1. Content Strategy and
CMS Implementation
A definitive approach to developing a sound
content strategy and successfully implementing a
Content Management Solution for publishers
Atul Pawar
Associate Director, Cognizant Business Consulting
September 2014

2. As publishers struggle to evolve their business models in the dynamic world of higher educa-
tion publishing, it is becoming critical that they have a very sound content strategy that sup-
plements their business strategy. It has been said for many years “Content is the King”. Dur-
ing the past several years, publishers prided themselves in the quality of the content they pro-
vided. Higher Education textbooks carried a very significant price tag and it was justified by
the quality of curated content that was produced by the publisher. Publishers identified
thought leaders in various subject areas and were able to bring the writings of these authors
to the students by publishing their works.
For over two hundred years the Publishers role was to bring the content created by these
thought leaders to the readers. With the internet age, the role of publishers has significantly
changed. The service of bringing content to the readers is now enabled by the internet. Au-
thors no longer require the services of a publisher to make their works public. There are mul-
tiple self publishing options that are available for authors who choose to take the DIY ap-
proach either working with platform like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing or Apple iAuthor or
publishing directly to the internet.
To stay relevant in today’s world publishers have to evolve to new business models and pro-
vide value added services. The newer business models and products require Content to be
managed in a methodical and systematic manner. As product managers envision new prod-
ucts that use content in ways it has never been before, they struggle to execute those visions
as the publishers lack a content management strategy .
Traditionally content has been managed by individual editorial teams. Stored on their com-
puters or shared storage drives with no systemic way to find the content, modularize it or re-
use it in a way that would enable monetization of content in new products. Many publishing
companies are loosing opportunity to generate millions of dollars of new revenue as valuable
content remains locked into CDs and Files at desks of editorial assistants. As new products are
being designed millions are spent on recreating content that already is owned by the publish-
er. Even where content is available it is in formats that cannot be reused. For example content
that is stored in print centric formats is difficult to repurpose in digital products. Or the con-
tent is in a monolithic structure where it can not be broken down into smaller fragments that
can be repackaged and sold under a different product models.
For education publishers to be relevant the age of Mobile devices with Socially connected
learners who demand adaptable and personalized content to be available any time any
where , an effective content management strategy that is based of solid content architecture
and implemented on the appropriate platform is required.

3. Elements of a Strategic Content Management Program
A Content Management Program is not a an isolated program that can be spear headed by
the single organization within the publishing company. Content Management impacts all as-
pects of the publishers operations and needs to be aligned with strategic and operational
goals of the publishers. Many publishers have tried unsuccessfully to develop a content strate-
gy that is lead by the technology organization. Millions of dollars have been spent with the
hope that the new technology will help the publisher attain the “Utopian “goal of have a per-
fect content management systems (CMS). It has been wrongly assumed that if only the tech-
nology groups would deliver a “workable” CMS publishers would be creating new dynamic
products that would elevate them to the leadership spots in the industry. After spending mil-
lions of dollars on failed technology driven initiatives, most publishers still do not have a com-
prehensive strategy or a platform that can help them transform from their role of bringing
content to public to the newer role of providing learning resources and services.
An holistic approach to content
strategy involves understanding
of the larger business elements
of the organization. The content
strategy first and foremost
should be looked as a an enabler
of business objectives and mod-
els. It should be aligned to goals
of the product management
teams that define and create
new products. It should enable
content acquisition from all
sources that the publisher de-
pends on to bring content to their products. The content strategy should be an enabler of effi-
cient content operation and support the production workflows. It should be based on sound
content architecture that drives content discovery and reuse. Content Management should
also have good governance to ensure content of value is retained. And, finally an appropriate
technology platform and systems integration approach is needed to provide an easy to use
CMS.

4. Key Consideration while developing an Content Strategy
An comprehensive and holistic approach to Content Management is required to develop a sol-
id content management strategy. Many organization are unable to fully leverage their content
due to content strategies that fail to take all factors into consideration. When content strate-
gies are lead by technology organization they are driven by goals around platform consolida-
tion or leveraging certain technologies like XML or NO SQL repositories to store content. This
leads to implementing sound technology solution but not necessarily a sound content strate-
gy that will align to key business objectives and new product models. Understanding of the
Content Lifecycle and ensuring that the strategy and the CMS supports the complete content
lifecycle is critical to the success of a content strategy. The content strategy should also take
into consideration the content and production operations and should serve as a framework
around which content operations will be optimized. The ultimate goal of any content strategy
is to enable new opportunities for content monetization. While product models will continue
to evolve, the content strategy framework should be an enabler of the new product models
and not hinder creation of new products. Also, the strategy should be flexible and adoptable
so new products don’t require an new content strategy.
The three components identified in the diagram above will help identify requirements and
critical to success factors of a content strategy.

