Articles, Governance

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.

Managing content — whether documents, transactional data or digital assets — is about providing content in context. Users can't find what they need for many reasons: (1) information and systems evolve and tend toward a disordered state; (2) in most organizations governance processes around asset management, search, taxonomy and metadata are immature; (3) content is not "selectively managed. In this interview we discuss a number of issues around content management, taxonomy, tagging, metadata and search, and provide some ideas on how to tackle the chaos to create business value. Access full article...