Countless vendors offer tools that will help solve a specific problem relating to your content. Enterprises have literally thousands of different tools they can buy that might help their content operations in some way. But while spoiled for choice, enterprises have a hard time using all these options effectively. Each of these tools may be designed to solve a specific problem. But the tools aren’t designed to change how the enterprise works with content overall. 

Within a single enterprise, different teams may be using various tools to do the same kind of work. And within each content team, individual team members may be using a number of tools that have highly specialized functions. When used in isolation, those tools seem less of a solution and more of a problem: another silo to overcome.

Tools Are Scattered Everywhere

Without doubt, content teams are facing more complexity than ever before. They often try to deal with complexity by buying specialized products that solve specific problems. But as the number of different products has proliferated across the enterprise, the diversity of tools used has become unmanageable.

These tools may be in the cloud but they don’t always share information with other tools. That prevents everyone who is working with content to be in sync. At best, there may be limited integration with another tool. Sometimes externally hosted tools don’t really connect the rest of content operations at all: they are standalone products. What enterprise content teams are missing is a common view of different information and tasks.

Tool Fatigue: The Consequences of Tool Proliferation

When various content teams across an enterprise use too many different tools to support their content operations, it results in tool fatigue. 

Consider the many ways that using dissimilar and disconnect tools hurts content operations:

• Each separate tool works differently, meaning that only select people know how to use each one.
• Processes become disjointed because tools aren’t related and don’t support each other.
• Content team attention gets fragmented as each individual is immersed in a specific tool.

The challenge is even greater for individual contributors who need to use several dissimilar tools to do their work. Not only do they need to learn different tools, but they have to remember how each one works. This results in the problems of “context switching.” Productivity is hurt when individuals need to switch between distinct enterprise applications that look and act differently.

In contrast to one-off solutions, Content as a Service takes an integrated approach to content operations. CaaS supports the needs of individual contributors while enabling the coordination of activities by different functions and teams. 

CaaS Integration Solves the Tool Fatigue Problem

Instead of having individuals hop between different tools and applications, CaaS offers a better approach, providing a unified environment to manage content across the entire content lifecycle. 

CaaS offers a common shared service layer that everyone in the enterprise can use to work with content. Different teams no longer need to choose their own tools to work with. CaaS:

1. Supplies basic common services that all teams need and that many different team roles use
2. Integrates specialized functional services (such as optimization or AI tools) into the CaaS service layer, so that these are available to all teams

By giving all teams and individuals a common set of services, content stakeholders across the enterprise can use a common portal with a consistent user interface to view information and do tasks. They have a common context and don’t need to learn or think about how different tools work.

CaaS Integrates Content Operations

CaaS integrates a range of functional capabilities such as planning and assessment, so everyone is in step with each other. With CaaS, teams can track and manage content, from conception to delivery, through a single portal. This provides the ability to “close the loop” where the planning of future content can be informed by the performance of published content. 

Enterprises benefit from the integration of specialized tools into the CaaS services layer. These tools become more widely accessible by different teams and enterprises realize a better ROI on their tool investments.

In the next post in this series, we will explore how CaaS increases agility through enterprise content models.