What is Content Governance? How Can AI-powered DAM Help?

With the growing importance of digital content, many organizations struggle to effectively manage the large volume of content being created. Content governance provides a systematic and strategic approach to managing content across its lifecycle. With a strong content governance strategy in place, organizations can ensure compliance, consistency, and quality of their content. This blog discusses what content governance is, the role it plays in the digital era, the key components of an effective content governance program, and the challenges organizations face with content production. It will also include the benefits of implementing content governance, how to formulate a content governance strategy using DAM, tools for content governance, and future trends.

Content governance ensures compliance, order, and security of an organization's content and data. It involves establishing rules, guidelines, and workflows to manage content creation, sharing, and storage. A good content governance program aims to mitigate risks associated with information and ensures that content is accurate, relevant, and useful. When an organization has a high volume of content from different sources, content governance becomes very important. It enables proper classification of content into structured folders and tags.  

There are assigned roles and responsibilities to manage content. Certain individuals are given rights to approve, create, and modify content while others are restricted. Regular audits are conducted to identify outdated or irrelevant content that needs to be archived or deleted. All these efforts ensure that the right information reaches the intended users at the right time, remains secure, and maintains the brand's voice and message.

Content governance plays an important role in how organizations manage their information assets. It establishes policies, procedures, and best practices to control important elements of content management.  

• Organizing content- It provides templates, taxonomies, and classification systems to organize growing amounts of content in a structured way. This makes it easier to find and reuse content. ‍
• Ensuring accuracy and compliance- It requires review and approval processes. Guidelines and style manuals ensure content is factually correct, free from errors, and meets legal and regulatory requirements. ‍
• Managing the content lifecycle- It defines how content is created, distributed, stored, maintained, and eventually retired. Who has permission to perform each step is also determined. ‍
• Securing sensitive data- It implements controls and access restrictions to secure confidential information and intellectual property from unauthorized use or disclosure. ‍
• Enforcing branding- It uses branding guidelines and tone of voice specifications to ensure all content aligns with the organization's image and messaging.
• ‍Auditing and archiving- It regularly audits content to identify outdated, irrelevant, or duplicate material that should be archived or deleted. The archived content is still governed and secured. Implementing governance helps organizations get the most value from their content assets. It ensures that content remains consistent, useful, and trustworthy to aid in decision-making and communications.

The rise of digital technology and widespread use of the internet has created unlimited possibilities for businesses of all sizes. However, with that comes the challenge of managing and governing their digital content. Effective content governance is essential for businesses to remain competitive in the digital era. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the importance of content governance and why it’s crucial for businesses to adopt it as part of their overall content strategy.

1. Ensuring Consistency

With so much content being produced on a daily basis, it’s essential that businesses maintain consistency in their messaging to their customers. Content governance makes sure that every piece of content that’s published aligns with the brand’s values and voice. It eliminates the risk of inconsistencies or contradictory messaging due to multiple departments creating and publishing content independently.

2. Protecting Your Brand’s Reputation

When content is published, it represents the brand and its values. Poorly written or inaccurate content can go viral and harm a brand’s reputation very quickly in today's fast-paced digital world. Content governance strategies prevent these instances by setting guidelines that define acceptable content, and how it should be created, approved, and published. This ensures that content is high-quality, error-free, and aligned with the brand’s image before it is published.

3. Managing Legal Risks

A crucial, yet often overlooked aspect of effective content governance is managing legal risks. Lawsuits for copyright infringement, privacy violations, or misuse of 3rd party copyrighted material can cost your brand dearly. Content governance sets up contracts, policies, and procedures that minimize these risks. These guidelines ensure that each content piece is compliant with digital regulations and Intellectual Property laws.  

4. Enhance Customer Experience

Customers have high expectations of what they receive online, and businesses need their digital presence to be engaging, informative, functional, and easy to navigate. Strong content governance ensures that every piece of content produced is relevant, high quality, and effective in engaging target audiences. This helps in building a better user experience and fosters customer loyalty that brings in repeat business opportunities.

