There are a ton of people involved in the enterprise content creation process across organizations. It’s very much an interconnected team where each person plays a viable role in ensuring that content created and published supports the business objective. After all, it is undisputed that enterprise content is a key enabler of business growth.
This is the first of a series of blogs that looks at each stage of the enterprise content lifecycle – from creation to publishing – and everything in between. Multiple team members are involved in each stage of the enterprise content lifecycle but let’s start by peeling back the layers of the content creation process. If done right within your organization, it streamlines the authoring process by ensuring the most up to date, accurate and compliance-controlled content is created only once and is easy to find and reuse across multiple documents and outputs. This technique significantly reduces a one-to-one effort with a one-to-many effort, supporting your organization’s digital transformation.
Many Cooks Are In the Content Creation Kitchen
The content leader, content architect, content designer and subject-matter experts (SMEs) are just a few team members directly involved in the enterprise content creation process. The content leader and content architect – or often known as the information architect – work closely together during the strategic content planning stage, which involves identifying a global content strategy that is in line with corporate and board-level objects and can scale to generate revenue growth.
The content architect understands the importance of supporting the content writers and the value of a structured, componentized content model, one that centralizes document types and makes it easy for content writers to search and discover reusable content components, with the entire process safeguarded against regulatory and brand compliance. What’s more, this approach removes technical barriers so SMEs can create content in a preferred Microsoft Word format. It also reduces time and effort associated with production by replacing time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks like copying and pasting with a smart approach that allows content writers to do more with the content they have and create reusable components that can be utilized and updated across multiple documents.
The graphic designer on your team is responsible for making sure content has creative and geometric elements, is engaging, on brand and easily accessible for all global channels. A centralized component content management system (CCMS) supports the designer’s productivity and accuracy too with easy access to a central location that stores all corporate and legal-approved brand assets. The designer can create and synchronize design templates with the content models that have been defined by the content architect for quality and brand consistency.
Avoid the Consequences of Not Putting a Content Reuse Strategy in Place
Your business can’t afford to not modernize its content creation process and a centralized platform is the key to successfully managing the sheer volume of enterprise data sources and breeding confidence that anyone on your content team can search and find the most accurate, up-to-date content types to support their content objective. A structured approach that leverages automation technologies also fosters strong connections between different pieces of information and uncovers opportunities to use content in new, creative ways to support business goals. And it is the only way to implement and execute a successful global content strategy as it augments each of your content team members’ roles in the creation process, allowing them to easily create, store, use and reuse content components with confidence.
Learn more about Quark Publishing Platform (QPP) NextGen.
Read Quark’s Top Tips for Next Generation Enterprise Content Lifecycle Management.