Content Governance

Governing digital workplace content 

We've all heard that "Content is King" so make sure that you treat your content like royalty at every stage of the content lifecycle by implementation proper governance guidelines. Never assume that your content creators, publishers, and owners will continue to look after the content they've added to the digital workplace. 

Governing your digital workplace content 

✔ You've aligned your content strategy to your digital workplace plan
✔ You've completed a content audit

✔ Igloo's Implementation Team has completed the build process based on your approved site structure
✔ Your content preparation efforts are underway 

helloquence-5fNmWej4tAA-unsplashPolicies and procedures are needed to ensure proper content management and maintenance within your digital workplace. As part of your governance efforts, we recommend publishing global, solution-specific, and channel-specific content guidelines that provide your Content Creators/Publishers with proper guidance to ensure content:

  • Is relevant
  • Has value
  • Can easily be found 
  • Meets corporate standards 
  • Is easy to consume and retain 
  • Helps employees do their job 

Your needs for content governance will depend on your key use cases (for both the digital workplace and individual solutions), as well as the governance approach you've decided to take. Below are some recommended policies and procedures. 

Need help ensuring corporate documentation like this gets used by your employees? Use our best practice for supporting the visibility of corporate documentation

Policies

Content-related policies

We recommend developing the following content-related policies for use across your entire digital workplace. You may also want to consider departmental/solution-specific versions of these policies to address the needs of specific audiences, content, or use cases. 

  • Corporate Style Guide: If you have an existing corporate or brand style guide, publish it in your digital workplace to ensure users are applying the organization's brand image across your digital workplace.

  • Global Label Strategy: A global label strategy should include corporate-level label groups to be applied across the entire digital workplace. Your different departments should also consider their own label strategy, especially if they maintain any knowledge bases. Do you have a taxonomy? Learn about the relationship between your taxonomy and labels.

  • File Naming Taxonomy and other naming convention policies: Policies related to naming conventions and taxonomies also improve the findability of content because employees will know which keywords to search for when looking for specific pieces of content. The success of these types of policies depends on consistent use. Naming conventions are particularly helpful to maintain the findability of knowledgebase (KB) content. Learn about creating a file naming taxonomy.

  • Channel Usage Policies: Consider creating formal or informal policies for corporate channel usage that defines the purpose, goals, and objectives for your corporate channels to ensure employees know exactly where to go to get the information they need and to ensure employees post on the correct channels. View some of our best practices related to defining channel usage: 
  • Digital Workplace Image Policy: Publish a formal policy related to image use within your digital workplace and include guidelines around appropriate images use and imagery that aligns with your corporate brand. A good starting point for creating this type of policy is our best practices for choosing images for your digital workplace.

  • Archiving Policy: Properly maintaining and managing content also requires you to determine when content should be removed from the digital workplace. To create a proper archiving policy, you first need to understand when you should delete versus archive content. Learn more about archiving content.
PlaybookTip_Icon.pngPlaybook Tip: Where should your policies live?
If you don't have a Governance Center Solution, learn how to build a Policy Wiki

Procedures

Content-related procedures 

Your content policies will support any standard operating procedures (SOPs) related to creating and publishing content within your digital workplace. Don't forget to link to related policies when creating any SOPs. View our best practice for creating SOPs for content creation to start thinking about the procedures you'll need and what information you should include. 

  • Content Templates: Using content templates makes it easier for creators to produce consistent content and for readers to scan and consume information. For example, a Channel template for Forums being used for request submissions to ensure you're gathering all of the information you need to resolve the request. Page and Space templates are also very valuable to ensure consistency in the architecture and layout of certain areas within your digital workplace. View our best practice for creating content templates to view some examples of what to include in a content template.
     
  • Content Publishing Procedures: Define a general content publishing process to help your Content Creators/Publishers push out content that is accurate, up-to-date, relevant, and valuable. Moderation can be used to ensure content is reviewed by the appropriate subject matter experts before it's made "live" in the digital workplace.

  • Adding New Channels: Maintaining control over how your digital workplace expands is another critical aspect of proper governance. Publish procedures for adding new channels to avoid unnecessary channels from being created, eliminate multiple channels being created for the same purpose, having too many new channels being adding that your employees become overwhelmed and disengaging. Ensure all Content Creators/Publishers, Site and Space Administrators, and Digital Workplace Builders read and follow this policy.

  • Channel Plan Template: In addition to an SOP for adding new channels, our experts recommended documenting a simple "Channel Plan" to ensure the purpose of the new channel is clear and expectations are well-defined to measure success later. Use our sample Content Plan to get started or create your own template and link the "Adding New Channels" SOP to your template.

Viewed 416 times
https://customercare.igloosoftware.com/playbook/handbook_library/content_strategy/content_governance
customercare.igloosoftware.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-17
124361
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5VQ3VE7DTIYT7SLYSXN2432CVLWBFNOS
<urn:uuid:21d2aca0-d023-478a-9da9-758ee7c0cd6f>
2021-04-16T07:58:41Z
13.88.239.12
text/html
sha1:L4CBEG5I64BVLYE34RD5FP6FB7RXUMXB
<urn:uuid:95e0dd1e-0b2e-43e4-ae9b-bb30842fa1a2>
https://customercare.igloosoftware.com/playbook/handbook_library/content_strategy/content_governance
response
<urn:uuid:67a10920-3c9c-4316-a54f-057dbafb2327>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-17
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-236.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/