5. Improved Efficiency

Many organizations struggle with redundant content and duplicated efforts due to a lack of governance strategies. This approach leads to confusion and wasted time when updating different parts of the same information, creating overlaps or conflicting information. Content governance enhances efficiency by streamlining content creation and publishing workflows, ensuring that content is not repeated, and ensuring optimization for search engines.

Content governance involves many interrelated components and processes to effectively manage organizational content. The most important components are:

• Policies and guidelines - These set the ground rules for how content should be created, approved, distributed, and stored. They cover issues like acceptable use, tone of voice, brand consistency, accessibility, and security.
• Taxonomies and metadata - Taxonomy is a classification system that organizes content into a structured hierarchy. Metadata refers to the data that describes the content, making it easier to search and manage. Together, taxonomies and metadata provide structure for massive amounts of digital content. ‍
• Roles and responsibilities - Key roles need to be assigned to govern content. This includes content owners responsible for particular types of content, reviewers to assess content quality, approvers to sign off new content, and administrators to manage systems. ‍
• Review and approval processes - Workflows define who needs to review and approve certain types of content before publishing. They ensure content meets quality standards and is factually accurate.

Companies face many problems when trying to create good-quality content. Here are 8 major difficulties

1. High demand - There is a constant need for fresh content across multiple channels. Meeting that demand can be hard.

2. Not enough staff - Many companies do not have teams for creating content. The work falls to busy employees with other duties.

3. Inconsistent quality - When multiple writers create content separately, there can be differences in style, tone, and accuracy. Making sure quality stays high at a large scale is tough.

4. Separate teams - Different departments create content alone. This wastes resources and leaves gaps. Combining separate content is difficult.

5. Outdated material - With so much content, it's hard to keep it all useful and current. A lot becomes outdated, inaccessible, or lost.

6. Security and legal risks - Sensitive info and intellectual property can accidentally be shared without proper processes. Ensuring compliance at a large scale is challenging.

7. Poor organization - Huge amounts of unstructured content make finding and reusing existing material hard. Organizing content to get more value from it is an ongoing struggle.

8. Inconsistent branding - Without strong management, content from various teams may not match the company's brand, message, and voice. Maintaining brand alignment at high volume is challenging.

Content governance systems bring many benefits to organizations and help achieve important goals. There are several reasons to implement content governance:

• Improved content quality - Governance ensures content is factually accurate, well-written, and consistent in tone, voice, and style. This improves the credibility and usefulness of content.
• Enhanced content security - Governance implements controls to properly classify, tag, and restrict sensitive content. It reduces the risks of data breaches, leaks, and compliance issues.
• Increased brand alignment - Content governance enforces brand guidelines, voice, and messaging across all content. This strengthens brand consistency and integrity.
• Improved content findability - Taxonomies, metadata, and organizational structures make vast amounts of content easy to search, navigate, and reuse. This maximizes the value of information assets. ‍
• Managed content lifecycle - Governance defines processes for content creation, approval, distribution, archiving, and deletion. It keeps content timely, relevant, and optimized. ‍
• Reduced information overload - Auditing and archiving procedures identify outdated or duplicate content that needs removing. This declutters the content library and simplifies the discovery of valid information. ‍
• Regulatory compliance - Governance implements rules and workflows to ensure all content complies with legal and industry standards. This reduces compliance risks.
• ‍Save time and costs - Reusing approved, well-organized content assets across the organization saves time and resources from producing duplicate information.
• ‍Align with business goals - Content governance aligns information management with larger corporate objectives like marketing, customer service, and productivity.

Here are the key steps to implement a basic content governance plan:

Step 1. Understand the Importance of Content Governance

The first step in implementing a content governance plan is to understand why it’s essential. The main reason is to ensure that your content is consistent, on-brand, and meets your organizational goals. It also ensures that your content is accurate, up-to-date, and complies with legal and regulatory requirements.  

