This is Part II of a series of articles about invoking an enterprise content strategy for to develop, publish and manage content for all of our audiences, begun with the — Hey! Where’s Our Content? — article.

It is remarkably easy to determine when an organization is effectively sharing useful knowledge. When customers, partners and/or staff discover and engage useful knowledgebase content, they push urgently for more. Challenges are related to capacity, scaling and navigation/discovery.

Success = Demand for knowledge resources is insatiable

Conversely, flat demand signals failure.

Mixed Results: Most organizations experience uneven popularity of their suite of knowledgebase-driven channels. Perhaps the public website’s marketing and sales information is up to the minute, but the timeliness of resources published for self-help and intranet have stagnated.

Premise. ROI increases when organizations focus on producing and maintaining quality content for every channel and target audience. All published content — even an FAQ — benefits from rigorous attention to detail. As roles and processes are refined over time, the organization will develop productive routines comprised of planning, production, publishing and maintenance. The outcomes will include improved effectiveness, economies of scale and risk mitigation.

Strategic Concept. The justification for a consolidated content strategy is that each target audience deserves high quality, timely information oriented to its needs. In practice — after the requirements of the various target audiences are understood — timely content is produced, published and managed. Key principles include:

1. All content for individual resources is derived from authoritative source material
2. Topical content ownership is established to instantiate accountability
3. Resources are crafted via a standardized production process using labor-saving tactics and technology
4. Copyright is respected, intellectual property is protected and digital record retention is prescribed, e.g. source material is archived
5. Publishing is coordinated to ensure oversight, consistency and usefulness
6. The organizing scheme is engineered to be adaptable to changing requirements
7. Complimentary resources are aggregated into task-oriented collections
8. Feedback and telemetry will surface symptoms of deficiencies that will be addressed as the system is refined over time

Managing knowledge as a strategic asset is a lofty goal in many — if not most — business plans. C-level and board leaders find the concept of harvesting and sharing knowledge enticing, but expectations are rarely met because nuggets of knowledge are elusive and damnably difficult to make useful for the future. By consolidating its enterprise content development, publishing and management efforts, an organization asserts much-needed rigor and quality control. Mechanisms for implementing the content strategy include:

· Guiding principles that define expectations

· Formal roles & responsibilities that address individual accountability and authority

· A sponsors’ committee that provides priorities, resourcing and oversight

· An operations committee that enables power users and key stakeholders to collaborate

· A phased implementation plan to establish milestone-based scheduling

· A comprehensive style guide for consistency

· Periodic reporting to baseline progress

Part III of this series examines the practicality of this approach by examining operational challenges, e.g. specifications, scheduling, production bottlenecks, adapting to changing requirements.