Content is an asset
More and more companies realize that information – content – is an asset of the organization. For a publishing company, this is immediately evident. But the knowledge generally present in an engineering or production company can be considered an asset as well. Take this knowledge away and the design or production process will come to an eventual standstill, much like when a machine required for production breaks down, only with some delay. With the realization that content is an asset, companies start looking into taking care of their precious content, and maximizing the impact content can have in an organization.
Defining Content, Content Management
Let`s take a closer look at what we mean by content. Here, we will define content as generally unstructured information, intended for one or more target groups. Examples of content are: texts, marked-up texts, images, audio or video streams, etc.
For the purpose of discussion, we will narrow the definition of content down to texts and marked-up texts. Examples of this type of content are press releases, product descriptions, user manuals, corporate procedures, and so on. Taking the example of the press release, we can subdivide the content into a title, a summary, a number of text paragraphs, possibly enriched with one or more images, and some general data like contact, date of publication, etc. The collection of these sub elements may be considered the definition of a content type.
Gartner has defined four content management segments based on the business domain in which, or for which, an enterprise creates and uses the content. They are:
- Enterprise internal content
- Web site content
- E-business transactional content
- Shared content.
The Essence of Content Management
Content Management targets the management of content only. A publication consists of other elements as well. A web page, for instance, consists of style elements and navigation along with content.
Traditional web editing tools offer access to each of these three elements of the web page, usually requiring a high level of expertise (HTML or otherwise). Worse still, these tools offer content editors access to corporate image aspects in the presentation, which is not desirable, and technical aspects e.g. related to navigation, which may be downright dangerous to the stability of the web site. As a result, traditional web editing tools will not satisfy the organization`s need to involve many employees in the creation and maintenance of content.
Professional Content Management Systems such as Smartsite focus on separation of responsibilities of web editors, site managers, designers and developers. Thus a web editor can concentrate on creating or maintaining certain content without the need for web-related technical expertise (i.e. HTML expertise), or, on the other hand, the risk of affecting aspects such as navigation or stability of the web site.
In order for Content Management to be successful in an organization, it needs to be easy to use and fool-proof. Smartsite provides content editors with tools similar in look and feel as well as functionality to familiar word processors such as Microsoft Word™. Content editors will be able to use Smartsite immediately and almost intuitively. On the other hand, site managers need access to power tools to monitor and optimize their web site. Role-based management makes this possible.
The Content Management Life Cycle
What are the steps a press release goes through until publication? What is the content management life cycle? Someone took the initiative to create a piece of information. Next, the information was fine-tuned and maintained, until it was ready to be submitted for approval. After approval, at a previously defined moment the content item was actually published. After some time, it might be necessary to update the information, thus creating a new version of the same content item. Some time in the future it may be decided that the publication will be archived and in a number of years the item may even be erased if it is not deemed to ever be useful any more.
Content management life cycle supports the process of creation, maintenance, approval and publication, including the related versioning issues. This process may be partitioned even further if this is appropriate for the organization under discussion.
In some organizations all activities mentioned above are executed by one and the same person for a particular content section. In other organizations there is a strict division in responsibilities. In that case, content management life cycle is strongly linked to workflow and collaboration aspects.