5. Content Management Implementation Approach
Implementing a Content Management Strategy can be a challenging task. A formal approach
to the initiative is required at a program level to ensure success in implementing the strategy
and deploying a CMS. Many approaches that have been used are based on software develop-
ment models . The framework we recommend involves leveraging software development
methodologies for the appropriate phases but creating an overarching approach that inte-
grates principles of good program management as well as effective software development
methodology. Having an Agile based iterative approach allows for the strategy to be imple-
mented with a focus on delivering value early and often. The frame work presented below
will provide a good reference to implementing a successful content management strategy.
Content Discovery—Finding the lost treasures
Instead of focusing on how content is managed in the current enterprise, it is necessary to
understand the types, formats and volume of the content within the enterprise. Locating ex-
isting content store and analyzing the content within the stores helps create an inventory of
the content within the enterprise.

6. Content Value—What to keep and what to throw
Once content has been inventoried it is important to understand the value of the content.
Content value can be assessed based on multiple factors like is the content primary source
content, how difficult it is to recreate similar content, how unique the content is and how
relevant the content. For example a content with journal entries for the first explorers is an
extremely valuable content as it is a primary source that is unique. A video of an Artic ex-
ploration similarly has very high value as it would be significantly expensive to recreate that
content. However, a stock picture of the Big Ben tower is low value as it is easy to license.
While the value of the content s being assessed the ownership of the content and the
rights and permissions associated with the content also need to be identified. Content is
worthless if the rights around the content are unclear. As content management strategy is
developed it should take into consideration how content will be made aware of the rights
and permissions associated with the content.
Content Organization —How to make content discoverable and re-
usable
If there is any one single factor that cause a content strategy to fail, it would be failure to
define a good content structure. Content organization will enable content to be discovered
and reused. Content organization defines how content will be stored, reached and re-
trieved. Content organization is made of three components:
* Content Architecture
* Metadata
* Structure
Content Architecture should define the schematic composition of the content. Content
needs to be stored in a format that is independent of the delivery format. Such a format
should allow for logical decomposition and regrouping of pieces of content as well as trans-
formations for content to different formats for packaging and delivery. The structure
should allow for logical tagging instead of display based tagging. While there exist multiple
schema standards like DocBook and ePub appropriate extensions need to be added to
these schemas to make them useful in context of the publisher needs and product models.
Having the appropriate architecture will help drive efficiency in content operations and en-
able reuse of content under different product models.

7. Content Metadata is used to identify content and make searches more powerful. With-
out appropriate metadata, content cannot be searched. Search technology has made sig-
nificant improvements but to get relevant results on searches appropriate metadata has
to be applied. Many organizations wrongly assume that the indexing that is done by the
CMS ingestion engines is sufficient and a substitute for metadata. Consider the case
where a editorial assistant is searching for autobiography of Dr. Martin Luther King. A
search in a CMS that does not have appropriate metadata will bring up references not on-
ly to works that reference Dr. King, but also to content that refers streets called Martin
Luther King Dr. The CMS should strive to present most meaningful search results and that
can only be enabled by applying the appropriate metadata.
Broadly metadata should cover the following four broad categories:
 Identification Metadata—which describes attributes that identifies the content e.g
ISBN, Author, Title
 Administrative Metadata—which provides administrative data like format as well as
data like rights and ownership
 Descriptive Metadata—which provides a narrative description of the content
 Taxonomical and Semantic metadata—which defines how and where the content can
be used.
Content Structure defines how the content will be browsed and navigated. It is expected
that content can also be found by browsing the content repository. Proper logical con-
tent structures need to be defined that will enable CMS users to browse the content re-
pository. The physical storage structures should not be considered a substitute for logi-
cal content structures. Physical storage is depended on the underlying content platforms
and are optimized for performance for the platform. Logical structure make discovering
content easy for the editorial and production team and should be modeled on product
structures and content hierarchies.

8. Implementing a CMS
In addition to selecting the appropriate technology solution, it is necessary to identify a archi-
tectural model for implementation. Various models exist that can be used to implement and
most technology platforms will support any of the models. The content strategy and the oper-
ations model will define which of the content platform architecture best fits the needs of the
enterprise.

9. CMS Services
In addition to the aspects defined earlier the CMS platform will be expected to implement a
basic set of services. These services will enable the user access and interaction as well as
meaningful use of the CMS. Most CMS platform will support these basic services which will
then need to be expanded upon to map the enterprise requirements and operating models.