Last Friday I completed my stint on an enterprise portal (intranet) project for a provider with nearly 60,000 employees. Having a national presence, the organization I worked with has complex internal collaboration needs. While the implementation of such a technology is complex, the content strategy needed considerable attention. It also just so happens that yesterday we published our primer on internal collaboration entitled The Connected Healthcare Enterprise. Combining these timely learnings, I account for you below three critical items you need to consider when developing your enterprise content strategy.
1. Content Governance
While content governance is oftentimes the least glamorous aspect of content creation, a good content governance process will ensure that the content found in the enterprise stays relevant, on message, and updated over time. The purpose of content governance is to ensure appropriate processes are in place for managing the contents of the intranet in a controlled and orderly way. Strong content governance starts at the strategic level and flows down through a series of key stakeholders throughout the content lifecycle. This requires a cross-functional committee, including a cross-representational group of employees by role, content creators, content approvers, and other stakeholders across the organization, to help guide the strategic content efforts of your enterprise portal into the future. This content committee can be a sub-committee to the larger governance efforts that surround the intranet.
2. Content Audit
To create a content strategy that is practical for the organization, it is important to understand current content. We took our customer through a thorough content audit process, which helped identify key content types as well as the complex taxonomy that would drive important tools such as search. This content audit also provides the opportunity for content creators to take a realistic inventory of current content and decide what stays, what goes, and what needs to be updated.
3. Content Creation Workflow
Creating a piece of content for the enterprise necessitates teamwork. The content authorship process requires a series of individuals to work together from creation to publication. The workflows for this content management process can be assigned within an enterprise content management tool for easy automation. Key considerations for this workflow include:
- Defining Need for New Content
- Content Creation
- Content Approval
- Compliance Approval
- Pushing Content to the Live Server
- Content Archive Plan
4. Content Consumption
Making healthcare work requires employees to digest a lot of information daily in order to provide quality care and services. This mass of data is too much for any given individual to do on their own. That is where the true power of an enterprise content strategy becomes apparent. Tools like enterprise social exist to help communities of people digest a lot of information quickly. Healthcare organizations view the benefits of internal collaboration as a way to take advantage of “crowdsourcing” to solicit input from thought leaders across the organization. Even better, it causes a dramatic decrease in the primary communication tool that is burying us all: Email.
So, there you have it. Be sure to check out the The Connected Healthcare Enterprise white paper to learn how you can transform the standard healthcare intranet into a powerful engagement platform for healthcare providers and health plans.
