New Year’s Resolutions: Get Your Corporate Assets in Shape
January 3, 2012
A new year is upon us once again, and everyone is making their New Year’s resolutions. Topping the list is usually to get fit by eating better and exercising more. This year, resolve to get your organization’s content assets in shape, too.
Content is one of the most important assets a corporation owns. But many companies don’t give it the attention it deserves. Allocating only small budgets for technical communications, many teams are forced to work in a very manual way, causing duplicate efforts, inconsistencies in content, longer cycle times, and bloated production and translation costs – all of which negatively affect the organization’s bottom line.
So, start your year off by taking the first steps to get your content in top condition and begin to exercise a content management strategy:
Work that management team.
Warm up support from your management team for a new process and tools that will help to strengthen your content. Show them how structured authoring and a content management system will build savings for the organization. Without management’s backing, your resolution won’t go far – just as many people’s resolutions to get healthy fizzle out by the end of January.
Build the financial muscles.
Get money allocated for your new content strategy. A budget will give you the stamina you need to keep your resolution going.
Burn the fat from your content.
While you’re working on management’s support and a budget, you can take steps to get your content in better shape. Start working towards a structured environment by cleaning up your content. Standardize similar content, enforce rules and standards, use templates…do anything you can to prepare your content for a clean conversion.
Start a training regimen.
Build a training program for your staff and begin to get them familiar with structured authoring and content management concepts. Ongoing training can help to alter their habits to new writing methods and healthy content reuse strategies.
Call us at 717-764-9720 or visit our website for help in getting started with your content management strategy.
