I’m currently sitting at home listening to the ‘Theme From Shaft’. It soothes the soul. More importantly it has helped me make an important decision. Let me explain.
I’m sitting on a shed load of content modelling material that will most likely never see the light of day. Not to mention grow old, stagnate and ultimately become completely useless. Gathered from project work, workshops, presentations, conferences, talking with smart people, and a even a book that I started but had to put down for work commitments. Instead of taking another year to try and reshape it into something, why not practice what I preach, test and learn, and get some immediate feedback. So I’m hoping what I share today will be useful to you tomorrow. I promise to share little and often over the next few months through my content modeling series. I think that makes sense.
What changed?
Over the last couple years I’ve been talking with clients, typically large multinationals, to help them design intelligent content to drive better customer experiences. Content modelling is the art and science of designing intelligent content. Author experience, content API definitions, aggregated/syndicated content, taxonomy and metadata, responsive and adaptive content, effective content management, multi-channel delivery, asset and content production: these and many other content services depend upon intelligent content. Nothing brought this home to me more than the Intelligent Content Conference 2015 with its extraordinary healthy mix of content strategists, UX, content engineers, content marketers, and technologists.
Then in early 2015 I met the folks over at Cancer Research UK in London who are on a digital transformation journey that like so many others are working through the chaos of designing useful and usable content for people get the right experience, typically during stressful times, everywhere, anytime.
Decision made. Let’s make things more accessible Cleve.
Architecture & Governance
I’ve also had a shift in focus over the last twelve months.
My work focus has shifted more towards content architecture and more recently governance. It was always there but now it’s more critical and relevant to what I do. What I’m seeing is that architecture and governance are two sides of the same digital coin. You can’t do one without impacting the other. Where architecture tackles the structural complexity of widespread organisational content and technology; governance strives to control behavioural complexity by being clear on who has the real decision-making authority to everyone knows who’s accountable and/or responsible for what. Although I’ve pre-dominantly worked on the architecture side of the equation, structure, over the last couple of years governance challenges have seen me focussing more on the people and process required to establish target operating models to get organisations digitally fit. More on this later, but structure and control are linked.
Confab Intensive
Until then, I hope you content modellers out there find this material useful. If so, please let me know. That’ll give me the kick I need to keep going. Also, I’ll be joining a bunch content practitioners at Confab Intensive in Portland this Fall 2015 to give a workshop on Content Modelling for Personalisation. Hopefully, I’ll see you there.
