Week 8 - Content Management Goals and Consistency

After meeting with Dakota, everyone was excited about the new content management system again. Dakota had given us a well-written and well-priced proposal as well as a direction for how we should approach bringing our content into the system and conducting the knowledge transfer.

Since we were stalled with Flatirons (see prev. post) we decided to take advantage of our time and move ahead with the advice Dakota had bestowed us. In doing so, a few of us sat down to really analyze our current documents and find how much of our literature was really reusable. By reusable, I mean a chuck of content from a particular suite of documents that appears over and over again on a continual basis. Thus far, we had never really created a library of such content and that's what we had planned on doing today.

The problem that we ran into, that I am sure any company would run into, is consistency. Consistency is a critical in ensuring that the new content system would operate smoothly. Our first issue with consistency was figuring out what topics were reusable in what kind of deliverables. Further, we asked if we would always assume that said content be used with a particular deliverable?

The second issue with consistency came in how we were to save the topics or chucks of information; in other words, what would the actual file name be versus what was to be included in the metadata. Having a naming convention is critical because that's how future users of the content management system will search the repository (the place where the all the content lives).

Again we found ourselves in a relatively heated debate. Should we name the files with a series of numbers or actually describe what the content within that particular topic is? Would legal wording in one type of deliverable make its way into a second type of deliverable? How extensive should a reusable topic remain, if parsing it may make it more reusable? Would we always have to take out parts of a topic that were not needed for certain deliverables? These types of questions and many more permeated the meeting and left us confused as to how we were going to approach this entire situation.

Then one writer suggested something a little unorthodox. He said that we first should start playing around with the system, adding in a large chunk of test content to see how it works in real time (for example, during a scheduled due date), and see how individuals intrinsically search for content (whether that be text or image files). After which, we might be able to decipher the naming convention. When the meeting ended, things were still up in the air, but it seemed that the only way to move ahead might just be as the writer suggested and dive right into it, putting the initial content in before a realistic due date.


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