The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Manage Phase
- by Kellsey Ruppel
Originally posted by John Brunswick.
Most people would probably agree that creating content is the enjoyable part of the content life cycle. Management, on the other hand, is generally not. This is why we thankfully have an opportunity to leverage meta data, security and other settings that have been applied or inherited in the prior parts of our governance process. In the interests of keeping this process pragmatic, there is little day to day activity that needs to happen here. Most of the activity that happens post creation will occur in the final "Retire" phase in which content may be archived or removed. The Manage Phase will focus on updating content and the meta data associated with it - specifically around ownership. Often times the largest issues with content ownership occur when a content creator leaves and organization or changes roles within an organization.
1. Update Content Ownership (as needed and on a quarterly basis) Why - Without updating content to reflect ownership changes it will be impossible to continue to meaningfully govern the content.
How - Run reports against the meta data (creator and department to which the creator belongs) on content items for a particular user that may have left the organization or changed job roles. If the content is without and owner connect with the department marked as responsible. The content's ownership should be reassigned or if the content is no longer needed by that department for some reason it can be archived and or deleted. With a minimal investment it is possible to create reports that use an LDAP or Active Directory system to contrast all noted content owners versus the users that exist in the directory. The delta will indicate which content will need new ownership assigned.
Impact - This implicitly keeps your repository and search collection clean. A very large percent of content that ends up no longer being useful to an organization falls into this category.
This management phase (automated if possible) should be completed every quarter or as needed. The impact of actually following through with this phase is substantial and will provide end users with a better experience when browsing and searching for content.
