The Difficulties of Content Governance

Defining a Model for Content Governance: This is a brilliant article that’s long on questions. It’s a bit short on answers, but that’s okay because – for the questions it poses – there aren’t a lot of hard and fast solutions.

The author starts off with a brutal, enduring truth:

Five years ago, web content management implementations still failed because of inadequate technology – today this is almost never the case. Instead, a failure to embed a workable content management process within the CMS infrastructure is the most frequent root cause.

And this is where the concept of “content governance” comes in, which asks, “Who – not what – manages our content, and how do they do it from an organizational – not technical – level?”

A content governance model tries to do just that. It captures the range of ongoing decisions that are made as content is developed, edited, approved, published to the web and retired. It creates roles and assigns specific responsibilities and privileges to these roles.

From there, the article goes on to discuss the different scenarios, use cases, forks, permutations, and general confusion that happens to content from cradle to grave. If nothing else, the article really captures the complexity of content’s non-linear path through the organization, and the difficulties of “trapping” this path in a technical system.