Content Competency: How to Know If You Have It, and How to Get It If You Don’t

By Andrea L. Ames | Fellow and Alyson Riley | Senior Member

This column explores the strategic aspects of information architecture and the tools to equip information architects (IAs) for success. Topics will address the business, strategy, user experience, and implementation of strategic information architecture, including organizational, content management, and tactical considerations. Send your comments, questions, and suggestions for future articles to thestrategicia@pobox.com.

In our May 2013 Intercom feature article (“Telling the Right Story: Proving the Business Value of Content”), we argue that it is our responsibility, as content professionals, to demonstrate and articulate the value of content in business. The article makes some assumptions about the value of content in your organization—it’s there, you just need to find it, measure it, and use the data to convince people with wallets that it’s a worthwhile continued (and perhaps increased) investment. That might be a big leap for your organization … perhaps the value isn’t there, yet. If that’s the case, what do you do? And what if you just don’t know?

In our quest to get to the end game we described last year—content as an acknowledged, respected, and valuable business asset—we’ve traveled a long road. Frankly, we’ve not yet arrived at content nirvana. We have, however, been contemplating our journey along the way. Unable to turn off the incorrigible information architecture neurons in our brains, we’ve taken note of some patterns and organized them into a meaningful (we believe) framework that can help you to:

• Determine where you and your organization might be in the context of “content competency”—delivering the right content in the right experience (to the right person, at the right time, and in the right place)
• Progress from where you are to where you’d like to be—whether that’s content nirvana or just a little further down the path to content nirvana

We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: An Evolutionary Model

Our journey toward maximizing the business value of IBM’s technical content began back in the 1990s when the Web was young (and so were we—big hair, grunge, and all). Back then, websites were winning design awards for visually disturbing uses of cell padding in HTML tables and paragraphs of text densely populated with links to unpredictable and often ironic or poetic targets. While our design sensibilities have evolved, we aren’t smug about it; we recall too intimately the blood, sweat, and tears—the triumphs, as well as the risks that didn’t quite pan out—that it took to get us from there to here.

As we reflect back on 20-plus years of toil in this space, there’s method in the madness. We’ve been on an evolutionary path, where each step along the way has been necessary and valuable. Our own history and current experience on the road to high-value content shows that it is possible to reap business value from your client content experience no matter where your organization currently sits on the road to maturity. Be of good cheer! You don’t have to be a 20-year veteran of content strategy in order to deliver high business value and make a meaningful difference for your clients and users.

Figure 1 summarizes a few of the phases in our organizational evolution and expresses the trajectory of our development in the form of a model. (If you know us at all, you know we love models, right?)

In this image, the columns that line the X-axis depict the key aspects of client-facing content that we believe are necessary for an organization to maximize its business value. The Y-axis depicts increasing maturity from “initial” through “optimized”—the first and last stages common in many maturity models. While the details of each column might differ for you and your organization, we believe that the core ideas are useful in assessing where you are today, what you can do to maximize the value of your content right now, and where you need to be going. Let’s take a closer look at a couple of key pieces.

Talking About a (Cultural) Revolution

The first column in Figure 1 concerns culture. For the purposes of this article, we’re using a lazy shorthand definition for culture that blends together the ideas of “What do you value?” and “How do you think?” Our graphic puts culture first for a reason: culture is the foundation, the driving force behind every other facet of organizational maturity. In many instances, the mission (and funding!) of your organization shapes your values and the way in which you think as a worker within that organization. So when you think about culture, think about your own values and patterns of thought, but be sure to consider the differences and similarities between your worldview and that of your co-workers and the organization as a whole.

We discovered that one of the most influential aspects of culture on our success with content strategy and promoting the business value of content involved our attitude toward silos: organizational silos, silos of content, silos of technology, silos of control. In the early days of our evolution, our scope was limited to official product documentation and our focus was limited to individual products and their components. In those days it was very easy for us to unconsciously nurture a siloed approach to content, where individual content creators wore institutional blinders that only allowed them to see “my content.” Many were rarely aware of other players in the client content experience.

