webinar series, you can learn how to align technology and processes with business goals, leverage existing content assets for better user experience, and creating an optimized content supply chain
• November, Banff, AB, Canada: CANUX
  I’ll be presenting a case study at this 2-day Canadian User Experience workshop. If you attend, you’ll also get the infamous Kristina Halvorson, whose keynote my presentation follows
• December, Boston, MA: Content Management Professionals Association Summit
  The theme of the trade association summit this year is open source standards. My presentation on “open source content” is a little different aspect of content strategy.
• December, Boston, MA:  Gilbane Boston
  I’ll be moderating a panel discussion on Content Modeling and Information Architectures for Content Management, which is a critical aspect of content strategy.

If you can’t complete your professional development in the content strategy area during 2009, there will be multiple opportunities during 2010. Stay tuned!

Explaining CCM (component content management) to clients is sometimes difficult. The concept of combining content at the component level to create topics, which then get combined to create publications – or not; sometimes, topics just remain topics – is complex to understand to people who aren’t typically involved in the production or management of content.

Ironically, one group that has a hard time with the concepts of CCM are the IS/IT groups. For a while, this flummoxed me, as I thought that an understanding of the technology side would be an advantage to understanding it. Then it dawned on me that knowing the general principles of content management could actually become a barrier. Content management has become synonymous with WCM (Web Content Management), with CCM considered an obscure niche within the broader field, and WCM does not handle content at a sufficiently granular level. The final two words, “content management” are the same, but it’s the first word that makes the functional difference. It’s a little like thinking a truck is a truck, whether the prefix is “moving” or “dump”.

The difference is a little like that. For the average WCM system, content is input directly into the content management system, and managed at whatever level the content is input – generally, at the page level. A change to made to a page, and an edit udpates the entire page.

For the average CCM system, the content is created in smaller-than-page chunks, and assembled, much like a content mashup, to create a larger-sized page for output. A change is made to a component, which can be a single word, phrase, paragraph, or larger, which is then compiled, much like a software “build”, which generates a presentation version of the specified sources. The aggregated content can be pushed out to a Web page, a PDF, or a print destination.

When we think of mashups, we think of the Wikipedia definition of a mashup, which is combining data from two or more sources to create a richer information set. A common mash-up is an address with a map, that displays that includes both components as a single, integrated screen, with more meaning. A content mashup is similar – for example, when an ecommerce retailer pulls product descriptions from one data source and the prices from a financial system to mash together and display according to the requested content.

The technology that allows content to be mashed up before making it to the end display is an XML editor. The editor allows authors to determine how the components will be mashed together, whether that be through a manual mechanism such as a content map, or automated through an information retrieval system such as a taxonomy or thesaurus.

Whether understanding CCM as a mashup application is helpful for purposes of explaining to the technical parties remains to be seen. I do suspect that the analogy will strike a chord with a certain client segment, though, and that’s about all I can ask.

Janus is in the enviable position of living and working “across the pond” where talking about dysfunctions isn’t sanctioned by threats of lawsuits and exposed to the “shoot the messenger” syndrome. On this side of the pond, a CM consultant is expected to turn away, tight-lipped, and not expose irregularities to public scrutiny. When one sees, for example, a CMS contract awarded to a questionable vendor – the vendor rep who leaves the group RFP debrief, where requirements were being discussed, and courts the IT Director instead – any questioning of this manipulation of the system will work against the consultant. It’s as if ethics takes a back seat to the expediency that requires membership to the inside track.

Janus Boye is organizer of the J Boye conference series. At the Philadelphia, online professionals can share knowledge, hear great keynote speakers, and further their professional development. If I weren’t already committed to going to the STC Summit, I would definitely be there.

• Do you re-use a lot of the same content in difference manuals, or in different types of material?
• If so, do you cut and paste the content to get the content from one place to another?
• Do you translate the content into at least a couple of languages?
• Do you have diverse groups of end users that could benefit from personalized content?
• Are you in a regulated industry where audit trails matter?
• Are you susceptible to lawsuits if your content doesn’t remain accurate across all content channels?

If you’ve answered yes to two or more of these questions, you should be wondering if a component content management is right for you.

