Information 4.0 is ubiquitous. It is everywhere online, searchable and findable: but our organizational silos lead to silo’d content delivery too. For your content to be connected, you need people to be connected in your organization. To achieve stakeholder alignment, you need to design your organization to collaborate and learn.

Step 1. Design a stakeholder map

At the design stage, identify and interview the various stakeholders that create content in your organization. You can start with the groups that are familiar to you, and progressively extend the scope. You then create a “content council” with these stakeholders, to ease communication between groups.

Step 2. Integrate content decisions into your processes

Take one step further and identify who creates what, and how. Describe who should be notified of what. Include translation process too in the description.

That way, you capture and clarify those cross-silo collaboration processes that were happening haphazardly.

Make a decision table that describes what content gets created by whom, and link the decision to a content creation process.

Step 3. Automate content processes and decisions

Coordination, even minimal, across content creation groups, is essential and cannot be replaced by machines.

But once you’ve captured the processes for content creation, you can automate those so that they are built into your content creation systems.

All content published, on all channels, can then be made available through a traceable process.

Have you managed to achieve stakeholder alignment? Automated your content decisions and processes? Share your experience in the comments.

mgirard

I manage digital customer experience projects. With a background in technical communication and information architecture, I develop scalable content strategies and organizational frameworks to deliver the right content at each stage of the customer experience.To me, content and organizations are living systems. I leverage collective intelligence and design thinking methodologies to deliver meaningful innovation.Outside of Software as a Service, I continue to investigate holistic practices through yoga, and I teach content strategy and design at university.I speak about enterprise content strategy at international conferences, and I am an active member of professional associations.