The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance

Let’s be honest – content governance is far from an exciting topic. BUT the potential of a very small intranet team creating and maintaining a platform that provides an organization with relevant, high value information, helping workers to get their jobs done with greater accuracy and in less time is exciting. It is easy to quickly start producing content, but the challenge is ensuring that the environment is easy to navigate and use on the third week and during the third year.

What can be done to bridge this gap?

Over the next few blog entries let’s take a pragmatic, minimalistic view of a process that can help any team manage a wealth of unstructured information. Based on an earlier article that I wrote around Portal Governance, I am going to focus on using technology as much as possible to support the governance of content with minimal involvement from users. The only certainty about content production is that business users are not fans of maintaining content. Maintenance is overhead and is a long-term investment thats value will possibly not be realized under the current content creator’s watch.

To add context to how we will use technical tools in this process, each post will highlight one section of the content lifecycle process as outlined below

Content Lifecycle Stages
1. Request – Understand the education, purpose, resource and success criteria for content
2. Create – Determine access and workflow for content
3. Manage – Understand ownership and review cycles
4. Retire – Act on thresholds established during the request stage

Within each state we will also elaborate as to
1. Why – why would we entertain doing this?
2. How – the steps that are needed to make it happen
3. Impact – what is the net benefit or loss based on the process

Over the next few weeks we will dive deep into the stages and the minimal amount of time, effort and process within each to make some meaningful gains in the improvement of user experience and productivity in their search for information. It might be a stretch to say that we can make content governance exciting, but hopefully it can end up being painless and paying dividends.

Request Phase

For each project, regardless of size, it is critical to understand the required ownership, business purpose, prerequisite education / resources needed to execute and success criteria around it. Without doing this, there is no way to get a handle on the content life-cyle, resulting in a mass of orphaned material. This lowers the quality of end user experiences.

The good news is that by using a simple process in this request phase – we will not have to revisit this phase unless something drastic changes in the project. For each of the elements mentioned above in this stage, the why, how (technically focused) and impact are outlined with the intent of providing the most value to a small team.
read the complete Request Phase on Oracle’s Fusion ECM Blog

Create Phase

In this installment of our Minimalist Approach to Content Governance we finally get to the fun part of the content creation process! Once the content requester has addressed the items outlined in the Request Phase it is time to setup and begin the production of content.

For this to be done correctly it is important the the content be assigned appropriate workflow and security information. As in our prior phase, let’s take a look at what can be done to streamline this process – as contributors are focused on getting information to their end users as quickly as possible. This often means that details around how to ensure that the materials are properly managed can be overlooked, but fortunately there are some techniques that leverage our content management system’s native capabilities to automatically take care of some of the details.
read the complete Create Phase on Oracle’s Fusion ECM Blog

Manage Phase

Most people would probably agree that creating content is the enjoyable part of the content life cycle. Management, on the other hand, is generally not. This is why we thankfully have an opportunity to leverage meta data, security and other settings that have been applied or inherited in the prior parts of our governance process. In the interests of keeping this process pragmatic, there is little day to day activity that needs to happen here. Most of the activity that happens post creation will occur in the final “Retire” phase in which content may be archived or removed. The Manage Phase will focus on updating content and the meta data associated with it – specifically around ownership. Often times the largest issues with content ownership occur when a content creator leaves and organization or changes roles within an organization.
read the complete Manage Phase on Oracle’s Fusion ECM Blog

Retire Phase

Good news – the Retire Phase is actually more fun than the Manage Phase. During the Retire Phase our content management team should not have to track down content creators if the Request Phase of this process was completed successfully. The ownership meta data, success criteria and time stamp that was applied to the original content submission will help to manage content at the end of the content life cycle. The Retire Phase will provide the opportunity for us to prune irrelevant content items through archiving or deletion, keeping the content system clear of irrelevant information, streamlining users ability to browse and search for content.
read the complete Retire Phase on Oracle’s Fusion ECM Blog

If you have never read Seven Habits of Highly Effective people you are missing out – especially when it comes to making the most out of an investment in portal. Specifically, I am referring to the concepts of stewardship delegation and production capacity, both of which can be developed through an educational curriculum and guidelines aimed at empowering business users. Simply put, in order to gain the most value from a portal deployment the business needs to understand how to fish.

Stewardship delegation places the responsibility for project results onto the business participants. This ability to participate is gained through platform education and agreed upon guidelines for contribution, thus increasing their production capacity, commonly known as effectiveness. This will maximize the return on the technology investment.

Although at first intimidating it is possible to grow production capacity within the user base via a formalized gating process users. In order to have business needs met through the portal the business must actively participate in some educational offering and obtain rudimentary levels of knowledge with the toolset, before being allowed to complete the deployment of their project. This process should be mandated by way of portal governance. With this being said it is understood and accepted that a less mature portal deployment might not have a robust governance framework yet in place and we may need to begin the process of education with more pragmatic measures.

