Streamline Content Operations with Content-as-a-Service and a CCMS

Many companies see technical documentation as a necessary evil. They know they need people to create it, and those people need decent tools, but they don’t truly understand its value. They don’t realize how this content can help increase feature adoption, elevate marketing messages, drive sales, or even improve NPS (net promoter score).

What if, instead of working in content silos across the organization, we could bring these silos together and find common ground?

Marcy Badertscher, Senior Manager of Information Development at Intapp, rarely thinks in silos, taking a more systems-thinking approach to content. She sees the customer journey as a tapestry, moving from brand awareness to sales, customer success, and support, and then back to marketing for retention, upselling, and cross-selling. The one thing that’s weaved throughout that tapestry is content.

What if your organization created a content management model that could support each department’s content needs? This centralized approach to content creation and management would not only support a consistent and accurate customer experience but also create efficient processes for content creation, management, and delivery.

“You should have a unified theme and a unified style and a unified approach to all of the communication that happens through all of those phases, and content as a service, as a model, supports that because you have this one place where you have all of your content stored and managed and created, and then it can kind of grow.”

But what exactly is “content as a service”? This article, with some great insights from Badertscher, will explain what “Content-as-a-Service (CaaS)” is, why you want to follow it, and how to set it up.

It’s no secret that content silos in an organization are bad for customer experience. With each department – marketing, sales, product, customer support, customer success – creating, managing, and delivering its content to multiple channels, it’s common to see inconsistent or inaccurate content. There’s also a lot of duplicate content, with each department managing its own version of some content.

“I’ve used this analogy a lot talking about this issue in my company. Content can rapidly get out of control, like one of those little dandelion flowers you blow, and the seeds go. The next thing you know, they are everywhere, and it’s super hard to control.”

We love Badertscher’s analogy because it clearly describes how easily content can get out of control. If everyone is creating their own version of content (and, in some cases, multiple versions to support different channels), the potential for that content to be inaccurate, inconsistent, and poorly managed is high.
Managing the same content in multiple locations is also a waste of time and resources.

Badertscher offered a couple of examples to understand the challenges we face with content:

• Sales have a prospective customer interested in a product but needs details on certain features, the security model, and other systems it integrates with. This is technical content.
• Marketing creates content that helps customers use features better or tells them about new features. This is technical content they combine with feature, benefit, and value marketing content.
• Marketing creates product tours, walking prospective customers through key features of a product. There’s technical content here, too.

When we talk about creating content more efficiently, these are examples of where that efficiency falls apart because you have two or more groups creating content assets that use similar information. Now, you have a dual maintenance situation. What happens, Badertscher asked, when a feature gets updated? How do Sales or Marketing know they need to update their content? And whose version of the content is correct?

A Content-as-a-Service model resolves these challenges. Let’s start with a definition. It has two parts.

First, content as a service is a content management model in which you create, manage, and deliver content independent from its presentation layer. Some refer to it as headless content management.

For example, it’s common for technical documentation teams to implement component content management technology, like Paligo, to help them create and manage content for delivery to different channels (e.g., PDFs, websites, knowledge bases, and customer portals).

With this model, a department can create content once in a central location, following a structured content model. They can then reuse that content in different formats and channels. When they update the content, it’s updated everywhere it’s published.

That’s part one.

A CaaS model enables other departments to access and reuse content instead of creating and managing their own version. The content must be managed in a central environment where everyone can access it, typically a cloud-hosted environment, to enable this reuse. This is the service aspect of CaaS. Badertscher referred to it as delivering “content on demand.”

When you implement CaaS as a service-oriented model, you assign a team (a service provider) to support departments in creating, managing, and reusing content. Depending on the organization, this content team may create and manage the content for each department or provide the tools, processes, and technology for each department to create and manage its own content.

Security and governance play important roles in a CaaS model because not all content can and should be available to everyone. We will discuss governance and all that good stuff shortly.

