Content management: One size doesn`t fit all

I am fortunate to work with many organisations embarking on content management projects, and it is always interesting to see how many different interpretations of this concept exist in the industry. Differences are perfectly understandable, of course. Companies have different organisational objectives and this translates into different types of content, different storage media and varying levels of importance that are applied to each medium. Trying to define a management philosophy across that will understandably be different from one organisation to the next.

Many people are looking for some kind of fixed approach or global content management crystal-ball to address their requirements, but due to the fact that content organisationally comes in so many different forms, a one-size-fits-all approach is not often possible.

Consider art for a second: it`s unstructured just like content and it always embraces the artist`s perception of a topic. We all know that two different artists would interpret the same topic entirely differently. Content management at an enterprise level is not subject to the double entry system and audit-trail specifics that we have in financial systems; its interpretation and implementation is certainly much more pliable. Content also comes in many different forms: voice communications, documents, e-mails, SMS records, Web pages, business process designs or process algorithms.

I am aware that very often even content management initiatives need to be in line with legislative requirements, and I am certainly not discounting the importance of this. Many content management projects and systems in place today are in response to legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. In SA, we have our fair share of legislation that has added to these requirements. But addressing the content management need simply for legislation only might not be the best option.

I firmly believe that embracing content management to address one isolated requirement in an organisation will only decrease the benefits to the organisation in the long-term.

Grant Hodgkinson, sales and marketing director, Mint Net.

I firmly believe that embracing content management to address one isolated requirement in an organisation will only decrease the benefits to the organisation in the long-term.

It is here that each organisation`s interpretation of this concept is critically important. Remember that content is created - and used - by users the majority of the time. Content creation touches what users do every day of their lives, even if there are "fixed" elements involved in that process. Implementing something to manage that creation and storage process more effectively will change the way they work. So it makes sense that a content management initiative needs to embrace the operational specifics in any organisation, rather than try to move everyone into a globally uniform way of thinking.

This is why I believe content management is not only about a specific technology. It`s about a paradigm shift, a culture change, and lastly, about technology.

The last point is where I sometimes have lengthy discussions with customers, but even more with platform vendors. Technology can only make an existing process faster, or easier. If a poorly designed manual process is "hard-coded" into technology, the final result will be the faster execution of the same poor process - with the same poor results. Content management technology is no different. Facilitating a virtual dumping ground for "all things content", and expecting this to magically deliver needle-in-haystack value on demand, is futile.

This means that implementing content management in any organisation - large or small - requires a very careful consideration of that business itself. Considerations like the type of content that exists today and will exist tomorrow and what the content is being used for is important. It`s critical to look at how the content is being created, and how users search for and access information within that content too. Also, consider the demographics of the users involved in the content creation process. Putting a vast and complex application in place might appear best on paper, but could alienate users instead because it appears overwhelming. This is where change management and training becomes so important, but that is a different discussion.

In any organisation, there is invariably a huge number of sources and repositories of content. Also, when working with users, a common theme of usage patterns will emerge. It makes sense to embrace those as the broad strokes of a content management roadmap, rather than something generic that is likely to alienate users.

In today`s knowledge-centric economy, users are responsible for creating much of the intellectual property that drives competitive advantage. Yes, managing the storage of that know-how effectively will help attain and retain competitive advantage. But as each organisation has a different personality, so the approaches to content management must be adapted accordingly to suit the business. One size fits all doesn`t fit here.