Vamosa Tools for Fixing the Enterprise Content Governance Mess

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Jun 26, 2009

The notions of web and enterprise content governance are gaining more and more attention — partially, due to growing concerns around eDiscovery and other compliance challenges. Everyone has some sort of content (and its volumes are growing at the speed of light), but do you have standards, policies and procedures around it? How do you enforce them?

The challenge many organizations face is compliance (or lack of it) with internal and external policies and regulatory standards. This is exactly the challenge Vamosa (news, site) is trying to address with its new product called Check & Fix.

We spoke with Nic Archer, Sr. VP at Vamosa, to get the scoop on the new offering, as well as to discuss general enterprise content governance topics.

Background on Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG)

There are different definitions for both web governance and enterprise content governance. But the two notions sit right next to each other.

Web governance, as one of the component of Web Operations Management (WOM), is defined as policies and standards for web products set by authoritative administrative structures. That’s how Lisa Welchman, who has pioneered the web governance space, defines it.

Enterprise content is, essentially, your web product in many instances. Vamosa looks at enterprise content from the point of view of the need to establish, implement and maintain content quality standards for organizations.

Why There’s a Need for ECoG

According to Archer, Vamosa started to recognize the overall state of unhappiness with content while they were doing what they are traditionally know for – content migrations and content analysis. While enterprise content tends to be driven by content quality and governance principles, many organizations often end up with content that is not accessible, not cost-controlled and not findable.

Enterprise Content Governance Principles

The goal here is to use governance principles efficiently and with the least amount of risk. There are many questions organizations need to consider:

Does your website have the right level of Section 508 and W3C compliance?
Is your brand management implemented correctly?
Are you using metadata, classifications and taxonomies efficiently?
Are your internal governance processes stored and managed correctly?
What are your internal processes to reduce cost?
What are your external processes to reduce exposure yet to maximize compliance?

Many CMS implementations fall short of addressing these questions. It is now a lot more that storing author name under metadata and hitting the Publish button. Enhanced compliance (for accessibility or corporate governance) is crucial if you want to go from a nebulous to a tightly-controlled state.

ECoG gives organizations the ability to implement and apply controls when content is created, updated, moved or otherwise managed.

What Vamosa’s Check & Fix Can Do

Vamosa calls it “the first web site content monitoring service” that checks and automatically fixes errors. Check & Fix focuses on enterprise and government branding message consistency, with a goal to reduce risk through adherence to standards and automated web content quality processes.

Vamosa Check & Fix features include: