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Enterprise
Web content has become the primary vehicle for communication
with customers and employees. The requirement for effective web content, comprehensive
and up-to-date web sites, and the growing volume of web content have resulted
in more and more organizations implementing web content management systems.
However, as web content has become better controlled organizations have realized
that their organization develops and must manage much more than just web content.
Today’s businesses are overwhelmed with the need to create more content, more
quickly, customized for more customers and for more media than ever before.
They need to control their enterprise content and determine how to leverage
their web content to address all their customer information and media needs.
Organizations are now turning towards enterprise content management. The role
of web content will not be diminished as organizations move to enterprise content
management; rather web content will be integrated in the complete enterprise
unified content strategy. This article introduces the concepts of enterprise
content management, identifies how web content can be integrated into a unified
content strategy, and the tools and technologies required to support enterprise
content management. This article also looks at how the skills for web content
management can be leveraged to support enterprise content management.
The role of content
A typical organization has multiple content creators who design,
create, manage, and distribute information. Virtually every department within
an organization touches content in some way. For example there are:
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Multiple content creators within the organization |
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Marketing/Communications |
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HR |
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Engineering/Product development |
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Technical publications/product support |
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Training |
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Customer support |
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Creating numerous information products |
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Employee training materials, policies and
procedures |
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User guides, online help, reference documents,
application guides |
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Product specifications, design documents,
test plans |
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Regulatory materials |
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FAQs, customer support materials |
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Classroom or web-based training |
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For multi-channel delivery |
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Paper |
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Web |
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Wireless |
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For multiple content users |
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Customers |
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Suppliers |
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Channel partners |
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Employees |
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Too often, content is created by authors working in isolation
from other authors within the organization. Walls are erected among content
areas and even within content areas, which leads to content being created, and
recreated, and recreated, often with changes or differences at each iteration.
We call this The Content Silo Trap™. Content silos can have detrimental effects on organizations,
resulting in increased costs, reduced quality, and potentially ineffective materials.
While it has been possible to more effectively create, manage, and deliver web
content, the web content process has created a silo in most organizations. Web
content managers frequently have to take content originally designed for paper
and convert it to HTML or take files created in authoring tools designed to
create effective paper-based materials not online materials. Not only do they
have to convert content to HTML, the content often has to be rewritten and redesigned
to ensure that the web materials are effective. This is a time consuming and
often onerous task. If content originally designed for the web needs to be reused
in paper the process is reversed and often just as onerous. Some content management
systems make it possible to repurpose content into multiple media, but content
is not optimized for the media reducing its effectiveness for customers.
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Created: April 21, 2003
Revised: April 21, 2003
URL: http://webreference.com/internet/enterprise