You can create a CaaS model within a single department, like the tech docs example above. However, a true CaaS model that supports the entire organization is an element within an organization’s content operations.

Content operations is a framework that encompasses the people, processes, and technology needed to strategically manage the entire content lifecycle for an organization.

CaaS supports the creation of more agile, efficient, and scalable content operations. It’s designed to:
Streamline content creation and delivery.
Improve content quality and consistency.
Enable the scaling of content production.
Provide the ability to measure performance and ROI.

Creating a content strategy is also an important element of successful content operations and CaaS. Understanding what content is shareable and what needs to be kept separate is part of an organization-wide content strategy. Defining taxonomy and tags is another part. The content strategist works with all departments to ensure their content is integrated into the CaaS properly.

The question then becomes, who should manage the entire content operations process, including the CaaS model? Badertscher believes it should reside with the technical writing team (or what her company calls the Information Development team).

A CaaS model is what she created at her company, turning technical content into a business operation that supports product teams across the company. What’s included in the model she developed?

1. An information model (using structured content).
2. Taxonomy and tags
3. Style and standards
4. A standard approach to writing and managing content.

This is a model Badertscher is hoping to evangelize across her company. Her vision is not to have her team write all the content. Instead, they have a set of document structures in their CCMS, a style guide, and an information model, which they plan to share and test with other teams. Each team would write its content following the model and guides, and Badertscher’s team would review and provide feedback and support to ensure the model and style guide are followed. It could take some time for teams to get good at writing this way, but it’s most likely faster and more efficient once they do.

“It’s like anything else where you need to put a little bit of that time in upfront to do your planning. Hey, sit with us and help us understand what you’re looking for and what information you need to create. Then, let’s build this structure, let’s put this template together. Let’s work together on this. And then, once you get that done, there’s much less support needed. And who knows, it could end up where you have a catalog of standard templates. Here’s a services template, here’s a marketing template, here’s a support template. We would have a collection of templates that people can use. And when I say templates, I mean a structure of what the information would be.”

We can’t have a discussion about managing content without talking about AI because AI has the power to completely change everything about how we manage content.

Badertscher believes technical writers/information developers must learn how to leverage AI. And it’s true, if you are a writer of any kind, generative AI can help you with everything from outlining, creating drafts, identifying tags and taxonomy, and more. Badertscher explained that you can connect your content corpus to an LLM and have it write content following your brand voice and style, ensuring that content is written appropriately for each audience. It is both an efficiency and scaling technology.

Generative AI impacts technical documentation teams in other ways, too. When you write content today, you have to think about AI. LLMs train on existing content. They ingest content, breaking the text down into words or characters, analyzing it to identify patterns and grammar, mapping relationships between words, and learning the context of words.

Generative AI is not reading and indexing content and returning results based on keywords; it’s generating new text based on a prompt (or question) you give it. That means its responses are only as good as the content it has learned from. While LLMs can ingest unstructured content, the responses they return are often more accurate and reliable when it has learned from structured content.

A Content-as-a-Service model leverages structured content to enable content reuse across departments and channels within departments. So, your CaaS model supports not only multiple departments within a company but also AI.

What’s your single source of truth for content? There are a number of different technologies that support content operations and can help with your CaaS model. One of these is a component content management system (CCMS).

A CaaS model has three components: content creation, content management, and content delivery. Badertscher said you need to separate these functions and not try to find one tool or way to do everything.

A CCMS, like Paligo, separates content creation and management from content delivery. It publishes the content output in the format you need, but delivering that content to a specific channel requires a different technology. Content delivery platforms such as FluidTopics and Zoomin provide content management and delivery but connect with a CCMS where that content is created. You’ll notice that management is part of both technologies. Which one you choose to manage your content will depend on your requirements.

“So that management piece is the one that I think each situation, each company or each team needs to figure out their processes, document their processes, and then have governance over it.”

