All posts about
Content management

Content management is the set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. (source: Wikipedia)

Enterprise Content Strategy Comes Down To Governance and Workflow

Added on 21 August 2012 Peter Bogaards
Enterprises, the new hunting grounds for experience design.

“The problem today is that this bastion of the Industrial Revolution remains as businesses try to mobilize their human capital for the content demands of an always connected marketplace. Further complicating matters, workforce downsizing and the flattening of corporate hierarchies in the mid 1990’s continues to cripple many organizations in their ability to deliver the content needed to be successful in the Information Age.”

(Kris Mausser a.k.a. @krismausser ~ Follow the UX leader)

Design Factory: Creative Design with Industrial Approach

Added on 20 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Disclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands).

“Digital strategy touches every fiber of your operation. We firmly believe that it takes a systematic approach that’s woven into your organizational fabric to deliver compelling customer experiences – an approach comprising a recurring cycle of ideation, design, development and evaluation (…) The Design Factory is a methodical, structured design capability that comprises people, processes and tools. It infuses your organization with the creativity, agility and efficiency to successfully execute your digital strategy – from conceiving innovative solutions through to using robust and scalable approaches for design and specification.”

(About Informaat, experience design)

The ROI of content

Added on 18 November 2011 Peter Bogaards
ROI (‘return-on-investment’) is this weird bean counter concept addressing the question what do you buy, in atoms or in bits.

“The idea that content contributes to the bottom line is no longer a novel idea. I can’t really blame management for their skepticism; after all, what has been rather thin in public discourse about the benefits of content is the actual ROI.”

(Intentional Design Inc.)

The CMS Is Broken

Added on 15 July 2011 Peter Bogaards
A nice practice case with a few exceptions to the rule.

“There are two explanations for the endemic publishing paralysis. Either no one has made a good CMS yet – perhaps putting words and pictures on pages is the limit of our engineering capacities – or the CMS is a broken concept.”

(Erik Hinton ~ TPM)

Making the right products in the right way: a consistent product lifecycle

Added on 11 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Creating a world class BBC Online depends on teams from diverse backgrounds working together, and this demands clear and consistent terminology, processes, and governance structures across all products in the BBC Online portfolio. The Product Lifecycle Management provides a framework for collaboration between technical and editorial disciplines.” (BBC)

About Content Strategy

Added on 24 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“One of the things that stands out for me in any consideration of ‘content strategy’ is that it is centered upon the business goals of the organization. It sounds almost painfully obvious but grim reality shows us that it is not as obvious as it sounds. A content strategy should bring to the fore the idea that the content must be expressly designed and developed so as to address specific business objectives. This content must also, it follows, be designed to work with and leverage the tools that are being used, such as the search technology that a customer or prospect is most likely to call upon when looking for an answer. (…) the content strategist must take on board a raft of considerations and then chart an efficient and effective path of content investment.” (Joe Gollner ~ The Fractal Enterprise)

What is Intelligent Content?

Added on 18 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“(…) is content which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s content that is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. It’s content that helps you and your customers get the job done. It’s content that works for you and it’s limited only by your imagination.” (Ann Rockley ~ The Content Wrangler)

An Intelligent Content Strategy for the Enterprise

Added on 10 December 2010 Peter Bogaards
“One of the challenges facing anyone considering a content strategy, whether on the scale of a single web offering or a global enterprise, is sustainability. It is only with intelligent content that it becomes possible to talk about a sustainable enterprise content strategy. Automation can be used to minimize the time, effort and money needed to apply a good content strategy. However, automation doesn’t just happen. Content must be consciously designed to support it. An intelligent content strategy establishes a coherent plan under which content will be designed, developed and deployed so as to achieve maximum benefit to the customer and the organization while minimizing the cost to the organization.” (Ann Rockley and Joe Gollner ~ ASIS&T Bulletin Dec. 2010 Jan. 2011)

Designing for Content Management Systems

Added on 22 November 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Designing and indeed front-end development for a website that will have content edited by non-technical users poses some problems over and above those you will encounter when developing a site where you have full control over the output mark-up. However, most clients these days want to be able to manage their own content, so most designers will find that some, if not all, of their designs end up as templates in some kind of CMS.” (Rachel Andrew ~ Smashing Magazine)

Strategic Content Management

Added on 7 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The rise of content strategy is dealing the content management industry a huge kick up the backside. In the web’s Wild West era, the CMS was run by the IT department—or sometimes a lone webmaster who knew HTML—so CMS choices were based on features, price, and cultural fit, rather than web or content strategy. It was the classic IT drill: selection committees, feature matrices, and business lunches with men wearing neckties.” (Jonathan Kahn ~ A List Apart)

Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers

Added on 20 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“(…) most of today’s intranets primarily consist of pre-produced information resources which are intended to serve information needs which can be anticipated in advance. They aim to serve people who perform predefined and repeatable tasks. These intranets are push platforms. As such they might work well for repeatable routine work where the information needs can be defined in advanced, but they are quite dysfunctional for knowledge work. It’s not a coincidence that many knowledge workers find it much easier to find information on the web than in their internal systems and that the intranet plays a marginal role in their daily work.” (Oscar Berg ~ The Content Economy) | courtesy of @everbass

Future Practice Interview: Ginny Redish

Added on 15 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“For a long time, content was typically left for last and given so little thought. I’m happy to say that the situation is changing. Content and content strategy are hot topics now (…) Content strategy means thinking strategically about your content. It means planning the content, coordinating content over the entire web site, and managing content over time.” – (Louis Rosenfeld – Rosenfeld Media)

Content management by redefining the document

Added on 22 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
Keynote by Ted Nelson – “Content Management is not just a corporate issue. Authors and families, as well as companies small and immense, have the same problem on one scale or another. Here is the problem: The curation and presentation of media, even as the media change. Whether the media are family pictures and family trees, or fleets of brochures and web pages, they need to be saved, shown and repeatedly edited. And not only long-term media assets, but day-by-day communications and presentations and changes, may need to be tracked and managed.” (cmf2006)

The Intranet Maturity Framework

Added on 5 June 2007 Peter Bogaards
“Over the years, Avenue A | Razorfish has designed and built enterprise wide intranets for industry leading companies across the United States. In defining the strategy, designing the user experience and building these solutions leveraging enterprise strength software packages, Avenue A|Razorfish has been able to observe not only how enterprise intranets are being implemented and used but also how they are maturing over time. These insights have been encapsulated into a proprietary framework, that shows how, why and with what business benefits intranets grow over of time. The Intranet Maturity Framework, which is described in this report, summarizes best practices along the dimensions of intranet sponsorship, governance, user needs, experience design, technology implementation, training, adoption, and ROI metrics.” (Avenue A | Razorfish Enterprise Solutions)