Step 2. Identify Your Content Stakeholders

After understanding the importance of content governance, the next step is to identify your content stakeholders. These are the people responsible for creating, managing, and approving your content. They include your content creators, editors, legal team, marketing team, and IT department.  

Step 3. Develop Your Content Governance Policies

Once you’ve identified your stakeholders, you need to develop your content governance policies. These policies outline the rules and guidelines for creating, managing, and distributing your content. It’s important to involve all stakeholders in developing these policies to ensure that they’re comprehensive and practical.

Step 4. Implement AI-powered DAM Solution

After developing your content governance policies, it’s time to implement a DAM solution. DAM is a software solution that allows you to store, organize, and manage your digital assets, including photos, videos, documents, and more. It provides a central hub for all your content, making it easy to find, share, and repurpose your assets.

Step 5. Assign Roles and Responsibilities

Once we have identified stakeholders and implemented the DAM solution, it’s time to assign roles and responsibilities to each of the stakeholders for different aspects of content governance like creating, reviewing, approving, tagging, and archiving content. Define what each role entails.

Step 4. Build Taxonomies and Metadata Structures

Building taxonomies and metadata structures is a crucial step in organizing and describing content within a DAM system. Taxonomies are hierarchical categorization systems that help classify and organize assets based on their attributes, characteristics, or subject matter. Metadata, on the other hand, refers to the descriptive information associated with each asset, such as title, keywords, tags, descriptions, and other relevant attributes.

Step 5. Audit Content Regularly and Establish Archiving Procedures.

Regularly auditing your content and establishing archiving procedures are essential for maintaining a well-organized and up-to-date DAM system. This step involves reviewing the content, identifying areas for improvement, and removing outdated or irrelevant material.

Here are the main tools and technologies for simply implementing content governance:

• Digital asset management: DAM systems like ioMoVo organize, tag, and protect digital assets like images, videos, and documents. They ensure assets align with branding.
• Taxonomies: Controlled vocabularies and classification systems organize content into logical, reusable hierarchies. They use simple, consistent terms.
• ‍Metadata: Data that describes content makes it easier to search, organize and manage. It includes things like tags, categories, and attributes. ‍
• Rights management: Technologies that restrict what users can do with content like copy, print, or modify. They help enforce security policies. ‍
• AI and machine learning: AI tools can flag content for review, detect sensitive data, assign metadata, and suggest improvements. ‍
• Collaboration platforms: Online workspaces enable teams to create, review, and approve content together in one place. They provide version control. ‍
• Archiving software: Systems that move old or unused content to offline storage while still governing and securing the archives.

ioMoVo's robust digital asset management solution provides enterprises with a comprehensive platform to implement effective content governance across the enterprise. The solution offers a centralized repository for organizing, managing, and distributing digital content assets. It helps establish governance policies through features like taxonomy creation, permission management, workflows, and metadata frameworks.

The system provides tools for classifying content by type, category, brand, and other attributes and organizing it into a logical taxonomy. This taxonomy forms the backbone of content governance policies. Content contributors are only allowed to add and modify assets based on their role-based permissions. Workflows and approval processes ensure content moves through the appropriate review and approval stages before being published. The system captures rich metadata around content to ensure consistency, comprehensiveness, and reusability. Staff can search for and reuse existing assets rather than creating duplicative content.

The DAM automates routine content activities to reduce manual effort. Content review and approval happen through the system rather than via email. Renditions and versions are automatically generated. Overall, the DAM platform offers a structured and controlled environment for managing content throughout its lifecycle, guiding the implementation of an effective content governance strategy. To explore more, sign up for free.  

Content governance is the management of simple information rules, processes, and tools to maximize the value of corporate content while minimizing risks. It requires setting standards for quality, consistency, and security across all enterprise information. With the right governance system in place, organizations can ensure the content aligns with business goals and supports strategic objectives. Content governance turns information into an asset that helps a business run efficiently, connect with customers effectively, and make better decisions. When implemented properly, content governance can significantly improve an organization's performance.