Features

Published September 2004

Developing Content to Deliver Results

David Ian Forbes

This article provides a step-by-step method for using organization-specific business processes to build a flexible, strategy-driven taxonomy that identifies and qualifies existing content, as well as crisply defines requirements for content creation and development.

A Brief History of Content Management
The typical approach to content management has swung from one extreme to another. First, there was the corporate librarian, who reviewed, qualified and validated useful and reusable information-one document at a time. As the knowledge economy gathered steam and the amount of content produced increased exponentially, this approach became inefficient.

At about the same time, the Internet exploded onto the scene, introducing the notion of "search." Companies readily adopted the search approach as a way to manage their content-saturated enterprises. Using brittle taxonomies implemented via automated categorization technology, search offered an exceptionally low-cost-per-content-asset solution, but it captured everything. Thus, the chaos of navigating the Web was replicated within the secure firewalls of the enterprise.

This flattened productivity and most certainly did not result in the promised content utopia. Search was the wrong metaphor at the right time. While the Web is arbitrary and random, thus demanding a search environment, businesses are not. Businesses are transactional. They produce goods and services and are organized around functional areas and business processes.

Bringing Business Discipline to Managing Content
Adopting a business process perspective is an ideal method for collecting and evaluating content requirements within the context of business strategy. Business processes imply rigor, and they have rules that enable you to apply a precise discipline to your thought processes. Applying that discipline to the development of content helps organize and simplify thinking around a complex and often daunting task. The benefit is that your processes will be better thought-out, better explained and probably more efficient. Also, your content will be directly linked to its purpose, not just sitting on desktops, file servers or offline in file cabinets, waiting to be discovered.

In practice, you must decide what kinds of information facilitate, enhance and impact activities (e.g., rules, laws, guidelines, templates). You must also consider the "flow" of the process-where does content initiate or drive an activity as an input? When is it the result or output of an activity-where does it go, and what does it impact or initiate next? Thus, you can produce a robust, multidimensional view of your business that clearly identifies relevant content needs that are specific to every single activity within any given process.

When you first put on your process thinking cap, it may take a bit of adjusting before it is a snug and familiar fit. Adopting a business-process perspective is tough, at least initially. Processes slice through an organization-they don't fit into tidy, departmental silos. Tools and techniques have been developed over the past quarter century to facilitate process thought, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The key to understanding business process methodologies lies in knowing that most techniques are really nothing more than semantics, providing a common language-a way for you and your team to communicate with exceptional clarity.

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