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| Measure Twice, Cut Once: Content Management Metrics | ||
| Often, when companies choose to implement a content management (CM) strategy they do so in an attempt to alleviate the operational inefficiencies associated with maintaining multiple content repositories. The documents in these repositories typically overlap each other, or fail to accurately represent true business processes. So it’s not surprising to find that most businesses strive to minimize these effects and, when they think about measuring the impact of their CM, tend to favor operational efficiency. But the way User Experience Consultants, Brian Manning & Caleb Brown see it, productivity wins are mostly illusory. Businesses are only looking at half of the CM metrics picture. |  |
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Caleb: I want to first raise the issue that the goal of increasing productivity is suspect. If we query the U.S. Department of Labor, we find Americans are actually less efficient than we thought. The average work week is 25% longer than it was a generation ago, and this expansion is simply in order to keep pace with the cost of living – our extra productivity produces nothing “extra”. Macroeconomic trends don’t necessarily translate into content management trends, but wringing productivity from CM can be like squeezing blood from a stone. You can do it, but it’s hard! | |
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Brian: Well, technology has always promised to free workers from tedium by reducing the time and resources required to get things done. It's only natural that businesses would look at leveraging CM as a giant opportunity to reap operational savings. The companies that thought up-front about the way content is generated, stored, published and reused have realized significant gains. (See Measuring Up, below.) But recently, the market has changed, and this argument is being tested as companies are feeling pressure to increase revenue and grow their customer base. We know that CM can be strategic to the operational side of the business, but let’s think outside the productivity box. Could it be that there is an even more powerful argument for leveraging CM as a way to boost revenue? | |
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Caleb: I think there is. The “Productivity Paradox” (see below) is baked into how IT is deployed and managed. So let’s reframe our analysis on the human side of the CM equation. The consumers of content are often left out of the picture. This is because adopting CM simplifies IT content administration and seldom addresses user experience concerns. To be truly scalable for the enterprise and usable to the end user sitting at the keyboard, insightful planning (including process analysis, content modeling, and user feedback from both content contributors and consumers) must occur first! But this is not standard operating procedure, at least not yet. The most common solution is an off-the-shelf software package, which fails to treat CM as the information architecture challenge that it is. (See Molecular’s Content Modeling Point of View by Jarrod Gingras for more information about solving this puzzle) | |
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Brian: Okay, if we’re going to talk information modeling – a way to understand how one piece of content is related to another in the context of the repository – we also have to discuss information quality. Of course, “quality” can mean different things to the publishers and the consumers of content. For example, an error free article may be more important than a timely article for the publisher, but the consumer might prefer precisely the opposite. Also, the reusability of content across groups within an enterprise is key. Of course, reusability has different meanings too! For the publisher it’s about taking content and tuning it for multiple purposes. For the consumer, reusability may be a synonym for portability, and could mean reading it online, storing it locally, downloading it to an iPod or sending it via email to a friend. | |
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Caleb: This is where user experience comes in. Businesses that identify behavioral differences in their customers can leverage CM to deliver the right information at the right time and in the right way. Seemingly trivial aspects of content, such as its metadata, can make all the difference in the successful conversion or a cross-sell opportunity. If we moderate our urge to manage content and promote UE insight, we can compare productivity gains in CM to quality gains in the content itself. Let’s look at an oversimplified case to illustrate this point: If a CMS implementation reduces publishing time from 2 weeks to 2 days, a company is faced with a choice – either crank out five times the content in that same 2 weeks, or take a “hit in productivity” and spend the same 2 weeks polishing the content so that it meets the needs of more of the customer base. In sum: higher quality content will deliver more revenue than the operational efficiencies of the CMS alone. | |
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Brian: Of course, no discussion of metrics would be complete without talking about follow-through. By measuring the impact of that content - whether it’s the amount of traffic it generates, the number of links to it from the blogosphere, or its ability to convert on a target action - businesses can determine if the content needs tweaking, or if it’s time to craft something truly revolutionary. | |
The Tale of the Tape
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Measuring Up (real world examples)
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