Issue 14

Help with research? I’d love your feedback on two topics: ​What should I teach about content?​ ​Tell me about your learning budget (if you have one)—or if you don’t! The surveys close on Monday, June 30, so act now! Thanks if you’ve already answered. Please share with colleagues if you don’t mind.

Strategy

Quick thoughts about the importance of thinking strategically about content

If you’re in an enterprise, a non-profit organization, or a government agency, is there any one person who can say “no” to publishing a piece of content?

I’ve worked in environments where there wasn’t. People could offer feedback, but if someone insisted on hitting “publish,” no one had the authority or clarity of role to stop them.

Often, this might be explained as a feature of collaboration, but in reality this is a collaboration problem. A content operations problem. A governance problem.

I come to this from an editorial perspective. As I’ve mentioned before, I was a newspaper editor prior to getting into a tech career, and that experience shapes how I think about both content quality and content operations.

In traditional journalism, you can’t publish without editorial review. Sometimes we’d hold stories until they were more ready. Sometimes we’d kill stories that couldn’t reach our quality bar. But in many organizations today, content teams operate without much oversight.

My newspaper was small, but we had some workflows, some processes. We had different check-ins on stories with different focuses. In one, we might make sure the reporting was complete, that the story didn’t have gaps. In others, we might be reviewing potential legal concerns, and then the last round was a copyediting pass.

But I’ve come to realize that governance is more than process and more than rules. It’s about ownership, authority, and accountability.

If this sounds like an editorial soapbox, let’s look at another angle: data governance.

Organizations have been investing heavily in data governance because the risks and inefficiencies of bad data are too high. They’ve learned that the benefits of data governance, as called out in The Importance of Data Governance in Today’s Business Environment, include:

• Improved decision-making
• Regulatory compliance
• Enhanced data security
• Increased operational efficiency

They’ve run into challenges in implementing data governance, but I’ve seen plenty of instances where there’s executive buy-in to address these challenges. As the aforementioned article calls out, the challenges include the following:

• Organizational resistance
• Complexity of data environments
• Balancing data accessibility and security

If you were to swap “data” for “content, everything still holds true.

As the article says, “Effective data governance ensures that an organization’s data is accurate, secure and aligned with business goals.” Content should meet that same bar, and that’s how content operations supports content strategy.

Our data governance peers have created roles like data governance lead, data stewards, data custodians, data administrators, data users, and more. The content world should learn from this.

Just as data governance relies on specific roles, content governance depends on real roles with real authority. Think about it: If anyone can hit publish but no one is accountable for strategy, you’ve got a problem.

As Kristina Halvorson points out in Content Strategy for the Web: “If you have workflow defined but no real standards or oversight to guide the people involved, it’s already broken.”

So if you have real roles given real authority, then you need to think about who fills those roles.

“Hire and organize for governance,” says Margot Bloomstein in Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project.

And so we circle back to the original question: Who can say “no” to content in your organization?

If the answer is “I don’t know” or “Nobody,” it’s time to revisit not just your content standards but also your staffing structure.

Governance begins with authority, and that starts with people.

Top of mind

Things that are bouncing around in my head as I synthesize a range of ideas

A few months ago, I bought a telephoto lens, partially with the thought of shooting some wildlife photography. In May, I noticed some raptors two days in a row while walking my dog, so I grabbed my camera and new lens and tracked down a pair of Mississippi Kites building a nest in an oak tree in a neighborhood park near my house. Here’s an image that I captured. It’s not quite the sharpest focus on the bird, that to my human eye seemed to be on guard during the nest-building process, but it’s striking and something I can work to improve on. It was great to be outside doing something I enjoy, and now I occasionally drop by because I think there will be baby kites soon. What kind of thing do you do to get away from the computer and recharge your creative juices?

John Collins

Thanks for reading! Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe here​ If you’re already a subscriber and you found value in something here, tell your friends and colleagues to subscribe!

Welcome to the 7 new subscribers who have joined us since the last issue of Model Thinking.

(As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases via affiliate links.)