Allowing Chaos in Content Management
Content management is not about moving from chaos to total order, from anarchy to total control, from ad hoc to highly structured ways of working. For an enterprise to work, you have to mix and match; give a little freedom here, add a little control there.
What I am saying is that there is no paradox in providing users with the freedom and power to create, tag and share their own content and communicate and collaborate with others as they desire while governing and controlling the production and delivery of content assets. It is just a little bit harder than to either give total freedom or take total control. Because the easy way out to tackle content management challenges is either to do nothing or to put everything under central control.
For example, an organization would probably benefit from having both user-driven metadata (folksonomies/social bookmarking) and centrally developed and managed metadata such as enterprise taxonomies. Why? Because they serve slightly different purposes and often complement each other; where one has its weaknesses, the other one has its strengths.
An organization could probably also benefit from letting employees choose their own tools for ad hoc content-centric collaboration and communication. At the same time, it would probably benefit from providing an infrastructure and structured and governed processes for producing, managing and delivering business-critical content assets.
It just requires a delicate hand to do the right thing with the right content.
What I am saying is that there is no paradox in providing users with the freedom and power to create, tag and share their own content and communicate and collaborate with others as they desire while governing and controlling the production and delivery of content assets. It is just a little bit harder than to either give total freedom or take total control. Because the easy way out to tackle content management challenges is either to do nothing or to put everything under central control.
For example, an organization would probably benefit from having both user-driven metadata (folksonomies/social bookmarking) and centrally developed and managed metadata such as enterprise taxonomies. Why? Because they serve slightly different purposes and often complement each other; where one has its weaknesses, the other one has its strengths.
An organization could probably also benefit from letting employees choose their own tools for ad hoc content-centric collaboration and communication. At the same time, it would probably benefit from providing an infrastructure and structured and governed processes for producing, managing and delivering business-critical content assets.
It just requires a delicate hand to do the right thing with the right content.