Much of the work of our content strategy team has been focused on changing this culture, helping teams to begin to discover the other players in the client content experience and start tearing down the conscious and unconscious silos that isolate people, teams, and content sets. This change in culture paved the way for our scope to grow such that we could fully embrace the total information experience and all of the content objects that clients encounter in their journey with IBM.

When content teams begin to think in a systemic way, the floodgates open, and that thought process becomes a natural part of the culture—to seek out connections, to analyze and shape the system as a whole, and to let go of a view limited to “my content” or even “our content” in order to focus on “the client’s content” (that is, what matters most to the client’s success). At that point in our growth toward maturity, we were able to drive massive, revolutionary change across our community of content producers.

When your culture truly values your clients’ success more than preserving organizational boundaries and mission, the business of building things like modular, reusable content almost comes easily. This kind of “client first,” dot-connecting culture is absolutely necessary when content strategy begins to address the organizational implications of eliminating redundancies and gaps, as well as the times when content curation activities force tough decisions about when to kill content. “My content” or “me first” thinking means that content never dies, even if metrics reveal that death to be a mercy to your clients.

Here are some questions to ask as you analyze culture within your own organization (and yourself—because, depending on who you talk to, either Gandhi or a bumper sticker told us that we should all be the change we wish to see in the world). Consider:

• Are you a destroyer of silos? Or do you build silos, putting up walls around your work and your content?
• Do you actively seek out connections? Or do you fear letting others into your domain or opening up your work for collaboration?
• Do you care more about client success than just about anything else? Or do you let fears about mission, funding, and “appropriate scope” dictate your priorities?
• Do you believe that your value stems from your ability to understand and advocate for those things that drive client success? Or do you believe that your best value comes from your domain expertise within a particular subject area?
• Are you the first one with the axe when metrics show that your content is no longer high value to clients? Or is it just too hard to allow your content to “go gentle into that good night”? (Thank you, Dylan Thomas.)

If this is an area in which your organization needs to evolve, we highly recommend you spend some time with metrics— invest in some hard work with metrics to determine:

• What your clients value (and don’t)
• What your organization values (and doesn’t)
• Where you have gaps between client and organizational values
• How to build a business case to bring organizational values into tight alignment around client values
• How to prove the value of your content using terms that your organization understands and appreciates—things like revenue generation, mindshare, ROI, and the like (and which we talk about at length in the article we referenced in our introduction)

For us, metrics allowed us to begin our cultural transformation. Once we had real client data, we used the voices of our clients as the most powerful agent of change for the cultural revolution we needed to get out of siloed thinking and evolve into a systems-thinking vision of an end-to-end, integrated, and enterprise-level client experience with content. And it’s a revolution we’re still driving.

Not More Process!

The second column in Figure 1 concerns process. In this column we consider the formal design and development processes common in product and service organizations. We also consider the critical characteristics of those processes, such as the extent to which they are client-validated, strategic, and metrics-driven. Culture captures how widely and deeply adopted process might be, and process describes the detail of the methods and characteristics practiced in those processes.

Many of us have a deep, visceral reaction to the word “process.” A spectrum of responses might vary from bureaucracy (on the negative end) to predictability (on the positive end). Those of us who have created content in start-up (and not-so-start-up) chaos might breathe a sigh of relief at the thought of more process, while those who endure the torture of accomplishing seemingly minor tasks in large enterprise and governmental organizations might experience brain cramps of epic proportion at the thought of one more iota of process.

Process methodologies (such as development processes like Agile) can be very interesting, but we restrain ourselves from getting stuck on the perceived formality of various process. We have a lot of process at IBM, and we’ve found a way to maximize the value of those processes without getting hung up on the details. We suggest that in your quest for content nirvana, you consider not process perfection, but rather those characteristics of process that enable and enhance your ability to deliver exceptional content and content experience.

