As I dig deeper into each stage of a successful content management strategy, one of the most important areas of focus is the unique subject-matter expertise of your people and how they share knowledge and collaborate with your team. A recently published Frost & Sullivan white paper Content Automation: The Essential Ingredient for a Successful, Agile Content Lifecycle Management Ecosystem emphasizes how organizations can benefit from modernizing their content ecosystems to support a digital-first collaborative experience and understand if content delivered is achieving desired results.
At the core of the content validation and approval workflows are those subject-matter experts (SMEs) who are imparting their knowledge to create and deliver impactful content that helps your business differentiate and win in your competitive markets.
Does your current operations infrastructure support the ability of SMEs to collaborate on content and deliver the most accurate, compliant and informative information in an easy-to-consume format? Importantly, is the content being delivered personalized, localized and reaching the right audience, at the right time, via the right device for optimal consumption?
Out with the Old
Digital-first content collaboration enables content writers, SMEs, line of business managers and other stakeholders to share files across the organization and operate easily accessible review and approval processes for optimized accuracy and faster time to market. Conversely, an error-prone, time consuming manual sharing process creates a significant risk to your business which leads to version control issues and serious security risk implications.
Your business won’t be able to keep up today’s customer content demands if your processes and software still reflect the traditional, often paper-based content workflow model where SMEs work in silos and content is manually adapted for each of the many different print and digital channels. It will also impact your ability to feel confident that content created is personalized, connects with the customer, and meets compliance requirements that vary by region and industry.
In with the New Automation Process
Automating your content collaboration workflows allows multiple people across the organization to work together on a single piece of content, series, or larger content project in a digital-first ecosystem. When organizations deploy content collaboration tools within their technology infrastructure, the benefits are endless, including improved efficiency and productivity that keep teams ‘connected’ and eliminates working silos.
It fosters true content collaboration, so content teams can work with SMEs and other key stakeholders across the business (procurement, legal, HR, etc.) to assign, review, comment and approve content.
Automation improves efficiency, productivity and traceability – keeping teams connected while eliminating working solos. It does this by streamlining these time-consuming and error-prone processes, allowing your organization to shorten review cycles by days or even weeks compared to a traditional publishing process by centralizing collation of feedback and version control.
For example, in a closed-loop content lifecycle management solution, an author can use their low-code / no-code structured authoring tools to create reusable, XML-tagged content components that keep the source content available in that one centralized component – and it can be iterated to any digital output instantly. No one has to review or update multiple documents every time a change is made. With automation, if a content component is updated, the updated content is reviewed and approved only once and is available to be published everywhere.
The tagging of content empowers your company to deliver highly personalized content to external audiences. Rather than creating monolithic, one-time documents, companies can now create templates that leverage content tags and follow prescribed business rules. This allows your organization to generate content fast and feel confident it meets business and compliance requirements.
Not only is this approach highly efficient and cost-effective, but it is also the only approach that allows you to traverse global time zones and create and deliver personalized content at scale.
To learn more about how automation can streamline content workflows to support personalized, compliance controlled content delivery to any digital output go here.
To read the whitepaper, Content Automation: The Essential Ingredient for a Successful, Agile Content Lifecycle Management Ecosystem, go here.
To learn more about Quark Publishing Platform NextGen and how it can help get you on your path to content lifecycle management, you can request a demo.