Content governance and lifecycle management are the policies, practices, and procedures that ensure that an organization’s available content is timely, accurate, and relevant. Content governance helps create trust in the information so that employees can use it with confidence.
After developing a content strategy, the organization should define the roles, policies, practices, procedures, and processes for how content is handled and managed across the entire content lifecycle. Iknow uses a client-tested, content governance framework to help organizations structure the key processes and activities needed to support the continuous flow of high quality content. Typically this is a complicated effort because content governance needs to be adapted to the nature and culture of the organization, as well as tailored to the different types of content and groups within the organization.
Developing an explicit content governance and lifecycle management program is vitally important for every organization, because:
- The importance or usefulness of most business information declines over time, so content needs to have an “archiving” or “expiration” date. Archiving activities need to be administered and controlled.
- Information security is of paramount concern in many organizations and, therefore, the content governance program needs to fully address concerns about content access and distribution.
- Some highly valuable content contains sensitive or proprietary information. Content governance defines the types of information that would need to be redacted, or sanitized, before it is shared with others.
- Organizations have increasing amounts of unstructured, user-generated content (e.g., blogs, social collaboration). These formats usually require different governance approaches than those for traditional documents.
- Many people across an organization have roles in creating and publishing content. It is important that the roles and responsibilities for content creation, review, and approval are clear, known, and followed.
Iknow’s primary deliverables for Content Governance and Lifecycle Management include:
- Content governance strategy, which includes detailed descriptions of how each major content type is handled, from creation through expiration. Specifically, this description, or map, would show who creates it, how the content is approved for use, and who the intended content consumers are.
- The roles and resources required to implement content governance policies and practices.
- A risk mitigation plan that addresses security, privacy and confidentiality, and other concerns that relate to the safeguarding of content.
- Implementation assistance.
A strong and well-managed program for content governance and content lifecycle management is key to ensuring that content shared across the organization is valuable and relevant to end users.