Here are some questions to ask as you analyze process within your company, your team, and the organizational structures (like departments and divisions) in between:

• Is your job to make clients and users successful? Or does history and inertia keep you from championing your users as you feel you should? Has that same history and inertia spawned a library of questionably useful content?
• Does your organization understand and advocate for those things that drive client and user success? Or does technology (perhaps even for its own sake) drive the agenda?
• Does your product or service have a strategy? Does everyone on the team understand it and know how they contribute to it? Do product and service requirements derive (in part) from and serve that strategy?
• Do you design your products and services? Or are “cool” technologies built first, followed by a frenzied search for a market and target users?
• Does your organization validate requirements, designs, and implementations with users directly and with metrics? Or do you release products and hope for the best?
• Is your organization nimble and able to respond rapidly to changing requirements from the market or from your target users? Or do your process keep you stuck in a rut?

If you find you need an evolutionary boost in the process area, consider some metrics work again, this time gathering data focused on issues such as:

• Where and how your processes involve client and user touchpoints, if at all
• What your market and users need to accomplish in their business and day-to-day work
• What your market expects vis à vis your company’s marketing content, the competition, their business needs, etc.
• How (or if!) your products are managed and designed
• How your products are developed

For us, the client (or user) is king. At the most basic level, until we know what they need and expect (requirements), validate our understanding of those requirements, validate designs as they are created and refined, and validate the product and content in the market, we don’t know whether we are providing value in our content or just creating lots of words and pictures. (Gee, sounds a little like a process, doesn’t it?)

Next Steps

In 2013, we gave you some data that you could use to start or energize your own efforts in proving the business value of content in your organization. Now, our goal with this column is to supplement our work last year—along with the excellent perspectives on the business value of content that appear elsewhere in this edition of Intercom—with a bit of practical advice. We gave you a starting point—culture and process!—for thinking about your own (and your organization’s) content competency as well guidance for how to move forward down the path to content nirvana. In our next column, we will expand beyond that starting point to address other aspects of our model of content competency in a similar fashion. When that work is done, we hope to have provided our community with a detailed and comprehensive model of content maturity.

To that end, we also hope that this is the beginning of a conversation about tactics to help each other progress in delivering content and content experiences with measurably high business value. No matter where we are on the path to nirvana—no matter if we are newbies or battle-scarred veterans—we each can take positive steps forward and share our experiences for the advancement and longevity of our community. So how are you driving cultural revolution and process improvements in your world? What impact are those activities having on the business value of your content? What’s working for you? We look forward to hearing from you.

Andrea L. Ames, MS, is an enterprise content experience strategist, architect, and designer at IBM, and she designed, coordinates, and teaches for the UCSC in Silicon Valley technical writing and communication program. Her mantras are “I don’t write doc; I solve user and business problems”; “installation is not a user goal”; and “think more, write less!” She is Fellow and past president (2004–05) of STC and a distinguished engineer of ACM (the first technical communicator to achieve this distinction). She has published two award-winning technical books and more than 50 papers and articles, and she speaks regularly at conferences and professional meetings around the world. Follow her on Twitter (@aames), find her on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/andreaames), or check out her blog (http://thinkmorewriteless.wordpress.com/).

Alyson Riley’s mother swears that her first word was actually a complete sentence, and she began her career as an information architect shortly thereafter by developing organization schemes for her toy dinosaurs and horses. At the time this column was written, Alyson served as a senior enterprise content strategist on the corporate Client Technical Content Experience team within IBM’s CIO organization. Alyson drove content-centric business transformation through her work leading IBM’s corporate-level efforts in content strategy and consulted with IBM content teams worldwide to develop effective content strategies for the portfolio of IBM products. She has since taken her skills in strategy, requirements analysis, relationship building, and storytelling to a new context. Alyson now brings a content strategist’s passion for content and systems-thinking perspective to her new work in driving business transformation initiatives at the Mayo Clinic.