How do you eliminate Content Hairballs?
Why the hell can’t I find it? Where did I put it? Which one is the most current? When I find it, I’m not sure it’s the right one!
Any of these sound familiar? Content management has become the bane of our business existence. Supposedly we went from the pain of paper, to a paperless wonderland. But all we really did was transfer the content hairball from one system to another. And, when we find the latest and greatest tech tool, we continue to move the content hairball around. We constantly move from one tool to another , never fixing the underlying structure of the problem…. Garbage in, garbage out!
How do you get rid of the content hairball? The reality is you can’t get rid of the content hairball until you do some detangling… something that cuts through the mess… I call it Content Rationalization . In other words, do some in-house organizing…. Any Home Organizer will tell you there are some simple steps to organizing your home. I’ve converted these into simple steps for Content Rationalization for small or large content hairballs….
- Assess – Figure out what you have and where you have it
- Plan – Figure out what you want to have in the end
- Rationalize – Go through everything and organize it all into 3 buckets
- Keep
- Save for possible future use
- Get rid of it
- Organize – Based on what you want to have and what you want to keep, determine the right “system” (based on people, process and technology)
- Sustain – Develop a content management process that everyone can live with that prevents having to do major content rationalization again.
Content Rationalization is a buzzword for organizing your content and getting rid of the “noise” content in your company. It’s not fun, and it’s not pretty, but you have to do it. It’s a huge job when you leave it alone and don’t touch it for years. But, if you invest up front time to do content rationalization and create an on-going process for content management – a cradle to grave process, then your business content landscape becomes much more tolerable and you start eliminating your content hairballs. And, you won’t say… Why the hell can’t I find it?…
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment