Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy  

Today's businesses are overwhelmed with the need to create more content, more quickly, customized for more customers and for more media than ever before. Combine this with decreasing resources, time, and budgets and you have a stressful situation for organizations and their content creators. To reduce the costs of creating, managing, and distributing content and to ensure content effectively supports your organizational and customer needs, organizations can benefit from a unified content strategy. A unified content strategy is a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet your customers' needs.

Rockley, Ann. E-Doc (2002). Design>Content Management>Collaboration>Content Strategy

Marrying Digital and Paper Documents

The use of physical paper or digital files is not an either/or choice. The two are complementary. Currently, there are many examples of paper used as an interface to digital processes. The UPC found on items we buy and the barcoded labels on the packages we send are two prevalent examples. Many papers we use to reach our customers or to do our work within our organizations have at least one barcode.

Zukowski, Deborra J. e-Doc (2005). Articles>Document Design>Information Design

A Unified Content Strategy

Today's organizational content is created by multiple content creators (marketing/communications, HR, engineering/product development, technical publications/product support, training) delivered to multiple content users (customers, suppliers, channel part-ners, and employees) and delivered through multi-channel information products (Internet, e-commerce, e-catalog, intranet, portals, marketing/communication/product materials, documentation, training, and support) in multiple media (Web, paper, wireless). Too often, content is created by authors working in isolation from other authors within the organization. Walls are erected among content areas and even within content areas, which leads to content being created, and recreated, and recreated, often with changes or differences at each iteration resulting in increased costs, reduced quality, and potentially ineffective materials. We call this the Content Silo Trap. While content migration tools can help, particularly with legacy content, planned reuse is the next step in facilitating content reuse.

Rockley, Ann. e-Doc (2002). Articles>Content Management>Content Strategy

Useless Memory and Email

While no one would argue that email is useless, continued inefficient management of emails makes email worse than useless—--it makes them dangerous.

Mancini, John. e-Doc (2005). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>Information Design>Email

Web Content Meets Records Management

While the Web has forever changed the way we gather information, communicate and conduct business, it's the highly dynamic and personalized Web content and the transactions performed on the Web that present records managers with the greatest challenge.

Marsili, Diane. E-Doc (2002). Design>Content Management