Content Management: Power To The People
The effectiveness of a workflow layer depends on how clearly roles are defined.It all starts from identifying the authors, writes Bob Boiko, from his forthcoming book
6 December 2001
In the past, the word author was applied only to a small group of professionals.
Today, in the world of electronic information, anyone is an author.
Whether authoring a new picture in a digital camera, recording an interview, or writing an introduction to an article, a creative act drives fingers to click, sketch, or type.
No computer can tell whether what is created is good.
Goodness is entirely a judgment call and completely depends on the context within which the content is created.
Who is the author?
The term author applies to anyone who creates content, regardless of what official job titles individuals hold.
Few organizations can afford the luxury of all their authors being professionals. Instead, authors often are people with other jobs who happen to know about something and can somehow communicate it.
Authors are also those who create original functionality for a CMS, say technical authors, as well as people who create original information.
Harvesting the creative product
The goal of any CMS is to harvest the creative product of as wide an author base as feasible and deliver it to as wide an audience base as feasible. The more organized the system is, the wider is the feasible base.
Contributions arrive in any form, written for any
audience, and editors end up with a lot of work on their hands sorting it all out. In the end, editors don’t get the definitive content on the subject; they just get whatever
anyone takes the time to send.
If, on the other hand, content editors are organized, they start by figuring out what they want and who creates it.
Understanding how information is created and modified helps.
Requesting clearly specified details of the information required via email , asking for specific contributions and offering specific methods of creation and collection could end up yielding ‘definitive information’ , a form of optimized content
Much more important, a process is triggered that can continue to yield the most, best content over time.
Authoring isn’t a one-time event. People continue to create original content, and editors must prepare yourself to continue to harvest it.
A CMS can add a level of organization to your approach to authors that you can never match through more casual measures. This is a good thing. To meet the demands of the wide and diverse author community in most large organizations, you need all the help that you can get.
Authoring tools
Digital information-processing tools present the most difficult problem of authoring in a CMS. In short, each tool is its own world. Each has its own file format, user interface, and capabilities. In addition, people gather around their favorite tools as if they were sacred objects.
Overall, this tendency leads to a balkanization of authoring camps that can cause a lot of additional trouble and expense.
A picture is a picture and so any image-authoring tool should do, one may think.
Different graphic artists, however, may disagree
In addition to the huge contention surrounding the best computer for graphics (with the Macintosh the consistent choice of the artists), another big debate centers about the best image-editing tool.
The depth of sentiment is such that trying to find the "best" tool or platform is a losing proposition. Rather, it could be worth take on the extra expense of using multiple tools and trouble for the sake of good will or use economic justifications to judge which tool is the right one for an organization.
Author's Attitudes
Changing the way authors produce content for their traditional purposes might be a difficult task, yet content produced hosted and distributed via a CMS must be reusable.
Given a wide and diverse set of authors and tools, editors need to organize them into groups to most effectively interact with them. The most natural way to organize authors is by what they create. From the standpoint of the CMS, however, the following factors are just as important as content type in organizing an approach to authors:
while others need a boost after each submission to stay motivated and on top of their tasks. Other factors that most influence a relationships with different authors:
Analyzing Authors
An author analysis for logical design can be more complete if authors and content sources are both taken into account
Initial brainstorming with the teams involved may help identify the types of content to be managed, as content may differ in format, data type, purpose and scope.
Then, charting out and profiling different kinds of authors will help to craft the best approach.
Finally, all the required content classes must be clearly identified to make the best use of all authors.
Useful information includes:
For each potential author, determine the following design constraints:
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