In our ongoing series on Essential Ingredients for Seismic Success, we’ve delved into the intricacies of training and coaching, change management, and content strategy. Now, it’s time to explore an equally crucial aspect: Governance. A robust governance framework ensures that your content strategy is effectively executed, maintained, and evolves with your organization’s needs. Governance can, on the surface, appear daunting. Many organizations avoid establishing a governance framework because it seems too difficult and time-consuming. However, this approach never pays off. Without a governance framework, your content and platform will quickly become unmanageable, resulting in increased time demands, unhappy users, and unrealized value.

There are three main components to a comprehensive governance framework: Program Governance, Content Governance, and Platform Governance. By addressing these components systematically, creating a governance framework becomes manageable and can be accomplished quickly.

Program Governance

Program Governance is the cornerstone of aligning your Seismic efforts with your overall business strategy. It involves establishing the necessary structures, roles, measurements, and processes to ensure that everyone is working towards common goals. Here are the key elements:

1. Stakeholder Alignment: Identify and align all relevant stakeholders, from executive sponsors to content creators and end-users. This ensures that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities within the governance framework.
2. Goal and Success Criteria Development: Define clear, measurable goals and success criteria to track the effectiveness of your governance framework. This includes setting benchmarks for content performance, user adoption, and customer engagement.
3. Activation and Monitoring: Implement the governance model and continuously monitor its adoption and success. This involves regular meetings, feedback loops, and adjustments to keep the program on track.

Effective Program Governance fosters a culture of accountability and continuous improvement, ensuring that your content strategy remains aligned with your business objectives.

Content Governance

Content Governance is all about managing the content itself throughout its lifecycle. It ensures that content is created, reviewed, and maintained according to defined standards and policies. The previous post introduced this content lifecycle. Here’s what it encompasses:

1. Strategy and Planning: Determine what content is needed, who will create it, and how it will be used. This involves a thorough content planning process that aligns with your business goals. The process for requesting new content should be automated using approval processes and forms within Seismic. Optimally, Enablement Planner can be utilized to automate and measure the entire content lifecycle.

2. Creation: Establish standards for content quality, consistency, and compliance. This includes setting editorial guidelines and defining approval workflows to ensure that all content meets your organization’s standards before publication.

3. Publication and Management: Define procedures for publishing content, including metadata and tagging guidelines, version control, and management. All content creators must be trained and certified to have publishing rights. This ensures that content is easily accessible, up-to-date, and relevant.

4. Content Promotion and Maintenance: Promote content to the right audiences and regularly review and update it to keep it fresh and effective. Utilize Seismic LiveInsights dashboards to regularly evaluate content effectiveness. To attribute ultimate business outcomes to content engagement, utilize the Seismic Business Data Enrichment application.

5. Retirement: All content should have an expiration date. Set up notification schedules to inform content owners of upcoming expirations. Define the process for archiving outdated content in a systematic way.

By implementing strong Content Governance, you ensure that all content is high-quality, compliant, and serves its intended purpose effectively.

Platform Governance

Platform Governance involves the technical and administrative aspects of managing your Seismic tenant. It ensures that the platform supports your content strategy and governance efforts. Key components include:

1. Administration Structure: Define a clear administration structure, whether centralized or decentralized, to manage system settings and user roles. This includes setting up teams responsible for different aspects of platform management.

2. System Settings: Identify and document the key system settings that need to be managed, such as user management, content profiles, and integrations. Ensure that changes to these settings are communicated and approved through the appropriate channels.

3. Content Profiles: While profiles are part of system settings, their importance to the entire program renders them deserving of special attention. Content Profiles determine the visibility to, and usage characteristics of content. Establish a cross-functional team to evaluate the profiles on a regular cadence.

4. User Management and Security: Establish processes for adding, modifying, and removing users. This includes setting up automated or manual processes for user management, defining user roles and groups, and ensuring compliance with security and privacy regulations. User Groups are especially important in their relationship to Content Profiles.

5. Custom Properties: These are so important, that we’ll deal with them in a dedicated post coming up next – Taxonomy.

6. Analytics and Maintenance: Regularly review platform usage and performance metrics to identify areas for improvement. Maintain the platform by performing routine checks and updates to ensure it continues to support your content strategy effectively.

Platform Governance ensures that your Seismic tenant is managed efficiently, securely, and in a way that supports your overall content governance framework.

Conclusion

A comprehensive governance framework is essential for the success of your content strategy. By focusing on Program Governance, Content Governance, and Platform Governance, you create a structured environment where content can be managed effectively, aligned with business goals, and adapted to changing needs. Stay tuned for our next blog post, where we will explore the crucial topic of taxonomy and its role in content management – how to classify and organize your content to enhance discoverability and usability. A well-defined taxonomy is vital for ensuring that your content can be easily found and used by your audience.

If you’re eager to get started or have any questions, feel free to reach out to our team. Let’s embark on this journey to realizing the full potential of Seismic together!

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Market-Partners Inc.
800 Shiloh Canyon, Santa Rosa, CA 95403
+1 707 575 4712
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