KnowledgeBlog

In this day and age, more and more emphasis is been placed around the importance of content – as the saying goes, ‘Content is King’. This is due to the increasing number of organisations that depend on technology (which have historically been limited to information technology companies but now broadly include teachers, lawyers, nurses and general consultants) and the ‘knowledge workers’ that run such businesses.

While there are still many differences between sectors, the value of these knowledge-based organisations is content. You don’t want confidential and highly sensitive information to be published on your websites or on your intranet, and in order to control that you need an approval process in place

In order to form an approval process it is necessary that we define the roles/responsibilities of different people in the organisation, once this is set we have automatically formed the base of approval process. Following are some of the roles/responsibilities that should be defined to form the basis of an approval process:

1. Subject Matter Experts (SME): These are the people who have got expertise in a particular area or topic.

2. Content Writers/Editors: These are the people who have got good content presentation skills. In some cases this function might overlap with Subject Matter Experts.

3. Content Managers: These are the managers of their respective departments who have got complete knowledge about their division.

4. Content Approvers/Reviewers: These are the people who will approve content looking at every aspect of it i.e. if the information is latest, correct and how sensitive it is. It should normally include senior staff who have got the complete knowledge about the organisation and also the legalities of it.

Once we have defined the above 4 functions and associated the people to it, the next step would be to define a workflow or a process.

The process would be that the SME writes a content which is then sent to the content editors who put their presentation skills in practice. This content then goes to the respective content managers depending on the type of topic.The content manager can either approve or reject the topic.If the content manager rejects the topic it goes back to the content editors for changes. If the manager approves it, the content is then forwarded to the content reviewer who then looks into the sensitivity and then audience of the topic and approves or rejects depending on it. Once approved the content is then ready to be published otherwise it goes to the content manager for further review.

The article just highlights the key points in the approval process. You can have more or less levels of approvals depending on the the nature,size and the sensitivity of the content.With this I would like conclude that it is be easy to form a approval process but the most important aspect is to properly manage it, if the process is well managed it can save a lot of organisation time and resources and improve productivity.

In order to know how a proper approval process for CMS can help your organisation, please contact us.