By Joe Gollner
At the heart of every content strategy we will find some fundamental decisions about what content should be provided and why. Many of these decisions will be independent of what technology might be available. At least some of these decisions, however, will take into account questions of technology. For example, when determining goals for your content strategy, you will probably consider what mobile devices users will be carrying and what social media channels they will be frequenting. So even in its most pure form, your content strategy will have a technology side. What you will find though is that as you start to plan your implementation, the technology side to your content strategy will become much more prominent. While they are not the whole story within a content strategy, the technology considerations deserve careful attention. And this is becoming increasingly true now that intelligent content, with its emphasis on open markup standards and extensible technologies, has become a fundamental building block in almost every successful content strategy.
Content Strategy and the Content Lifecycle
When we come to consider how we will deploy content technologies, we find ourselves thinking about the content lifecycle. We also find ourselves thinking about how our content strategy will change that lifecycle and how the operation of a changed lifecycle will in turn modify our strategy.
Figure 1. The Content Lifecycle
Content Strategy
A content strategy establishes how an organization will leverage its content assets to achieve its overall business goals. A content strategy also provides a roadmap describing how these goals will be realized. Part of the focus in these management instruments will fall upon the nature of the content that will be needed. And part of the focus will fall upon how this content will be handled and leveraged.
Content Acquisition
Content acquisition addresses the question of how an organization will acquire the content assets that are called for in the content strategy. The acquisition activity will encompass the planning and design of the content that will be needed. It will also entail the creation of new content, the revitalization of legacy content, or the licensing of third-party content as necessary. Under this activity, you will consider what industry standards might apply to your content and what authoring tools might be used.
Content Delivery
Content delivery focuses on the publication of information products and their provision to users wherever they may be and in whatever circumstances they might find themselves. The delivery activity will establish the process whereby content assets are selected, assembled, and formatted so as to effectively address all identified user requirements. It is as part of this activity that you will consider what content transformation tools and techniques you will deploy and what publishing platforms you will leverage to generate information products of the highest possible quality.
Content Management
Content management introduces the level of control and security into an organization’s content environment that is appropriate to their business activities. This management activity will put into place the processes whereby content assets are maintained as relevant, valuable, and effective given the needs of the other lifecycle activities and the business objectives being supported. It is here that you will consider what repository technology will be used, how security procedures will be implemented, and what facilitating tools, such as workflow automation, will be deployed.
Content Engagement
Content engagement injects the perspective of information users into the content lifecycle. The content engagement activity involves content stakeholders in the process of validating, improving, augmenting, and contextualizing content through the provision of rich feedback. Engagement, as a management concept, is a measure of how much a stakeholder is invested in something. Accordingly, content engagement seeks to maximize the degree to which content stakeholders, and in particular the users of the information products being published, are willing to invest in the improvement of the content. In a very real way, content engagement becomes an expression of how useful the information being provided is to those stakeholders and therefore how valuable the content really is to the organization. It is as part of this activity that you will look at how your organization leverages social media to involve your user community in validating, improving, and extending your content. It is also here that you will look at how analytics and other assessment techniques might be used to gain a clearer picture of how content is being used and therefore how effectively you are leveraging your content investments.
The Content Dynamic
The content lifecycle model identifies the main activities that an organization will perform as it acquires, delivers, manages, and leverages its content. Some organizations will conduct these activities very poorly while others will be innovators who relentlessly pursue improvements. How well an organization performs these activities and how well these activities are balanced will determine, to a surprisingly significant degree, how well an organization performs overall. The productive interaction among these content activities will drive what we can call the content dynamic.
Figure 2. The Content Dynamic
Within this dynamic, an organization’s content assets iteratively evolve in response to the experience of users participating throughout the lifecycle, but perhaps especially within the content engagement activity. And as content assets evolve, the environment within which they exist must also adapt in order to better support the changing content. In fact, the content, the technology, and the business processes must all evolve together and in a way that establishes and maintains an optimal balance. It is not too much to say that the central role of content strategy, on an ongoing basis, is to initiate and support this evolutionary dynamic and to harvest the resulting benefits for the organization.
Implementing Content Technologies
Unless your organization plans to realize its content strategy using nothing more than HB pencils and foolscap paper, you will arrive at the point where you must consider what technologies you will deploy. To be precise, HB pencils and foolscap paper are possible choices for your content technologies, just not very inspired or scalable choices. It should be expected that your organization will need to invest in some more advanced technologies if it hopes to participate in the global economy for any length of time. It follows that the roadmap set out with your content strategy will establish your plan for identifying, selecting, deploying, and evolving appropriate and affordable content technologies.
Investment Justification
It should be noted that there will be specific challenges surrounding the justification of content technologies. Suffice it to say that an important part of your content strategy will establish the groundwork for justifying the essential technology investments that an organization must make if it hopes to succeed against its stated strategic goals. It goes without saying that your content strategy will facilitate the justification for all of the investments that will be needed and not just those associated with content technologies. Our focus, however, is currently directed to the technology side of a content strategy where there are unique challenges to be overcome. One of these challenges is the fact that content technologies will typically fall outside the realm of experience, and therefore outside the comfort zone, of most information technology (IT) shops.
