Organizations have been operationalizing every aspect of business. People Ops, DevOps, Business Ops, Revenue Ops, Marketing Ops, all the way up to Chief Operations Officers. If it’s a function of modern business, chances are an “ops” suffix has been tacked onto it. And there’s a good reason for it.Departments began realizing they can’t achieve their goals without considering the operational procedures and systems that make them function properly and lead to those goals.
Organizations have goals, but it’s people and processes that achieve those goals. The better organized those people and processes are, the more efficiently those goals are achieved. That’s the point behind focusing on the operations aspects of business function. Good ideas don’t come to fruition without careful attention to the details of getting them there. Within those details, we have people, technologies, corporate strategies, and a number of variables that all enter into the vast landscape that is ops.So, where do ContentOps come into play amongst the crowd?
Content Operations — What Is It?
Content Operations is the systems and processes that efficiently get content from brainstorming to business-facing in a digital-first world. To quote content confidant, Lucie Hyde: “ContentOps is putting everything in place that takes you from producing and publishing content as an individual to scaling that across an organization.” The places and formats that people demand content are growing rapidly. As businesses scale their teams and products, they have to scale the content that surrounds those products.
Gone are the days of locking knowledge content in PDF downloads for users to hunt down and dig through (soon to be gone are the organizations that take this approach). People are looking for easily accessible (and searchable) content that’s up-to-date, relevant, and helpful, and they want it in diverse places. For teams to ensure their content is up-to-date, relevant, consistent, and available across all channels, they need ContentOps. They need to align their systems, processes, and people to enable them to produce content quickly, accurately, and at every touchpoint the users might demand it.
Why Does ContentOps Matter?
Being evangelists for ContentOps for Knowledge Management, we like to start with an undeniable truth: content drives behavior. An organization fundamentally, from a customer’s perspective, has two jobs: make something useful and make people good at using it. And most of the touchpoints for that customer journey of making someone good at using a product are content. Product and content can’t be separated because content makes people proficient product users. It helps them learn to glean every bit of usefulness from what you make, helps them solve problems when they stumble, and informs them of uses they might not have thought of on their own. A product by itself may be great, but it’ll never be whole without accompanying content.
It’s rare that a customer can use your product without some manner of instruction. It’s even rarer that your product remains the same today and ten years down the road. Because of this, content plays a pivotal role in keeping users in the loop with the proper knowledge to sharpen them as product users.In this case, the behavior your content is driving is building proficiency. In order for your content to do that effectively, it needs to be up-to-date, accurate, and relevant to problems or questions your users might have. It needs to be quick and easy to access. But above all, it needs to be trusted. Any problem a customer can solve on their own but doesn’t know how to solve intuitively needs content.
And, trust me, they want to be good at using your product! ContentOps is important because it’s the foundation for providing coverage, trust, and ubiquitous access across channels and use cases. ContentOps matters because it impacts customer experience and employee experience. When your employees have consistent processes and systems in place, they don’t need to think about the “how” of their content getting to people, they can purely focus on the quality of the content that properly constructed Content Operations is designed to deliver. Effective ContentOps allows your organization to deliver better content experiences over and over again, giving you an edge that turns your content into a competitive advantage.This post originally appeared AdaptivOps.
