by Rob Mills, Head of Content at GatherContent
Change is hard. Even if the outcome of change is known to be positive, convincing people to use new technology, follow different processes and work together differently is often met with questioning, resistance, and much sighing.
This is understandable because any worthwhile change takes a lot of time and effort, which can mean a lot of money too. Even if investing in change means gaining long-term efficiencies and economies of scale, it can still seem too daunting a prospect to commit to.
This is one of the greatest challenges with content operations - securing buy-in from leadership and getting the organisation committed to long-term change management.
Content operations, or ContentOps, is the combination of people, process and technology that are required to produce, distribute and maintain content in an organisation.
The symptoms and causes of poor content operations
Content operations is an organisation-wide commitment and responsibility. In our recorded Content Operations Class, Carrie Hane shared some causes and symptoms of poor content operations.
Symptoms:
too much content on your website
little or no governance
inability to focus on what’s important
feeling disempowered to solve content problems
not having content ready
Causes:
doing things the way they’ve always been done
disconnected silos
software steering solutions
no policies or standards
These symptoms will be felt in different ways across any organisation.
For the practitioners, they will be caught up in the day-to-day chaos that poor content operations creates. They may know things could be better in term of roles, processes and technology, but they may be powerless to change it, though they can make their feelings known and try to make allies in the decision-making process.
Feeling disempowered is demotivating, to say the least. One of GatherContent’s higher education customers started to use our platform for their content operations and stated that ‘introducing a new system was a positive signal of change to the teams that were frustrated with the poor processes.’ It's important for practitioners to be heard as they are often very close to the problems and have valuable insights.
By making a small change, you can change the entire culture and perspective across an organisation. By showing the impact this small change can make, you can open up the doors for widespread digital transformation.
For the managers, their team efficiency sinks and that can directly impact the quality of the content being produced. At this level, there is accountability in terms of how the content is performing in relation to business goals.
For leadership, all of the above is a concern but regulatory risks also open up and this is a significant and severe situation that the business would want to avoid at all costs.
There can be crossover in those circumstances with some practitioners also being decision-makers and managers and some managers being on the leadership team. Universities are a perfect example of hierarchical structures where content operations should permeate every department, discipline and level.
The time to prioritise your content operations is now
If an organisation waited for everything they needed to start thinking more strategically about their content operations, they’d never get started. It is a huge and long term undertaking that will require cultural change for the business and intense change management work.
Being proactive in improving content operations is a better approach than being reactive or forced into change. Due to the global pandemic in 2020, lots of organisations unexpectedly and suddenly found themselves as remote companies where digital transformation, governance and content operations suddenly found themselves higher up the agenda and list of priorities.
In April 2020, Microsoft shared that they'd seen 2 years of digital transformation in 2 months. That may be even higher now. This is all as a direct outcome of COVID-19. Similarly, in May 2020 McKinsey reported that 'we have vaulted five years forward in consumer and business digital adoption in a matter of around eight weeks.' The final stat to really labour this point, in the Economic Times in August 2020 it was stated by the CEO of Genpact that COVID-19 has cut digital transformation timelines to 6-12 months from 4-5 years.
Rather than having your hand forced, take the first step by choice. To do this, leadership will have to be on-board. For those whose job it is to convince them, find out what they care about, such as saving time and money. Smart content operations should be tied to and aligned with business goals.
End-to-end content operations
Having well-implemented end-to-end content operations allows content creators the appropriate level of control over publishing. Controlling access to the CMS is beneficial because it reduces the need to spend time on training and it also reduces the risk of error. Decisions like this, whilst mentioned briefly here, are actually a signal of huge change for an organisation.
It changes the people involved, the processes followed and the technology used, which brings us back to content operations being an organisation-wide responsibility that's committed to at all levels.
Leadership must have the vision for content operations in order to create and nurture a community aspect throughout their organisation. Having allies, establishing working groups and empowering content champions ensures there is buy-in, enthusiasm and collaboration up, down and across an organisation. Only then can true and successful content operations be established and thrive.
Continue the conversation on ContentOps
The conversation continues in our Content Ops peer group and in our regular member conference calls.
You can also leave a comment below.