Common Roadblocks to Building Production Capacity
Beyond executive sponsorship the primary roadblock to building production capacity generally sits with the fallacy that the portal team “cannot afford to take time” to educate their user base how to self-serve. Remember that we need to focus on effectiveness, not efficiency. It will always be more efficient to have the portal team do the work directly, but it will not scale. We need to build effectiveness.

This is somewhat akin to owning a race car, but never taking time to learn how to drive the car properly – you have made the investment, but will never unlock the full potential of the investment. This is why investing in an organization’s production capacity makes so much sense. The portal team can still continue to produce results for the business, but some of their time needs to be spent building the production capacity of business teams themselves.

It may seem obvious, but this approach goes a long way towards
• Allowing the portal solution to scale throughout the business
• Providing faster response times to business needs
• Allowing the portal team and development staff to focus on more strategic initiatives and less day-to-day management of the platform

The beauty of this model is that after experiencing success with it the business is unlikely to want to wait on the portal team to laboriously build out solutions that they can configure themselves. Just imagine a solution development system where a portal team spends more time developing reusable or strategic components and evolving the governance model!

Getting Started with Stewardship Delegation
In the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People the concept of stewardship delegation is introduced and is alarmingly similar to portal “Governance”. This style of delegation takes time and patience on the part of the educator, but the end result is a rewarding relationship where the student (the business) walks away able to effectively contribute to solutions. You may ask why this is different that any other form of education. Good question!

Per the Seven Habits, Stewardship Delegation requires an up-front mutual understanding of and commitment to expectations in five areas. The following areas are taken from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and updated to directly relate to portal initiatives.

1. Desired Results – Have the person see, describe, make a quality statement of what the results will look like and by when they will be accomplished with their project. This should be achieved through a formal request stating the mission of the initiative, that is vetted before a portal steering committee or project approval board.

2. Guidelines – Identify the parameters within which the project group should operate. Keep the responsibility for results with the project team that has been empowered. This should include the responsibility for participating in a portal education session. The project team should not be able to commence work until they have completed the education session and had their project request approved.

3. Resources – Identify the resources available to accomplish the required results and who will maintain the solution once it has been created. Although seemingly simple, long term ownership can be very challenging. When solutions are built without clearly defined long term ownership they detract from the end user experience, cluttering it with out-of-date or irrelevant content.

4. Accountability – Set standards of performance to be used in evaluating the results and specific times when evaluation will take place. This represents a layer of governance present in more mature portal deployments that should be placed around any project that is undertaken within the portal.

5. Consequences – Specify what will happen as a result of the evaluation, including rewards and penalties. In the above example this might relate to the community being discontinued if traffic levels fall below a certain level. These metrics need to be agreed on by the parties ahead of time and will be used to ensure that the project outputs (perhaps a community) stay on track well after completion.

Governance is complex and the above illustration of the five areas only scratches the surface for what is needed to successfully run and manage a portal deployment. It is clear, however, that the common thread is the participant’s commitment to agreed-upon desired results.

My hope is that the above elements can jump start a more formalized approach to deployment success within an organization. The participants realize that they need to be place genuine commitment behind their initiatives, but also understand that they will be rewarded with the ability to have a generous degree of autonomy and control over their projects if they commit to the five areas above.

Going Fish – Making it Happen in the Real World
It is obviously easy to write about the merits of the above model when we seemingly find ourselves constantly bailing the water out of our canoe so we do not sink. Just as when we are working diligently at jobs there is never a “good” time to take vacation – but we just need to do it to protect our production capacity.

Once an organization has made an investment in the portal platform it would be doing itself a disservice not to start engaging in stewardship delegation to enable its user base to increase its production capacity through education and adherence to agreed upon guidelines. The following items represent some practical steps and guidelines to help begin the journey of increased production capacity

• Design a community request form that addresses each of the five areas highlighted in the “Getting Started with Stewardship Delegation” section above

• Find a request suitable for a pilot project that the portal team can mentor the business team to develop themselves

• Make it mandatory for anyone who requests a community to actively participate in a portal 101 class and demonstrate a fundamental understanding of the toolset

• Hold lunch and learn workshops to enable business users to get a better sense of what business value can be provided by the platform and where it has been successful in the organization

• Develop a community that contains a wide range of sample portlets so people can get a sense of what platform tools exist to meet business needs

Implementing the above concepts through stewardship delegation will go a long way to ensure that an educated, empowered business team has an optimal production capacity and can make the most out of the portal investment. This will allow the portal team to then focus on developing the vision and strategy necessary to continue to support new solutions for the business in a timely, effective manner, making the most efficient use of portal.