The challenge is to get different teams and individuals to work together toward common goals and to follow common policies. Without the right support systems in place, digital governance can be difficult to make happen. Content as a Service (CaaS) makes digital governance easier.

You Need an Enterprise-wide Approach

Enterprises have many content contributors belonging to different divisions or units. They often engage outside agencies to help them create content. However, everyone working with content should be following a common direction.

But when various teams use separate content management systems, it can be hard to get all parties to follow common practices and standards. Disconnected teams face the problem of silos, where separate activities are difficult to coordinate.

Large enterprises produce loads of content, but don’t always feel in control of all the content being generated. Central content teams worry that all the content produced by different groups may not be fully aligned with corporate policies and objectives. Some common concerns include:

• Legal and regulatory compliance such as disclosures, disclaimers, terms and conditions, and notification of changes.
• Branding consistency.
• Uniform communication of marketing messages, product features, and benefits.
• Keeping all details up to date across different operating units and delivery channels.
• Appropriate use of content assets such as images.

How to Get Different Teams to Follow Common Practices and Standards

Enterprises often lack the infrastructure they need to coordinate the many decisions relating to content. Individuals and teams make decisions in isolation from one another and this can lead to inconsistency and headaches. Without a common process, different content teams and outside vendors may publish content that:

• Is off-message.
• Has errors.
• Is used incorrectly, for example, by releasing information too early.

CaaS provides a common set of services to support all parties in their work. Because everyone uses common services, everyone can follow common practices—how they do their work. Standards and policies can be built into the CaaS service. 

Ways That CaaS Supports Governance

CaaS promotes consistency in enterprise content. It shapes:

• How new content gets created.
• How existing content gets changed, updated, or modified.
• How existing content gets used.
• When and where content gets published.

CaaS supports governance by providing a managed, repeatable process that all content stakeholders follow. It ensures that content is consistently structured, consistently written, and consistently delivered.

Governance of How Content Is Managed and Assembled

All content contributors work within a common structure for content—a shared content model. They can use the same authoring templates and information structure when creating content.

The content model makes it easier to manage core content that must be consistent wherever it appears. It also specifies and manages the variations that are permitted, so that existing content doesn’t get altered in ways that conflict with corporate policies or undermine business goals. 

Stakeholder Governance

CaaS lets enterprises manage roles and permissions relating to content across business units. Workflow guides who needs to review content and when they need to see it. Reviews and approvals can specify role-based content permissions, such as who is:

• Authorized to create certain content types.
• Permitted or forbidden from adding details to specific content elements such as metadata.
• Allowed to view and comment but not modify specific content items.
• Required to review particular content items before publication.

Delivery Governance

CaaS provides all the infrastructure required to manage content centrally, which ensures consistent policy notifications regarding user interaction with content in such areas as security and privacy (for example, GDPR in Europe or the California Consumer Privacy Act—CCPA). 

CaaS provides centralized delivery access through its APIs. Having a central delivery point limits the possibility that external vendors could create or publish unauthorized content outside of the established governance process.

Message Compliance and Consistency

CaaS ensures that messages and information are consistent, providing support throughout the content lifecycle, from creating new content to replacing dated information.

Thanks to CaaS, different authors can follow a consistent process when creating content. It provides authoring guidelines that help each content contributor understand the specific themes, information, and goals they must address. 

Moreover, CaaS can help content contributors achieve more consistency through automated rules and suggestions by:

• Indicating what elements must be included.
• Checking voice and tone.
• Checking for readability, grammar, and spelling.

Automation works together with content models to make sure that the right content is always available.

With CaaS, content that is used widely only needs to be created once. That yields two major benefits:

1. The information and wording are always consistent, no matter where they appear. Approved language is always used.
2. When this content needs to be updated, the updating only needs to be done in one place. It will automatically update everywhere it appears. 

The updating event can even trigger notifications to customers about changes in the information if this is desired. With CaaS’s omnichannel readiness, it is easy to keep customers updated in whichever channel they use.

CaaS Reflects Your Governance Priorities

CaaS’s flexibility makes it a superior option to support digital governance. The CaaS approach recognizes that no two enterprises will have the same governance requirements. Therefore, CaaS can support a range of priorities.

Enterprises can define what aspects of their content operations they want to manage more consistently, and what approach would work best for their organization’s culture and digital maturity. They can define their own workflows, which will reflect their preferred process and will formalize roles and responsibilities. If content teams decide they want to adopt more automation to bring greater reliability to certain tasks, they can choose to integrate with a range of specialized third-party tools and systems. 

Governance provides a foundation for enterprises to manage their digital operations with predictability and maturity. But governance is also one of the most vexing challenges that large enterprises wrestle with. CaaS provides the options that enterprises need.

In the final post in this series on Content as a Service, we will look at the benefits of adopting a technology-agnostic approach to your content operations.