The State-of-the-Art Institute Proceedings: Reading about Revolutionary Ideas in Technology - Brief Article

Information Outlook, Jan, 2000

On November 18-19, 1999, the Professional Development department presented the State-of-the-Art Institute: The Next Technology Revolution. This two-day professional learning opportunity focused on the advanced technologies which will impact how we do things in the upcoming millennium. Presenters at the Washington, DC based event, included technology experts and those who have put advance technologies to work. Carol Knoblauch, Product Manger for Open Text Corporation, conducted a session titled Technologies for Managing Content and presented a paper to be published by SLA in its 1999 State-of-the-Art Institute Proceedings. An excerpt of Knoblauch's article, Technologies for Content Management: What Do You Really Need, is provided below.

Technologies for Content Management: What Do You Really Need?

by Carol Knoblauch

Content management is the process of developing, maintaining and deploying web content. There are various stages and tasks involved in a comprehensive content management solution. The areas of interest to you will depend on where your organization is on the adoption curve and the size and scope of your needs. What problems are you encountering today and what problems do you anticipate? What factors should you consider when you are setting goals and identifying requirements? What technologies are available to help conquer your intranet?

Why Manage content?

Most intranets have grown exponentially; in many cases through the efforts of a few enthusiasts with very simple tools. In some organizations, anyone could set up a web site. With no rules, those intranets quickly got out of hand because no one was concerned about the content.

Research indicates that most companies can use all the help they can get to manage their intranet content. A report from Forrester Research, released in February t999 found that slightly more than one half of the 50 Web Managers interviewed, do not use any tools to administer their Web assets. 'With most intranets doubling in size every year, it is no longer feasible to manage content without automated tools. Information technology (IT) organizations haven't taken content-creation tools seriously. They need to start getting involved and thinking about an overall content-creation and management strategy.

While IT organizations may not take content management seriously, it is apparent that information professionals do. Applying appropriate principles of information science to your tangled web needs to be a cooperative project with IT. You can advise the technical specialist about matters of organization, of knowledge, and patterns of information use. According to the Gartner Group's Daryl Plummer, "organizations would be wise to appoint a 'cybrarian' to coordinate the management efforts; develop a shared repository for content; and create a system for authorizing people to have access to the providing and changing of content." iii

Components of content Management

Content management (CM) is the process for controlling web content, in order to develop and organize a large body of information so that everything can be found by anyone authorized to find it. Content management is vague because it can apply to any stage of the content life cycle. By many definitions, if a tool has to do with the intranet, it's called content management. Depending on your perspective, your training, or your role in the organization, CM means something slightly different.

Content is not only found in HTML web pages. There are multiple and heterogeneous sources of valuable content, both inside and outside the organization. Content management is an exercise in content integration that employs tools and services to provide a single point of access to all information resources.

In addition, content management is a process of efficiently moving content through its life-cycle. Content is created, maintained, organized, and published. Each stage of the content life cycle has various associated tasks. There are automated tools available to support many of those tasks.

Creating Content

The first stage in the content life cycle is the creation, selection, or identification of the content. Tasks associated with creating content include designing the appearance, generating or preparing the content, and reviewing and approving items for publication. Static pages might be created using an HTML editor, or word processor and document converters. Structured data- may be derived from existing databases. Unstructured data may be managed in an object database or document management system. Content may be reviewed through a formal approval. Although we will not cover selection- or licensing for acquired external content, it should be managed using the same techniques applied-to internal content so that access to both can be integrated.

Maintaining Content

Maintaining content relates to the physical aspects of access and control of the information.- To ensure the value of your web-content you need to define ways to: revise information; control versions; authorize users to read, add, update, or delete content; maintain currency; apply retention guidelines; navigate the content without error; and, assure the integrity of the links between resources.