Managing for Usability
In the movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, intrepid archeologist Indiana Jones searches for the Ark of the Covenant, going through a series of hair-raising adventures, finding the lost ark amidst strong opposition, and uncovering its mystery only to have the ark “ark-ived” (pun intended) forever. For the average knowledge worker, content management is a little like content archeology. It starts out on a trek for the missing treasure (content), searching in the deepest corners of the enterprise infrastructure, soliciting help from experts, including content-savvy explorers, and sometimes even priests (at least in rare occasions). When the lost treasure is finally found, the value is finally realized, only to be tucked away in the deepest bowels of cold storage, never to be used or seen again.
Perhaps content management (CM) is not that dramatic, but the point still holds true: CM is by nature a practice that is guided by human dynamics, with the key to managing content for usability. For enterprises to find value in their information, content management must have as its chief objective the goal of translating data into “combustible information”—information must become a usable asset in achieving tangible business objectives.
Managing Information
The manner in which we manage information is of vital importance, and yet in practice very few enterprises have a purpose-driven strategy for managing content. Not unlike business process management, content management must be arrived at by understanding the business requirements for how content is organized. This means that the content management strategy must be aligned with the business goals and objectives of the enterprise. This can only be achieved by going back to understanding the underlying business strategies that are in place in order to achieve the business goals of the enterprise. Consequently, a purpose-driven strategy for CM must also be developed. By clearly defining the requirements for managing content in light of the business requirements, develop a content strategy for achieving content goals that are consistent with and will facilitate the achievement of the corresponding business objectives. This may seem simplistic, but how many organizations have content management strategies in place that do not facilitate business objectives? Many times, these are rationalized under the banner of “operational efficiency”, yet cannot demonstrate any tangible return on content value.
Within the lifecycle management of the information itself, the infrastructure that supports the CM processes must facilitate the business processes that are in place to support the enterprise. This lifecycle must bear in mind the maturity cycle of the content itself. The information maturity cycle includes the creation of content and the corresponding actions of content becoming mature (review/revision/approval/verification). Within most enterprises, these actions are either formalized as a process and/or take place on an informal basis. Within informal methods, whatever form the content arrives at in its final state is generally the accepted state.
The second aspect of maturity is the means of distribution or delivery. This is one of the most crucial areas where organizations lose opportunities to create value in collaboration—by not employing change management of content, which involves the tracking of crucial content metadata for information such as versioning, synchronizing changes, authoring rights, security of information, etc. Creating a collaborative content lifecycle may be the point at which the most value is created in managing content. Content storage is also vital. Developing a strategy for storing, archiving and eliminating content must be based on usage, compliance with corporate and legal regulations, as well as determining the optimal and most cost-effective means within the organization.
Content Metadata: The Glue of CM
The same general principles of metadata management as applied to structured, tabular data apply to managing content metadata. Content metadata is key to the management of content in that both physical and logical characteristics of the content are required for the key administrative feature of change management of content, including:
- Versioning—the capture of content within the context of time provides value if and only if it supports business objectives or drivers such as compliance, historical analysis or revenue generation;
- Synchronous/Asynchronous Change Management—this is similar to conflict resolution. When change occurs to the same content, which change is correct, how the changes should be properly applied. The key determining factor is to maintain the semantic purity of the content itself, so context is not recast, thus corrupting the content; and
- Exception Handling—resolving conflicts within content will always require exceptions to be accomplished for legitimate business purposes. New information that can create better, more accurate context for the content, thus providing better business value through accuracy is vital.
The functional requirements of managing content, especially unstructured content, require the useful consideration and application of content metadata, as part of the entire enterprise metadata management strategy.
One of the key principles of hermeneutics (the study of human interpretation and content) is that context determines meaning. This places a greater importance on content workflow in that it becomes the single means of managing context available. Each agent of content change (or knowledge worker) collaborates on content, with the result of context being defined. As each person adds differing and sometimes contradictory information, the type of information, whether it is experiential or objective, adds to the context of the content itself. This information can be wide in the degree to which it adds or subtracts value from the content. A formal set of decision criterion can help alleviate any inaccuracy and result in the final information being qualitatively accurate and valuable. The content workflow should guarantee that the process of information maturity results in accurate context such that the final value is measured in the appropriate and desired business outcome. While this may seem somewhat theoretical, if a workflow includes an unnecessary amount of collaboration in arriving at a given business process, the end result may be an incorrect decision being made due to too much input from the wrong people.
Additionally, the workflow should ensure that the desired business outcome occurs in an efficient and optimized process. If a company is introducing a new product or service, the workflow or plan for the number of steps that need to be accomplished will be defined with the necessary resources allocated and assigned. If the workflow is not optimized, documents may be sent to all the resources for a given step even when the accomplishment of that step only requires a subset of resources to achieve it. In this case, the workflow should be defined in such a way, that only the required resources collaborate on the actions necessary to achieve the given task. This means that only those resources will be involved in the creation, revision and approval of the necessary content. This will ensure that the proper context is defined with limited opportunities for non-essential and potentially corrupting influences upon the context and even further, jeopardizing the quality of the new product or service being offered. (For an exhaustive treatment of hermeneutics as applied to content, please see The Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, Stuart. C. Shapiro, editor, John Wiley &Sons, New York, 1987, “Hermeneutics: From Textual Explication to Computer Understanding?” by Mallery, Hurwitz and Duffy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Content: Use It or Lose It!
The single measuring stick of how effective content is managed is found in how content is being utilized. Assuming that the strategy for content management is successful in aligning content with business process (and hence desirable business outcomes), content utilization then becomes the measuring stick of how successful the content model is for a given organization.
The utilization of content is measured along several lines. The degree of collaboration may be a means of utilization. However, just because content is being used in a collaborative way does not mean that content is being productively used.
Content usefulness is not a hard and fast set of metrics but must be defined in light of the business objectives that are in place. In light of this, if a business objective requires that a high degree of collaboration exist among a group of knowledge workers from a variety of departments, then the content workflow of the given business process must span multiple levels of the organization and the necessary mechanics of CM must be in place. If on the other hand, a given business process does not require a high degree of collaboration, then an individual contributor (see diagram below) of content may define value from singular utilization. This can be especially true in areas of compliance. Whenever the dynamics of regulation and content security come into play, there may be an underlying characteristic that the scope of data may be large; however the degree of collaboration is small in comparison. The bottom line is that the metrics of value cannot be standardized across companies because the business objectives and underlying business processes cannot be standardized.
The end goal of enterprise content management is enabling the ability of the enterprise to define value through the usability of content. With the hope that content management doesn’t evolve into content archeology, the future of CM holds promise not so much in the technological advances of CM itself, but in the maturity of enterprises in the use and development of clear content management strategies that result in enhanced usability that facilitates desired outcomes and the achievement of business goals.
Bob Bolds is the National Program Manager in Field Marketing for Computer Associates CleverPath Portal and Business Intelligence Solutions. Bob has been involved in data warehousing, business intelligence & predictive intelligence for over 17 years with a wide range of vertical market experience. Projects have included enterprise data warehouses, data marts, operational data stores, and data mining applications for the federal and state governments, manufacturing, communications, health care, insurance, and financial institutions. He is an eleven year member of the Data Warehouse Institute, has authored several articles and spoken widely at The Data Warehouse Institute, ACM and DAMA.
Bolds welcomes comments and conversation about this article. He can be reached at Robert.Bolds@ca.com