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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, 2nd EditionManaging Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, 2nd Edition

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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, 2nd EditionManaging Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, 2nd Edition

Learn More Buy

The role of a unified content strategy

To take advantage of new digital markets, you must rethink the way you create, manage, publish, and deliver content. You must reengineer your processes to create a more flexible and sustainable future. You must also reimagine a production process that frees your content to be easily transformed into whatever new formats and devices that your customers desire. In this new world, a publisher becomes a content and service provider, capable of meeting the ever-changing time-to-market requirements. It is not as straightforward as simply incorporating XML into your workflow, because the workflow is only as effective as your content strategy. You also need to determine how you want to create modular, structured content that can be repurposed for multiple information products and services. What’s needed is a unified content strategy.

Case study: American Society for Training and Development

The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) is an association for workplace trainers. We create content to help trainers do their jobs better. We publish 20 books per year, a monthly magazine, and several newsletters. ASTD content is mostly evergreen and not time-sensitive, so reuse is central to our content strategy.

Goals

At ASTD we wanted to increase personalization and findability of our content, to reduce production resources (including time to produce the content and headcount), and to generally make it easier to do business with ASTD.

What we did and why

ASTD started by improving production workflow. We mapped out the current production workflow in a new content management system (CMS) and added automated email notifications, status reporting, and a content repository of XML versions of our books and magazines. We then converted our back catalog and front list into XML, and we integrated our Microsoft Word and InDesign content into XML as well. We added XML format transformations that converted our XML into multiple “flavors” of HTML, PDF, and EPUB. We developed a master taxonomy of training terms and applied that taxonomy to our content down to the article level (for our magazines) and to the chapter level (for our books). We also released this taxonomy for the benefit of the training profession. Finally, with all our rich XML content in the repository, we built a user interface to create custom packages of content.

Outcomes

In addition to meeting our goals, we also experienced other, unexpected outcomes:

  • Reduced onboarding time. New ASTD employees became “instant experts” in training content because they could instantly find everything we’ve published on a certain topic.
  • An integrated language. Our taxonomy is applied across the organization, so how we segment our customers is aligned with how we are segmenting our content.
  • Meeting customer expectations. Customers increasingly expect publishers to offer multiple formats to customers. XML-based publishing allows small companies like ASTD to meet those customer expectations in a cost-effective way.
  • Agility. With our content already in XML, ASTD is now creating several new (and very cool) content apps. We can concentrate on the app without having to go back and do anything (at all) with the content.

Lessons learned

Start free and small. We started our content management initiative with a company-wide blog. It was a great, stress-free way to get everyone speaking the same language of content management: categories, tags, analytics, search engine optimization (SEO), linking, and findability.

Incentivize the community. ASTD’s certified trainers earn recertification credits for tagging our content to our taxonomy. How can you incentivize your volunteers to help you with your content management needs?

Complexity can kill. ASTD integrated XML into the tools that were already being used: Microsoft Word, Excel, and InDesign. Forcing staff to change tools is the surest way of undermining your unified content strategy!

Anthony Allen, Director of Production, American Society for Training and Development

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