DCMOC
Department of Content Management and Online Collaboration
I’ve got definitions on the brain…
I’m also trying to “rough in” exactly what we mean by content management. Here’s my first stab at a definition, for our CM&OC purposes:
“Web content management comprises the set of tools and practices by which the appropriate experts throughout the organization are able to create and update the online content that they care about, according to their own priorities and schedules, without specialized technical or design skills and with exactly the right amount of intervention from technical experts.”
Breaking it down:
“…Tools and practices…”: it’s not enough to have a tool; you also need a set of understood and obeyed processes and policies.
“…appropriate experts throughout the organization…”: The right people, all over, own their content. This doesn’t say anyone can write anything; it says the right people can write their things.
“…create and update…”: Not only can they make it in the first place, but they can change it when necessary.
“…according to their own priorities and schedules…”: This is big. If, for example, HR wants to post 50 job openings on one day, they should be able to, and it shouldn’t dramatically affect the web team’s capacity.
“…without specialized technical or design skills…”: Authors shouldn’t have to know much about web technology or web design. In fact, they shouldn’t be able to make sophisticated technical or design choices.
“…with exactly the right amount of intervention from technical experts.”: In a content management environment, experts are certainly necessary, but they provide genuine technical, design, or editorial expertise, not maintenance/rote work.
Thoughts? Refinements?
8 Responses to “I’ve got definitions on the brain…”
Keith A. Morneau Says:
Hi Jason,
A continue of this dialogue …
You wrote – “…Tools and practices…”: it’s not enough to have a tool; you also need a set of understood and obeyed processes and policies.”
I would agree with this because there are a slew of good tools that are available and best practices are needed for the tools and how to use them appropriately.
Also, I would add in the context of a community of practice you need a community coordinator. This person to me is critical in their role. One part of their role is to bring people together and facilitate the collaboration and communication. Another part of their role is to like a librarian to make sure that the content being co-constructed and co-created is filed away properly. There are other roles also.
Sonja Irlbeck Says:
Your definition made me think of a mission statement. It is quite encompassing and forward thinking. My reading has been about different approaches to content management SYSTEMS, but often one can find less about content management strategies, tools, practices.
An organization I have heard about is the Center for Information Development Management (http://www.cm-strategies.com/index.htm). While their conference was in March, the synopses of their workshops was interesting.
It is a daunting task to consider how to provide useful tools and strategies for the distributed workforce that includes staff and faculty at Capella.
Shelly Kleine, PhD, LP HASOP Says:
Jason,
It seems to me that defining things is always a problem. there is considerable research that supports the idea that it is far easier to reach agreement on identifying/recognizing phenomena than it is to define it. For example, I think we’d find considerable agreement in identifying learners who were doing well than in describing the specific factors/elements that went into their performance.
I’m not sure how this helps you, but it might be helpful to move from an emphasis on defining excellence to a process that helps us identify it.
Shelly Kleine
Will Wilson Says:
One of the things that academics do best is define and redefine and spend most of our time in thinking and defining. How we ever get to action is often a surprise — and when we stumble into a goal — we LOVE it.
When I read the announcement of this office and the blog, I was enthused.
My sense of Capella is that we have lots of great groups / organizations of people. We all have a commitment to success – but our different backgrounds result in different “definitions” and clarity on what we mean by success.
Sometimes it seems that Academics define success by engaging learners in more than just courses. We want them to catch the bug of being an effective professional. We like being part of that process, and my guess is that it often teeters between our importance or theirs. I think I like to be significant in the life and transformation of my learners and mentees – even when I know it supposed to be about them.
Business seems to see quality / success as improvements in the margin. As a psychologist and as a soldier, I learned that “marketing” and promotion were “bad”, so its hard to get excited about numbers and growth unless it means growth and development in my learners and my faculty. Business seems to run on deadlines and boxes. I seem to think in terms of potential and expansive opportunities.
IT seems to love new tools and ways of doing the same process better. They like their special knowledge, as I do as an academic, but they like to hold closely on to what they know. They like to appear as “magicians” and they are. Academics like to know things too.
Curriculum development seems to like structure and things that you can measure and not things that are more conceptual. How do you measure my criteria for an adequate Capella clinical psychology graduate: someone I would take my grand daughter to for assistance!
The concept of smoothing out our processes and collaboration is critical to our success – and we need to understand that we all come in with a different view of what a good process is and looks like. Its not that we disagree – we just see things differently. The trick is in being able to see how others view our concepts and not simply convince them that our way is THE way.
We have a lot of processes that need understanding and digesting:
Enculturation new faculty and new learners
Curriculum review and development
Organizing and managing all of the information on the various lettered drive so its useful
Addressing impaired learners and impaired faculty
Dealing with an environment that must continue to change
Balancing workload with reinforcements
Integrating real multicultural aspects into how we do business and learning
How we move into virtual world opportunities
I tried to jot down a few that flew all over the place and which are at multiple levels.
What is the process of the month!?
: >)
Bill Burkett Says:
I wanted to share some web sites and white papers with everyone on emerging technologies. Theya re:
http://polychronicclassroom.blogspot.com/
http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/
http://www.insidethisworld.com/
http://sl.nmc.org/
http://facstaff.elon.edu/mconklin/pubs/glshandout.pdf
http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/papers/BBook_SoP2.pdf
DCMOC » Blog Archive » Web Principles as credo Says:
[...] direction for our internal teams. As one of the first posts on this blog, Jason worked toward a definition of the Content Management and Online Colaboration [...]
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Keith A. Morneau Says:
I would like to step back a bit and look at the area of Communities of Practice (CoP). In the context of content management, you may want to consider the aspects of CoPs as part of this discussion. I have done a lot of work in this area and CoPs are something you need to consider as part of the vocabulary. I will write a definition piece about CoPs and where content management fits into that construct.
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:56 pm