Book review: Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy

There are two big challenge for people  trying to develop a unified content strategy, challenges that Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper's book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, don't overcome.

The first is that most organizations don't care about a unified content strategy.  In every business, there are good ideas that languish because no one high in the food chain cares enough to listen to reason. The costs and schedule delays are too small and spread across too many organizational boundaries for any one person to see a major impact on business operations, expenses, or revenue.

Enterprise content is, first and foremost, about the enterprise, not about the content. The enterprise is an ecosystem that produces content, to be sure, but it's mostly concerned with staying healthy by making sure that no one loses their job because they made a bad choice.

Down in the trenches, the problems are all too prevalent. Anyone who has to write anything knows that someone else is writing almost the same stuff someplace else. Things are slightly out of date or out of phase. To fix it, though, requires a major shift in operations and management. It ain't gonna happen.

The second thing is that users don't care much, either. If the manual or online help is out of date, they'll use Google or Twitter to find the answer. It gets to the point that even if the content is correct, users are so out of the habit of trusting the docs that they'll go to Google or their neighbor or the kid down the street before they'll read a help file.

So, managing enterprise content isn't about identifying types of content, developing a taxonomy that resolves concepts and terminology into a coherent whole, or any of that, as important as those steps might be. It's about understanding a) why executives don't care and b) why users don't care and then delivers something that resonates with them.

The book has no mention of organizational issues or ROI or search or SEO or even Google. In other words, the book provides valuable tips (of which there are many)  for developing and managing content unencumbered by management or users.

I've been reading books like this, along with companion white papers and presentations and sales pitches, for a quarter-century. For most of that time, I'd get excited about each new analysis, only to see another project founder on the rocks of executive apathy. I'm disappointed that we haven't advanced beyond these good books and toward solutions that executives want to deliver and people want to use.

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Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book for review. I will donate my copy of the book. I was not compensated in any other way.