Articles

This article, by Seth Earley, was published in the December 2010/January 2011 issue of ASIS&T Bulletin.

Governance is not a simple process of writing up some plans and policies.

Operationalizing governance requires the correct structures and working agendas.

The Missing Piece of Content Management

Information and content governance is frequently a missing piece of a content management plan. Think of building the new content management system (CMS) as building a new house. You design the layout of the house and requirements based on the needs of your family. Then you move into the house. In preparation for the move, you put all of your possessions in boxes and mark those boxes to indicate where they will be going in the new home. If you are moving into a larger home, you’ll likely take items that were in a single room and put them into multiple rooms.

This article originally appeared on DocumentMedia.com as "Pulling a McGiver" Parts 1 & 2

Faced with increasingly complex document and information management needs, many organizations are exploring so called ECM suites – Enterprise Content Management. 

The idea of ECM is simple – have one place where people can collaborate, solve problems, access reference materials, manage works in progress, develop learning curriculum, manage web site content, organize records, manage email, and engage in numerous other on line knowledge and information management tasks and processes. 

However appealing the concept of ECM seems to organizations, selection and implementation of ECM is complex and fraught with challenges.  In this article, we’ll talk about the challenge of ECM, consider how to go about selecting tools and avoiding the pitfalls of the software purchase process and ways to gather and prioritize requirements.

From the Introduction of Information Management Best Practices:

"Just as business is practiced within a more specific context, information management is also practiced in context.  Thus, we believe that the best wayto illustrate the concepts and practices of information management is within the context of one or more sub disciplines. So, this best practices book tries to show global principles of information management in the context of projects in one or more of the sub disciplines.

The most important issues to business today include information overload, integration challenges, improved efficiency, adaptability to competitive challenges, and the faster pace of business change. All of these require improved ways of connecting people with each other and with the information and systems on which they depend to do their jobs. A core challenge is that there is a disconnect between IT functions and the line of business people whose job it is to keep the enterprise delivering products and services to customers.

Content management systems often are deployed within a single department (such as legal or marketing) and therefore are implemented with a focus on the needs of specific and even isolated audiences. The “E” of ECM may stand for “enterprise,” but few installations have that kind of scope, instead providing solutions to only specific, vertically oriented business goals. With transactional enterprise content management (tECM), however, the primary business goal is most certainly enterprise-wide: pushing high volumes of content through the system quickly, efficiently and accurately. In a transactional environment, document management is not a collaborative tool but an infrastructure. It takes “t” to put the “E” back in tECM.

Keyword research assists with making intelligent decisions regarding which words to target and in what order and where those words need to appear in our site content. Many of the words or phrases we come across while working through the research process might also in turn become preferred terms in our taxonomies. Further, we’re also likely to uncover some really great related (and unrelated) terminology originating directly from the fingers of our target audiences themselves...

Many organizations have turned to component-oriented content creation to create more sophisticated knowledge products, in more languages, and at lower cost. Our research shows that organizations that use XML authoring are more mature than their peers with respect to the adoption of best practices for search and metadata. We examine the metadata capabilities within DITA (and content management systems), discuss two major benefits that can be achieved by using descriptive metadata and taxonomy, and recommend some best practices for getting started with metadata for component-oriented content.

Measuring the right aspects of search performance requires a holistic view of the content, processes, applications and usage patterns that collectively makeup search integration and experience (“SIX”).

As social tagging grows increasingly popular on the Web, organizations are curious to see how this trendy Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world. Social tagging allows users to employ their own language to organize and retrieve content, and encourages social collaboration between peers by making those tags visible to others. Organizations are thus looking to social tagging as a potential solution for increased findability on intranets, news/blog monitoring and collaboration in workgroups. 

Far from being dead, taxonomies are more important than ever. In this article, Seth discusses the renewed importance of taxonomies from a number of perspectives, including the work of leveraging user research for improved experience, various taxonomy structures and their impact on content findability and reuse, and gaining buy-in from diverse groups of stakeholders.