Many opinions about the best approach to managing content exist. But it is universally agreed upon that if you want to succeed with enterprise content, you must figure out a plan and stick with it.
That’s where content maturity comes into play. The content maturity model sets the vision for your organization’s content ecosystem and aligns it with the business strategy.
What Is a Content Maturity Model?
A content maturity model is a framework based on information architecture principles (IA) that helps create an effective information management strategy. The model identifies five key stages of development in an organization’s approach to managing its content:
- Origin: Where does your content come from? Examples include internal documents, reports, presentations; external websites; emails; social media posts; videos, photos, and audio recordings.
- Capture: How do you get your content into SharePoint? Examples include scanning documents into SharePoint libraries or saving webpages to Document Libraries.
- Storage: How do you store your content? Examples include storing files in document libraries, archiving documents in Site Assets Libraries, or storing graphics files with other graphics in a Graphics Library.
- Use and Reuse: How do people use this content? Examples include tagging content with keywords so it can be located later or using Microsoft Office programs like Word and PowerPoint to create new documents based on existing ones.
- Disposal: When should you get rid of old material? Examples include deleting unused items from libraries or even entire sites if anyone no longer needs them.
How Can SharePoint Help the Content Maturity Model?
SharePoint can help the content maturity model in many ways. It is a powerful tool that you can use in many different ways, but it is essential to know how to use it and how it will benefit your organization:
1. Content Quality: Effective Search
Create custom dashboards and reports to track performance KPIs by using SharePoint BI functionality. You can monitor your site search results, content inventory, and more. You can also use advanced reporting tools in SharePoint to analyze content quality and compare your company’s performance against industry benchmarks.
For example, create a dashboard that displays the number of users satisfied with the search experience they received. You can also create a report that shows the top 10 most popular results for each keyword used in your search index. You can use this information to optimize your search engine so that users receive better search results.
2. Content Usage: Metadata and Social
Use SharePoint as a central hub for enterprise taxonomy management and controlled vocabulary creation. Implement SharePoint document templates and metadata tagging features.
Organizations need to have a strong metadata strategy to manage content appropriately. SharePoint allows users to create custom metadata columns, which can be used across all site areas, including lists, libraries, and documents.
3. Content Organisation: Intranet, Teams, Sites, and Hubs
Take advantage of site mailboxes to consolidate shared documents in a central location. The SharePoint intranet is a great way to organize content accessible to everyone within your organization. It also helps distribute information about company policies and procedures.
SharePoint teams can be an online workspace where employees can collaborate on projects and share files. SharePoint sites are similar to individual pages on the internet, but they can only be seen by members of the group who created them. They’re ideal for making personal websites or blogs within your organization.
Hubs are collections of websites and documents grouped because they’re related to a specific topic or project area. These hubs represent departments within your organization, such as human resources or sales training programs.
4. Content Governance: Policies and Permissions
Use versioning and check-Out/check-In features to improve collaboration. Incorporate SharePoint in-place records management functionality. SharePoint has built-in workflow capabilities that help you organize your documents into business processes and workflows — so you can quickly find what you need when you need it.
With SharePoint’s asset management capabilities and records management features, you can easily manage compliance requirements like retention schedules and records management policies across multiple sites or locations.
5. Content Identity and Access Management
Leverage SharePoint indexing features for near-immediate search results. The search box in SharePoint is a powerful tool that you can use to find information in your site collection quickly.
You can boost the effectiveness of this tool in two ways: by using managed metadata to add structure (metadata) to your content and by using search scopes to adjust what items get indexed in the first place.
For example, if you have many documents created over a long period, it may make sense not to index everything but rather to use managed metadata and search scopes to narrow down what gets indexed.
6. Content Trust and Authentication
Utilize SharePoint workflow to route content for review and approval to ensure that no unauthorized changes are made and that any changes are appropriately documented.
SharePoint offers several ways to ensure that your content is approved before publication. The following options are available:
- Approve/Reject checkboxes – This simple approach requires users to approve or reject each item individually. It’s suitable for small organizations where everyone approves every change, but it can become laborious as the number of approvals increases.
- Approve/Reject checkbox with Comments – This allows users to approve or reject an item or add comments about their decision. Other users can then use this when they review articles, giving them more information about why specific changes were approved or rejected.
- Approve/Reject list with Comments – Similar to option two above, this approach allows you to define multiple approvers for each item and provides a record of comments made by each user. It’s also possible to create rules that automatically send the following items back down the approval chain if required (for example, if someone rejects an item).
The authentication and authorization policies allow you to specify who can use your site, what they can do, and what information they can access. You also have granular control over which users can access certain parts of your site or libraries within that site.
Wrapping Up
A content marketing maturity model measures the extent to which established, and documented processes, standards, and metrics are maintained within an organisation.
The Content Maturity Model provides structuring internal processes that lead to higher content quality. SharePoint is one of the platforms which can help you achieve managed and sustainable content maturity model in your organisation.
Implementing SharePoint can be complex. Hence, it always needs excellent support. If you are planning to go through this endeavour, then you need experts who can guide you in implementing it successfully for your business.
We at Neologix provide SharePoint development services for enhancing content maturity models, risk assessment, and other evolving technologies surrounding it.
