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“Please don’t use that word. If you do, no-one will cooperate.”
I was helping a company implement a new wiki-based knowledge hub, and the head of communications was insistent we shouldn’t use what they referred to as “the g-word.”
At the time, this plea to avoid using the word “governance” seemed strange. Why would anyone be afraid to embrace governance for their employee-facing content?
It turns out a previous governance team for their website had laid down strict rules around content development that people felt were too restrictive. “Governance” therefore became synonymous with overzealous rules that made people’s jobs harder.
If that’s happening at your organization, you need to read this. Because like it or not, you need governance.
What We Mean by Governance
Let’s first declassify the word. While “governance” may sound like it’s all about creating and policing rules, it is actually about managing change.
The word “governance” comes from the Greek word meaning “to steer.” And that's such a good definition because as Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper put it in “Managing Enterprise Content,” governance is about steering the content, the people who create it and the systems that support it, through both day-to-day and the long-term content lifecycle.
Kevin Nichols writes in “Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide” that all content lives within an ecosystem. And ecosystems need to be well thought out, maintained and controlled in order to thrive.
Governance shouldn't be treated like a four-letter word. It's needed to oversee the entire content ecosystem, from establishing tools, roles and processes to directing ongoing operations in such a way that it supports a consistent, relevant, timely and effective content experience.
Related Article: Information Governance Is Boring, But Necessary
The 3 Key Areas of Good Content Governance
A good content governance program addresses three key areas: people, content and technology.
1. People
Managing humans isn’t easy, and managing the way people react to a governance model is often the hardest part of this process. But let’s remember the idea from earlier that governance doesn’t automatically mean rigid rules.
Content strategist Val Swisher put it best: “Governance is the process of managing your content over time as business needs change.” Fairly simple, no?
“How strict or flexible your content governance model is depends on your organizational culture, how much content you have and other factors unique to your organization,” she wrote. What that means is in the end, a well laid-out governance process will help prepare your team for ongoing change — and thus help you manage your team and, of course, your content.
2. Content
Let’s face it, it's too easy for people to create and publish content. Without governance, content can be a source of confusion, of duplicated, outdated and unnecessary information. Even when it’s meaningful, valuable and accurate, it can still be difficult to find if some guidelines aren’t followed. Without governance, there are not only no plans for reviewing and retiring out of date content, but there's little to no oversight for what content should be published.
You should have a clear chain of content workflow and processes in place, as well as an understanding about who is responsible for which decisions. Governance helps ensure that workflows and decision trees are clearly delineated and adhered to as the content strategy is put into action.
3. Technology
The creation, management and delivery of content involves a collection of different platforms that all need to work together. The role of governance here is to ensure that the right labels (or metadata) are applied to the content to allow it to flow between systems, to be found via search engines or to be applied to machine learning models.
From a more practical standpoint, a governance process needs to monitor the IT infrastructure and resources to keep the systems running and communicating.
Related Article: Information Governance Requires Speaking the Same Language
What’s in a Governance Charter?
The governance charter is, simply put, the document that binds all of what we just talked about together and sets out the objectives for the team.
These typically include:
- The content strategy, enhancements and lifecycles.
- Content planning and editorial strategy.
- The digital delivery strategy (i.e., which content goes into which channel).
- The taxonomy and metadata.
- User-generated content moderation.
Some organizations may also want to add some operational and management areas, such as:
- Accountability and escalation policies
- Change management
- Performance
- Risk management
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Remember that content governance isn’t a one-and-done activity — it's a scheduled, ongoing commitment.
I did end up using the term “editorial board” with the wiki-based knowledge hub team. But it still represented every aspect of the content strategy, from product, engineering, legal, training, support, HR, marketing and branding. We met monthly to discuss content consistency, usage, ownership, impact and all of the company-wide communications initiatives that played a role in the centralized knowledge base we were building (in other words, the governance of the content, but we don’t have to say that out loud).
Ultimately, no matter what you call it, a governance program — or an editorial board — will support both a unified vision of what you want your content to do and provide the roadmap and authority to get things done. It will provide the foundation to provide an effective ecosystem for your internal content needs.