Several of the concepts that are touched on below have evolved over the years as tools for engaging and coopting IT shops so that a good content strategy will at least have a chance of survival and maybe even success. Let there be no mistake, how well you manage the justification of content technology investments will be a major factor on whether, or not, your content strategy even gets off the ground.
Iterative Implementation
Probably the key concept to be adopted within your implementation roadmap is that of iterative development and deployment. While it is quite easy to say, and many IT shops advocate its theoretical merits, iterative implementation is actually quite a rare phenomenon. What is most important to keep in mind is that there are some tricks that you can use to make iterative implementation work in your organization as part of your content strategy. Here is a selection of these tricks of the trade.
- Content Scenarios. Content scenarios basically amount to business prototypes. These prototypes supply examples of how an organization’s content might look in an envisioned future and demonstrate how the services being provided to information users will be improved as a result. These scenarios become business-oriented demonstrations that can be used to build up the interest and even excitement of executive management. And there is nothing quite as useful as an excited executive champion who can help you navigate the approval gauntlet.
- Delivery First. Although it is true that maintaining balance among the content lifecycle activities is important, political realities do demand that some compromises be made. Specifically, it can be highly beneficial to place an early emphasis on implementing improvements in the content delivery environment. And this is done with the full knowledge, and even the active encouragement, of the content authors and editors who often must accommodate added complexity within their work as a result. It is seen as a tactical investment because the release of significantly improved information services achieves one very important end in that it builds a supportive and vocal constituency among the users. As this user community often travels under the name of customers, it is heartening to see just how effectively their interests can be used to batter down internal resistance, for example from an IT shop.
- Just Enough Content Management. Among the most common reasons for failure to realize the potential of a content strategy is somewhat surprising. Nevertheless, it is also a remarkably common reason and in many ways it can be considered the norm. This is the tendency to over-invest in the content management environment that supports just one of the activities within the content lifecycle. And this over-investment in the content management infrastructure will often hamper the overall initiative and thereby prevent organizations from making broad progress against their content strategy.
The issue that arises around content management is that it is an area where IT shops feel most comfortable directing investments. The fact that content technologies in general are unfamiliar to mainstream IT professionals in fact bolsters their desire to impose stringent controls over content assets and content processes. There are some problems with this approach and they are very serious problems. One is that content management is an area where potentially large amounts of money can be expended. This can have the concrete consequence of leaving little or no budget to invest elsewhere in the content lifecycle. Another problem is that the investments in content management, although major, can be almost entirely invisible to information users whose active support is so important. Yet another problem, and the most serious one of all, is that an over-investment in content management will put into place tools and procedures that can become an impediment to the evolutionary dynamic that a content strategy ultimately seeks to initiate and sustain.
The Just Enough Content Management tactic is one that intentionally restricts the level of investment that is made in the management environment until such time as the evolutionary dynamic has had an opportunity to flush out new or changed requirements. This tactic also seeks to build up the level of support that is manifest within the all-important customer community as this can, with a little finesse, be turned into an expanded budget for content management and all other aspects of the content lifecycle.
Content Strategy, Architecture, and Solution
If the technology side to your content strategy is handled well then the outcomes can be very compelling. The goals outlined in your strategy will have been achieved and, in being supported by affordable and sustainable technology investments, the envisioned benefits can be enjoyed for some time. Even more importantly, you will have been able to achieve new goals that only emerged as you moved forward with implementing your original strategy. In adopting an approach that encourages, rather than impedes, your ability to evolve your content and content capabilities, you have been able to respond to market changes that were not present when you started your strategic planning efforts.
Figure 3. Content Strategy, Architecture, and Solution
Now it should be emphasized that the effective handling of content technologies is a specialized area of expertise and experience. It is also an area where there are advanced techniques that can significantly improve the chances of long-term success in your content technologies investments. Some of these techniques bear upon the definition and governance of a content architecture. A sound content architecture is important because it will determine how well, and how sustainably, your content lifecycle will be reflected in, and supported by, your technology investments. Some of these advanced techniques bear upon the integration of the content lifecycle activities and supporting content technologies into a unified whole. This unified whole, when done well, becomes the tangible realization of your evolving content strategy. It is in this way that your content strategy is expressed through your technology investments to become a content solution. And an effective content solution delivers a range of planned and unplanned benefits and allows your organization to accelerate the rate at which it evolves. 
JOE GOLLNER is the managing director of Gnostyx Research Inc., an independent consultancy and integrator specializing in applied content technologies. He has been active in the content management industry for over 20 years and has led numerous large-scale implementations. He is a graduate of Queen’s University (BA, literature and mathematics) and the University of Oxford (MA, philosophy). He blogs as “the Content Philosopher” at www.gollner.ca.