5 Top Business Benefits of Content Re-Use

1. Process Efficiency.Content developers are knowledge workers, and an efficiency goal is to create more time that can be spent on the important tasks associated with content creation. Using a CCMS to produce content supports efficient processes by reducing, and sometimes eliminating, rote tasks such as searching, cutting and pasting, checking for identical changes in multiple places, and repetitive set-ups for generating content output.
2. Scope Extension. When staff isn’t spending time on the rote tasks, they can concentrate on the activities that add value to the organization. The gain in process efficiency allows staff to re-allocate their efforts, perhaps creating material that had previously been beyond their reach, or responding to requests for materials that didn’t fit within the product schedule. Or, it could mean the difference between having the resources to enter a new market. or taking a pass.
3. Risk Management . Inaccurate content, or content that inconsistent across publishing media – documents, websites, and product packaging – can lead to lawsuits. One content developer estimated that her company successfully avoided one lawsuit per year, at approximately $1 million per lawsuit, by demonstrating content accuracy. The only way they could maintain accuracy across all their product lines, given the amount of content and time-pressured publishing schedule, was through a CCMS.
4. Customer Trust. In markets where the difference between you and competitors is a better user experience, getting good information out to your customers quickly can be a distinct advantage. With a CCMS , you can publish content sooner, be confident of its accuracy, and, when it makes business sense, easily create more variations of your material for specific audiences. When customers have better instructions, more personalized content, or targeted translations, it all adds up to increased consumer confidence in your products and your organization.
5. Increased Revenue . Whether the support takes the form of better material for sales reps, better training material, more translated material to allow your product into a new market, or real-time sharing of content with other groups such as customer support, the ability to manipulate content quickly, easily, and accurately translates into more sales.

If you’re being asked to use your content in more than one way, you might be at the stage where the more part includes methods or technologies you’re not really familiar with. Maybe content re-use means syndication or collaborative creation with other departments or divisions, or incorporating content from other sites or user generated content. It could mean figuring how to build community or provide better support or get better feedback.

Maybe more means creating or incorporating help from the technical side, sharing the content in a knowledge base, putting it on the Web, maybe with automatic updates, and adopting XML, perhaps figuring out how the new DITA standard works for you in all of this.

No matter what your situation, you’re in the position where you’re supposed to figure out the XML stuff and the Web stuff and the quality stuff and the stuff around RSS feeds and copyright, how it all fits together, and why you need any of it, anyhow.

After all, if you’ve even tried to coordinate content creation between departments, or track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, or just share content between a CMS and LMS, you’ll recognize how hard it is to find two systems that play nice together, let alone get an entire corporate strategy in place. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. The promise of content management was to solve the silo problem, but in many cases has simply created larger silos.

I’ve posted slides from my workshop, where we look at:

• The concepts of content convergence and integration, the principles behind it, and the market forces that are driving the trend
• Opportunities created by content convergence in various contexts, from technical documentation converging to support documentation to marketing material to user-generated content
• The changing nature of content to allow for successful convergence, and the changes in processes to support it
• Ways to prepare your organization to adapt, and explore ways to allow content convergence to drive improvements in business efficiency and customer relationships

If you’re the type of person who likes to write, think, edit, and then publish , tink about the pain of re-using content from an article created in a word processing program to a blog entry. You had to go through and check things like apostrophes, quotation marks, and dashes to make sure you didn’t end up with question marks in the middle of your carefully-crafted prose. That can be called “dumb work” – silly rote tasks that don’t add any value at all.

Now, multiply that dumb work by millions when content gets locked into a proprietary system. You may have a million-dollar content management installation, but what happens when you want to use your content elsewhere, or when you need to migrate content between your behemoth system and specialty systems, such as a component content management system?

Unless there is a vested interest by, say, a competitor in providing some sort of import wizard from a specific proprietary format into their own format, your content is now held hostage by the vendor’s system. This used to be considered good business sense, as it locked you into their system for long periods of time. In today’s world, however, it’s considered a pretty bad move on everyone’s part. The recognition that content is a valuable corporate asset whose value increases with its potential for re-use has changed the game.

Re-use is a concept that is often discussed at too low of a level within the corporate sphere. There are several kinds of re-use:

• Single-sourcing. This isn’t a particularly sexy type of re-use, but is the industrial workhorse of re-use that is the backbone of any product or service provider that produces technical content (user, installation, maintenance, and quick-start guides, training material, knowledge bases, and so on). The ROI on standards-based, re-usable content becomes critical, particularly in cases where translation are involved.
• Integration. Content among departments, divisions, or partner companies may need to be mashed together to create a cohesive whole. Saving troublesome conversion steps toward a common format is a huge time-saver, and eliminates the worries that the conversion process has eliminated or corrupted critical content that affects the quality and integrity of the end result.
• Convergence. This re-use case is bringing together content from various types of sources, such as mixing single-sourced content with user-generated content in a knoweldge base. The need to “round-trip” content relies on being able to get content in and out of systems easily and quickly, with as much automation and as little human intervention as possible.
• Syndication. Content flies (or should fly) outside of the organization, in the form of news releases, event announcements, and so on. If content doesn’t conform to the standards-based formats – microformats is the most common example – then the value of automating syndiations is lost, with a default position of cutting and pasting into multiple sites.

Having content that can “play nice” with other systems is a key component of a good content strategy. Because large-scale content projects are dependent on the technologies that manage the content, it’s critical to look at how the system treats the content, and how open the content is for re-use in strategic ways.