How to optimize your content management

Managing and maintaining content in and across documents is a challenge that most organizations face. Organizations rely on manual processes and document management solutions to maintain content and ensure consistency across the enterprise. For many organizations, content is the core delivery of their services, it illustrates and proves their value proposition.

For knowledge organizations, content management should be a competitive advantage. But, managing content is not enough in itself. Organizations need to manage and maintain content across the organization – not only in some regions or offices, but globally. If you are talking about your product delivery, why should this be different in Germany vs Singapore?

“Maintaining and updating content should be well organized, but also easy to manage.”

Content Management Strategy

Your content management strategy should involve multiple Subject Matter Experts (SME) responsible for managing and keeping their content current. This would enable the global organization to have the same content used across the enterprise. It also would allow organizations to use single-source content (or master content management) and composite content management for handling live documents. And, should your SMEs leave your organization, the gap to fill is far smaller than using a centralized Full Time Employee (FTE) to update your content.

Content should be easy to reuse as single-source content. At the same time the content should be easy to assemble in various formats and for different purposes. The look and feel of your content should be separated from your narrative in order for your content library to work optimally. The reason for this being that you may use the content throughout your organization for different purposes.

“It is vital to your content strategy that the content is approved, but also reviewed and constantly updated.”

Updated Content is King

The cycle for reviewing, updating and approving should be an integral part of your content maintenance and executed where your content resides. If you have several systems to manage your live content, is it really live anymore?

What if you could update all your core content in one place and ensure that your master library updated all live documents containing the same information? 

What if you avoided check-in / check-out of content, ensuring that all content was available to everyone in your organization and allowing you to avoid manual formatting of documents? 

What if all your content was the latest and greatest before making a strategic decision?

What if you had a cloud-based solution that actually supports this?

Note: This blog was first published 31.Oct 2019