Content Governance: What Happens When the Consultants Leave?

Making CMS work: models for content governance: Content management — on intranets or public Web sites — is almost always presented as a technical question. It’s all about bits, bytes, and code…right?

It’s really not. Content management is about people. Content starts with the people who conceive and write it, and it ends with the people that consume it. What happens in the middle is nothing but a means to an end.

The article linked above is about “content governance models,” which is a short way of saying, “okay, the system has been development…now what do we do with it?”

[…] a model must perform its primary purpose: to make content owners and related governing bodies aware of their responsibilities to the long-term maintenance of the site. If the model does nothing else, it is still likely to ensure that the site will remain intact after the consultants leave the scene.

I wrote about something similar on Gadgetopia in a post called “The First 85%.”

At what point does the content management system come into the picture [when developing content]? […] in most cases, no one actually opens a content management system and tries to enter any content until about 85% along in the entire process.

Assuming I’m right and the actual content management system doesn’t come into the picture until the last 15% or so, then don’t expect a CMS to solve all your problems with the first 85%.

One of the best exercises an organization can do when looking at their intranet is to isolate every section of content, and figure out (1) who owns it, organizationally; (2) who actually puts fingers to keyboard to update it; and (3) what is the trigger — what event occurs to cause someone to make a change?

If no one owns it, content rots. It doesn’t change, it gets old, and before you know it, you’ve lost the trust of your readers because they assume — often quite correctly — that no one is minding the store. Getting that trust back is tough.