In episode 96 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Gretyl Kinsey talk about the importance of content governance.

“An important part of governance is knowing that changes can happen. Keep your documentation in a central place where everybody can get to it and understands how it’s updated. If you don’t, some groups may start creating their own and that can result in unofficial documentation that doesn’t necessarily capture what should be captured.”

–Gretyl Kinsey

Related links: 

* Localization strategy governance

* Content scalability: Removing friction from your content lifecycle

Twitter handles:

* @PattersonScript

* @gretylkinsey

Transcript:

Elizabeth Patterson:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about content governance. Hi, I’m Elizabeth Patterson.

Gretyl Kinsey:                   And I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

EP:                   And I think we’re just going to go ahead and dive right in, Gretyl. So could you start out by giving us a definition of what exactly content governance is?

GK:                   Sure. So when we talk about content governance, we are talking about a former system of checks and balances where we are defining the responsibilities, the accountability, the roles, everything that’s involved, and measuring quality each step in your content development process. And unfortunately, it is not as much of a priority as it should be at a lot of organizations, but it is critical for success. So it needs to be a big part of your content strategy.

EP:                   And I think it’s really important to note here, if you are in a regulated industry, you must have a plan for content governance and accountability in place, or you get shut down. And if you’re not in a regulated industry, that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. You still need to document so that everyone knows what’s going on, what the plan is, and you can have that consistency in your organization.

GK:                   Absolutely.

EP:                   So when you are getting this plan in place, what types of things should you include?

GK:                   One is just standards for your content. So defining your content model and how that is going to be maintained and governed going forward. What are the workflows and systems that are going to be in place to do that? So that might be whatever your toolchains are for authoring, for publishing, for review, approval, editing, all of those kinds of steps all the way out through publishing and delivery, and all of the updates that are involved to your content. So just all of those kind of workflows for the actual development, and ensuring that that all goes smoothly as a big part of your governance.

GK:                   Another one is just defining the roles and responsibilities. So making sure we know who is in charge of doing what particular thing. I think one area where that’s really, really critical is that if there’s any sort of change to the content, that’s an overarching level. So if it’s something like branding terminology that changes, if a logo changes, that kind of thing we’ve seen with rebranding before. Who’s responsible for making sure that information gets disseminated out to everybody? Who is in charge of making sure that you’ve got processe...