Expert Access: What Is Content Management?

Question: What is Content Management?
Answer: From Content Management Strategist, Scott Abel

Content management is a new-and-improved way of strategizing and organizing information in order to drastically reduce time-to-market. It’s also a popular buzzword in our industry, one that causes much confusion and consternation.

Well-planned content management initiatives utilize proven, existing technologies to automate many manual and repetitive tasks, reduce the amount of time and resources necessary to generate documents and other content, and improve the quality and consistency of the information we provide to our customers. Although it is a new area for most, the automatic assembly of documents using computers (with little or no human intervention) has been taking place in government, defense, and aerospace industries for several decades. Recent advances in computing technologies, the emergence of first-generation best practices, and the availability of web-based authoring and publishing tools make content management an attractive and necessary next step for corporations, organizations, and government agencies seeking to get the most bang for their budget bucks.

Content management is not a software product, although it relies on certain software components. Instead, content management is the next logical step in the evolution of communication (technical, medical, marketing, scientific, etc.). Specifically, content management is a set of software tools, organizational and workflow processes, internal policies, procedures, and training, that, when coupled with targeted organizational changes and proper research and planning, can deliver an excellent return on investment.

Content management is a smart risk because its implementation will not only reward us with productivity gains, reduced time-to-market, and knowledge management benefits, but it will also help prepare us for the future. Inherent to content management is the ability to deliver information in computer-readable, open formats like Extensible Markup Language (XML) and electronic/digital signatures. These open technologies are said to help “future-proof” organizations because they do not rely on propriety software code and thus allow the sharing of information between disparate computing systems, platforms, and web browsers without the need to develop costly interface layers between systems. They also make converting information to voice, wireless, Braille, HTML, and other formats much easier and cheaper than alternative methods in use today.