Corporate-wide content contribution, publishing, editing etc.

Your experience please

[adfree]

I am going to head up our corporate e-communications group starting in September. We employ 20,000 folks, active in 120 countries, headquarters employs some 30% of global population.

Our web content is heavy technical (chemicals) plus investors, public stuff that is taken extremely serious.

Due to the nature of the content (highly specialized, dead serious, conservative environment) we are maintaining a network of editors and publishers via content management software plus document management software as expert literature systems.

Since education and governance of fragmented contributors become increasingly difficult and stagnant I am considering to take in some specialists from the businesses and other content areas and build a communications group specialized in content development, online visibility, SEO, SEM and such.

Any one around here with a comparable setup or additional ideas how to run the show in such an environment?

[adfree]

anyone?

[Shane]

We are smaller and all in one province. 2,400 in one public organization. We have a central committee which vets anything to go outside. They have a writer on staff and two editors. We have other editors for our print media. The committee also initatiates projects for others.

A seperate group takes care of governing the funding of application development. Well two actually, one for small projects (the same group above) and the corporate execs for large projects.

Anything else?

..... Shane

[adfree]

Very specific approach, thanks for the feedback, anyone else?

[crashomon]

Hi, I'm currently working for a Fortune 500 company with over 70,000 employees. Primarily in America, but contributors are all over the place.

We currently have over 12 different publishing systems (some use Microsoft VSS, some use Interwoven TeamSite and others are home-brewed solutions) with all these systems one thing is constant: nothing gets published without 'approval' from someone other than the developer. This goes for Intranet AND Internet sites.

Currently, we are migrating our publishing company-wide to one cohesive system (the better to allow cross-publishing by web editors). There are three levels being used here: Content Owner, Content Approver, and Content Developer.
Content owner is usually the manager or author of the piece.
The Content Approver acts as a project manager to ensure quality and accuracy of items developed.
Content developer is merely a web designer/developer who translates the Content Owners vision (with guidance from Content Approver) into web pages.

Its a good system to have, but the bureaucracy can be frustrating at times. (multiple people can act as approvers, so that helps when the main approver is out of town or whatever).

So, as long as you have a system of checks/balances in place, you'll stay sane managing the content output.

One thing though, you won't believe the level of duplication that occurs, so make sure you develop a method to contain/restrict duplication of content or else you'll wind up chasing your tail.

Hope this helps,

Patrick Elward

[uncle_bob]

When I worked for an international Bank, we had one website team for each country, with the banks home country responsible for the global site, and global policies.

One tip I can give, is when accepting work from publishing, we found keeping details of the name, position and department of each contributor, and most importantly the same information for their bosses all the way up to the board, meant that as people left, changed roles etc we could keep track much easier of who we should contact with regards responsibility for the article. Having the details of the chain from the board to each contributor was not a lot of work when accepting stuff, but saved a big headache when reviewing content.