Is your content future-enabled? 3 questions to consider about content creation
We commissioned a survey in late 2015 on the topic of innovating content creation and reuse. The data revealed that only a handful of companies have formal content creation practices. It prompted us to summarize the numbers and ask the three questions below and to frame this blog post around the value of future-enabling content.
You’ve probably already heard that the cha
tbots are here, attention spans are decreasing, purchasing and that consumer habits have forever changed. Today’s consumers demand a more agile, personalized, and precise experience. “Show me only the things I’m interested in and nothing else!” said everyone who has ever done a google search. As Google says, “Mobile has forever changed what we expect from brands. It’s fractured the customer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-drive micro-moments. Each is a critical opportunity for brands to shape our decisions and preferences.”
Should the consumer of business information enjoy the same expectations? As an employee shouldn’t I be able to say “show me only the information I need to do my job and nothing else so that I can be more effective?” Shouldn’t management be demanding this experience? Is it too difficult to achieve? Too expensive? Is it less risky to continue with business as usual?
Organizations have a critical and immediate need to organize all the “stuff” from the document, web, and mobile/cloud era, automate as much of this task as possible, extract as much value from it as possible, and utilize this “stuff” to create customer and employee experiences. But just beyond this immediate challenge lies another one – and an enormous opportunity.
Is anyone in your organization thinking about how you will approach this task?
Where are the opportunities?
Start the conversation in your organization today! Hopefully, our white paper and the statistics can support your conversation. We’re here to lend a hand too.
Micro-moments require micro-content.
Note: The survey results quoted here are taken from a survey carried out in October of 2015 with 307 total responses from individual members of the AIIM community surveyed using a web-based tool. Invitations to take the survey were sent via email to a selection of AIIM’s 80,000+ registered individuals. (Download the survey here – No form required.)
1. How do organizations typically create and reuse content?
- Duplicative content efforts (87%) and extensive time searching for content (85%), are the top issues related to poor content practices. 79% say there is too much single use content within their organizations.
- While office productivity tools dominate content creation in business, 48% of respondents cite they use web content tools to create business content. 46% are using desktop publishing tools.
- 65% report that their organizations leverage a team writing approach for some content, using shared documents. Subsequently, there is still a large of amount of independent writing activity using email as the review and approval tool (65%), or share central locations (59%).
- The greatest focus for team writing is in marketing (74%), and HR Policies and Procedures (60%). 56% indicate writing teams in use for learning and development materials.
2. What operational and organizational considerations are raised by a focus on content creation and reuse?
- Challenges are seen in collaboration and review of content creation by 51% of respondents while 45% cite content reuse and a common vocabulary as the main challenges. (45% equally). 40% feel there is a lack of standard tools and content sharing within their organizations.
- For many (66%), training and competency development for content authors is the focus as a result of their audits. 45% have turned their attention to the content itself with 42% taking a technology approach.
- While a web interface is commonly used for content distribution (66%), print is a dominant means of distribution with 64% citing this as a primary method. Additionally, 60% indicated use of office applications as the means of distribution, pointing supporting the stated use of email for review and approval cycles.
3. How do governance practices fit into the content equation?
- While information governance is gaining attention in many organizations, when it comes to content creation, 16% indicate there are strict standards in place, while 47% acknowledge there is something there, but not strictly followed. For 37% the indication is that there is little to no use of standards in any form.
- Authoring education is cited as a key way for organizations to support the user community (65%), with 54% saying the identification and implementation of standards should be a focus. For 53% organizational support would come in the form of a standardized toolset, providing greater levels of governance over content creation and standardization.
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The original article was developed in co-operation with AIIM and repurposed with permission. Download AIIM’s latest white paper The Next Wave – From ECM to Intelligent Information Management
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