If you choose to use a CCMS to create and manage your content, you have several features to help:

• Structured Content: A CCMS enables you to create structured content. A publication gets broken down into discrete topics, which enable more than one author to write content for that publication at a time. Each topic stands alone, supporting reuse (and enabling AI to process it more easily).
• Collaboration: Not only do you have multiple authors writing content, but you likely have reviewers like SMEs reviewing the content to ensure it’s accurate. A CCMS provides a collaborative environment where you can give reviewers and approvers access to the content. They can then comment and provide feedback, speeding up the review time.
• Workflow: All content development goes through a workflow process. Once it’s written, one or more people are notified to review or approve the content. It may also need translation. These are all steps in a workflow that you can design in your CCMS.
• Versioning: As content gets updated, it goes through versions. A CCMS creates a new version (based on rules you define), tracking what changes were made and who made them. You can easily roll back to a previous version if necessary. A CCMS can also branch your content, creating a different version (e.g., you are writing a new version of the content for a product release that hasn’t happened yet, or you are using the content as part of a different publication that needs to be kept separate).
• Metadata and taxonomy: A structured content model uses metadata and taxonomy to help categorize content. Authors can then quickly locate and reuse existing content.
• Multiple Outputs (publication types): One of the biggest benefits of a CCMS and a structured content model is that you can publish your content in different formats. You can publish content in HTML/XML, PDF/Word, and SCORM (eLearning) or directly to other systems such as CRMs, GIT repositories, and content delivery platforms.
• Translations: A CCMS enables you to manage the translations alongside the original language if your content is available in multiple languages. When the source content is updated, a workflow is initiated to update the translated content, ensuring your translations are always accurate.

Governance and security are always part of the implementation of a CCMS. If one of your departments is creating content that others should not have access to, you can lock it down. You can also create roles and permissions that map out who can access content and what they can do with it (read, write, etc). Part of your CaaS model will require understanding the security requirements of each department and applying them in the CCMS.

Your CCMS should also provide workflows and reporting that enable you to see where content is reused and notify departments when their content is updated.

Every organization will define its CaaS model and content operations differently, but there are common steps that everyone needs to think about to ensure they create a model that works best.

First, don’t try to implement a CaaS model and enforce it for every department at once. Put the model in place for one department or team – like the technical documentation team. Build the model and then slowly educate other departments and teams and start incorporating their work into the model. When you can show success early, bringing others on board is much easier.

You can also start with one type of content. We’ve talked primarily about technical or product documentation in this article, but there is other content that a CaaS model can support. Marketing content, customer success and support content, and other content can benefit from a centralized content model that others can access. Look at the different content your organization creates and determine if there is a benefit to applying a CaaS model to it.

Create a governance plan that outlines how content is created, how reuse will work, and how you will ensure content consistency is maintained. Badertscher’s information model and voice and brand style guides are great examples of applying governance.

Select the technology that will support your CaaS model. This will include a component content management system and other technology such as a digital asset management system (DAM), project management, content delivery platforms, etc. Map out a training plan to ensure your content operation team learns how to use the technology effectively.

For each department, you need to do several things:

1. Map out their content workflows and content development process. Identify authors, reviewers, approvers, and how content flows between these roles.
2. Look for content that can be reused or is duplicated in another department.
3. Identify taxonomy and tags, map them to the overall taxonomy model, and add to the model where required.
4. Identify security requirements, including roles and permissions required and what content must be secured.
5. Train users on the technology, the standards, and the information model. Provide support as they work.

Like any process or model, you must monitor performance and look for ways to improve it. You may need to adjust your taxonomy or tagging to support new departments or content. You might see new opportunities for content reuse that weren’t obvious before. Workflows may need to be adapted to support new processes or additional roles. Or you may need to implement new technology to support changes.

You should also provide a mechanism for people to provide feedback on how the model is working, make suggestions for improvement, or identify challenges you need to overcome.