Content management involves pretty much everything except the actual writing part of producing and distributing written communication. Everyone who writes needs a content management system. For an individual it may be as simple as the filing cabinet under the desk, or the file system on the computer. For a multinational corporation it may scale up to a complex collection of tools and processes that control the way content is stored, transformed, produced and transmitted. Content management systems (CMS) include tools and processes for
- creating text and images, individually and collaboratively within teams
- content storage
- editing, revision, and review
- integrating content with other product components (such as code or packaging)
- output — production in one or more formats for online and offline (print)-based consumers
Primary goal: cheaper content
It’s a cost-saving thing, really; it’s not something that directly improves the quality of communications or readers’ experience. In fact, content management strategies on a grand scale can lead to reduced quality as focus shifts from what readers and consumers need, to what helps produce content more efficiently.
A CMS can help prevent loss of content by tracking file versions, so you can take a snapshot or ‘fork’ the documentation set for a specific release while still supporting prior releases. You can also revert to previous versions when disaster happens or requirements change.
A CMS can also speed time to market by helping multiple writers, artists, and editors work concurrently on a document. This is perhaps one of the hardest things you can ask a CMS to do, but there is a direct relationship between reducing cost of production and reducing individual ownership and expertise within an organization.
In general, there are savings when we automate and replicate processes that would otherwise involve people getting together and discussing stuff. It enables (or even requires) people with specific expertise – who may not be involved in writing itself, such as subject matter experts – to contribute or review in a timely fashion. The CMS oils the wheels by controlling handoffs among all contributors at each stage of production, and integrating with a scheduling component so everyone understands the timeline.
Welcome to the Machine
Of course, not everyone will be happy with the new CMS even after the trauma of introducing it into an existing documentation organization has subsided. Creative staff can find it tough to adjust to the need to comply with the often rigid and unforgiving procedures involved in their new work practices. Increased efficiency and flexibility are accompanied by a corresponding increase in purely logistical and process-related tasks not directly related to the primary job of content creation. Using templates, filling in online forms, complying with housekeeping requirements in order to keep the content machine running can all be stifling to writers’ and artists’ creative side. There is also a loss of individual ownership when the benefits of collaborative production are introduced, and staff can feel a loss of control and therefore less rewarded by their work.
We’ll look at this issue in subsequent articles. It represents less an obstacle than an opportunity for managers to find outlets for staff creativity that don’t conflict with the benefits of automated CMS processes.
Potential side-effect: improved consumer experience
It’s a mistake to expect a CMS to make your readers more delighted by your content. It may help them get it on time, it may help the content be more accurate, and it may enable you to deliver the content in a variety of formats that will be more or less useful. But a CMS doesn’t help you make decisions on audience requirements, who documents what, how it’s documented and illustrated, and the required output formats. Of course if the touted benefits of a CMS are realized – among them collaborative production, streamlined processes, efficient storage, search and retrieval – then it may make the finished product better than it was when you worked with whiteboards, sticky notes and an external disk drive. But not necessarily. It may just make it cheaper and quicker to produce the wrong content.
It’s a mistake to shift the measurement of the value of your content from a consideration of how useful it is for your consumers, to the efficiency with which it can be produced.
Required for, but not to be confused with: Single Sourcing
Single sourcing is another popular concept that we’ll look at in a future article. Single sourcing, the idea of writing once and using many times is more closely tied to the content itself than the concept of content management. A CMS doesn’t care about what the semantics of the content, only its structure and form. Single sourcing requires us to break down our content into identifiable chunks, along with a means of identifying each chunk’s semantic relevance and relationship to every other. CMS helps manage the chunks, that’s all.
And single sourcing, unlike a CMS, requires that we change the way we write, and even what we write, in order to benefit from the write-once-use-many strategy. We need to keep the distinction between a CMS and single sourcing clear if we’re not to be disappointed when we implement either one of them.
More on single sourcing and the relationship with content management, coming up soon.