Content Strategy and Enterprise Content Management: How They Fit Together

For my first article of 2011 I thought I would tackle the issue of Content Strategy from an Enterprise Content Management perspective. How do they fit together, especially in terms of your internal content strategy.

Remember, when I talk about Enterprise Content Management, I mean ECM as in the AIIM definition of strategies and technologies for capturing, storing, managing and archiving / disposing of all types of content across your organization. I do not mean just the technology as in an "ECM system" from say EMC Documentum, OpenText, Oracle or Microsoft etc.

Content Strategy as Part of ECM

The first issue is one of definitions and language. Content Strategy is often discussed in terms of an organization's external web presence and social media activities. It may focus on editorial or delivery channel issues, but it is really a complex "system of systems" style endeavor.

In her article "The Discipline of Content Strategy", Kristina Halvorson says that in her experience the content strategist is a "rare breed who will often be willing to embrace many of the roles required in order to deliver useful and usable content".

Depending on how your organization likes to nest its strategies, a Content Strategy may exist as a sub-strategy of the Enterprise Content Management Strategy — or they may exist as "peers" at the same level (but perhaps as sub-strategies to an overarching Information Management or Knowledge Management strategy). Either way, your Content Strategy should cover your external facing web presence (including social media use etc) and also your "internal content" — that which is used exclusively inside the organization to facilitate its operations.

As Kristina suggests in her article, the strategy should cover the editorial and web writing side of things, metadata and SEO, and content channel distribution. Kristina suggests it should also cover content management, but of course I have kind of turned that on its head.

Will the Internal Content Strategy Differ?

In outline I don't see why it should differ at all. In fact only the details with respect to the types of content, the delivery channels and target audiences may change. In another excellent recent CMSWire article, Patrick Walsh asked: "What are the real differences between Intranet and Internet sites?". Patrick comes to conclusion that they are really quite different, and that content on the intranet is different because it is generated by, and in support of an organization's activities and thus is unique to that organization.

He states: "If users can't find it on the intranet then they won't find it anywhere else". Whilst I could nit pick at that statement (they might find the info "inside" a colleagues head), generally I agree with Patrick. Could this make Content Strategy for the Intranet even more important than for the external, public Web? Surely it puts it at least on a par?

A Brief Example

Let us say you are collaboratively working as a team to develop a new internal policy document (doesn't really matter which policy, but lets say it's really important!). The end result must live on the Intranet where it can be easily found and referenced by all your staff.