Who’s in charge of your content?
Content governance is integral for any organisation. Think of the last time you bought something online. Did you view an advertisement on social media? Did you google the item then visit a website or app? Chances are, the company you bought from creates, publishes and manages a lot of content for various channels. But how efficient are their processes and workflows? Cue content governance.
According to GatherContent (a content operations service provider): “Content governance is the system, a set of guidelines, that determines how an organization’s content gets created and published. At its most basic level, it can help you avoid getting sued or embarrassed, or both.”
Without governance, content can become a difficult and costly asset to manage and one of the most important elements of content governance is clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
In this article, I explore how a responsibility matrix (RACI) can help define content roles and responsibilities, to reduce the complexity of planning, creating, publishing and managing content.
What is a RACI matrix?
A feature article on CIO magazine explains what a RACI matrix is:
“A responsibility assignment chart that maps out every task, milestone or key decision involved in completing a project and assigns which roles are Responsible for each action item, which personnel are Accountable, and, where appropriate, who needs to be Consulted or Informed.”
Essentially, the matrix helps clarify who does what. From actually executing the work, to being consulted, being held accountable and being informed. When roles and responsibilities are clearly defined in this manner, workflows become a lot more transparent and easier for everyone to manage and be involved in.
In content operations and governance, roles and responsibilities are often unclear or muddied.
Content creators: does this sound familiar to you? I hear you!
You might have multiple persons ‘signing off’ on content or making decisions related to the content, without a clear ‘owner’. This makes it extremely difficult for workflows to run smoothly, and can add unnecessary stress for content creators.
Similarly, content creators may end up in situations where they need to not only create the content, but also plan it, update it, publish it, and set up guidelines for its creation–AND have to deal with stakeholders providing critical feedback. These responsibilities can be overwhelming and as a result, can lead to inefficiencies in the process and in the worst scenarios, burnout.
The RACI matrix can play a significant role in removing some of the obstacles that content creators face through clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
How to create a RACI matrix
Creating a RACI matrix is fairly simple. You start by outlining, in detail, all the tasks involved in planning, creating, publishing, storing and updating content. This will give you a clear view of your operations, and you can start to identify the person(s) who are responsible, accountable, consulted and informed, throughout the process.
In order to avoid confusion, it is important to ensure that only one person is accountable per piece of work. As the old saying goes: ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’, and this is very true when it comes to content governance.
Once you have listed all the relevant tasks, you can start to assign them to roles. Below is a simple example of a content operations RACI matrix:
After creating your ‘status quo’ RACI matrix, you might discover that there are overlaps in roles or even gaps that require hiring dedicated staff to perform certain responsibilities.
Digging further into the gaps and challenges of your current setup can help you determine next steps. You may want to take a step back and examine your operation’s content strategy maturity. Do you have established processes and guidelines? Does your content get produced based on a clearly defined plan and workflow? Do you have the necessary tooling to properly manage your content and scale it? These are all essential questions to answer, because your content strategy’s maturity level will probably have some correlation with how well defined (and efficient!) your roles and responsibilities are.
This article is mainly about the impact of roles and responsibilities on content governance, but I highly encourage you to also read up on content strategy maturity and how to assess this for your own organisation.
Conclusion
Roles and responsibilities are a very important part of the content governance puzzle. If you don’t have these properly defined, you could very well be running an inefficient content operation, and you’re highly likely to run into further problems as your business grows.
But remedying this problem need not be complicated.
Start by talking to all the persons involved in your content planning, creation, publishing and management workflows. Understand what they do and how they do it. Then map all of this information in a RACI matrix. This will be the first step to identifying gaps and problems, and eventually finding out what you need to do to create a better governance framework that will benefit your team, your customers and ultimately, your business.
P.S. I’ve recently started delving deeper into the topic of content governance as part of my Content Strategy masters program at FH Joanneum (taught in English).
If you liked this article, check out my colleague Wolfram’s post on taxonomy and why it is essential to properly organise and structure content. Have a look at the program’s Content Strategy Knowledge Base for a host of resources on content strategy.
