Blaine Kyllo: The Power of Content Governance – Episode 41

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Blaine Kyllo helps enterprises understand and optimize their content processes. A key part of his work is helping his clients develop governance models that keep content operations on track.

Blaine and I talked about:

• his background in journalism and publishing
• how large enterprises tend to have the big, sticky problems that governance can solve
• how media companies – whose business is content – can be a model for non-media enterprises
• how content crosses departments, how it’s cross-functional by its very nature
• how content strategy at its core is really change management
• how governance is the people side of change management
• how content governance starts with the “what”
• the content lifecycle – discovery, planning, design & creation, maintenance – and the processes needed at each stage to make sure the work gets done
• the importance of thinking as early in the process as possible about how you’ll measure content success
• how to visualize success for each kind of content intention, as well as for your content operations
• how the practice of content ops has emerged – “Content is not something that you ever finish and leave” – it’s not a project
• how efficiency and measurable impact are two of the key benefits of content strategy and content governance
• clever ways of measuring content ROI, beyond page views, downloads, etc. – e.g. a calculation showing how much customer service time is saved by knowledge center content
• the importance of setting baseline metrics at the start of a project
• how content marketers are probably further ahead in using content metrics
• how the processes that content managers use look very similar from a high level – regardless of channel, content type, industry, etc.
• how to apply knowledge of process-pattern best practices to your organization’s unique needs
• his definition of “governance”: “how you manage the work of content” – encompassing the tools, the technologies that support the work (CMS, e.g.), the people, your publishing model, and roles and responsibilities
• the common problem of establishing a “the buck stops here” point in your content processes
• his upcoming Confab talk, “Process to the people: How content governance can power content teams”

Blaine’s Bio

Blaine is a senior content strategist at Content Strategy Inc, where he focuses on enterprise content governance. His clients have included BC Hydro, Investors Group, and Pearson. He’s also structured content teams for other contexts and has become a master at streamlining complex content processes.

Before content strategy, Blaine worked as managing editor for a leading independent book publisher, as well as with a national telecommunications company, and a non-profit initiative.

He’s also an audio and print journalist.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 41 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Blaine Kyllo. Blaine is a senior content strategist with Content Strategy Inc, up in Vancouver, BC. Let me have Blaine tell you a little bit more about his background, what he does up there. Welcome Blaine.

Blaine:
Hi Larry. Yeah, thanks so much. I appreciate the opportunity to join you. I come to content strategy like so many do from my particular background. There are people who come to content strategy from a technical communication background. I come to it from more of a journalism and publishing background. I worked with an independent book publisher in Vancouver for a long time, transitioned from there into doing digital content and journalism as a freelancer and had an opportunity to sort of build editorial teams and systems to support those teams in that time.

Larry:
Great. I know that’s the way I have you pigeonholed. It’s as the guy who knows about how to work with big editorial and content creation teams. Mostly in big enterprises. Do I have that correct? I know you’ve worked with BC Hydro and other things. Is it mostly large enterprises?

Blaine:
Well, we find that large organizations are where there tend to be the big sticky problems when it comes to content governance. How do we do the work of content? Smaller teams, it’s easier to get away with more ad hoc systems because you could just turn to the person next to you or throw an idea over your back. Smaller groups can manage themselves much more nimbly. But when you’ve got big organizations, especially if there are organizations that don’t do content as a business, figuring out how to do content to support the business and how to manage that properly tends to be tricky.

Larry:
Right. That must be where your background in publishing and journalism comes in. You’re used to running operations with content, but you’re coming into like a hydro electric company or some big company that has nothing to do with content. Are you working with established teams and helping them develop or do you sometimes build the new teams? Tell me about how you work with these outfits?

Blaine:
There’s always some kind of a content team in place. Often it’s smaller because bigger organizations that aren’t in the business of content haven’t necessarily given the value to content that other organizations do. If we want to look to a really good model for how content and large organizations works, we could look to media companies because their business is content. And so everything that they do is structured around having consistency, having standards and guidelines that are followed by everybody.

Blaine:
So that when you look at content from a media organization, you know that it’s from that organization because that’s their business. Other organizations, content is a part of their business and so they have some people in place, but often it’s scattered or it’s distributed. There’s often this idea that anybody can write, everybody can do content. And so there are people who for whom content is not their expertise, but it’s something that they do because that’s what they were assigned on their team.

Larry:
Right. That notion of, “Oh, anybody can write.” It’s like, “Oh my God, if only they knew.” That’s one of the things you could bring with your background. I’m curious, one of the things you said there is how the disperse the publishing operations can be. I assume there’ll be like marketing people doing stuff and product people writing product descriptions or things like that. Is some of your work pulling those teams together or cutting across those silos?

Blaine:
A lot of content strategy work from the governance perspective is doing exactly that. It’s figuring out how to break down those silos and how can … Because content happens across those things. Content does not live in a department. Content takes things from all department and synthesizes it and pulls it together to serve the needs of the business. While organizations and companies are structured in functions because that’s how they deliver those services and products, that’s not necessarily how you communicate about those services and products. Content is something that must be cross-functional just by its very nature.

Larry:
Right. That gets into, I recently read Mike Atherton and Carrie Hane’s book, Designing Connected Content. They talk about the importance of domain mapping there and one of the benefits of that is having a common map that everybody in the organization come look at like all those … You were just mentioning some of the different, like each department has their own way of looking at things.

Larry:
Can you tell me some success stories there like how you integrated or actually let me back up a little bit from that one because I’m really curious about how you make that case to connect content across departments in an organization and how you make that happen?

Blaine:
That really, it comes down to how you manage the relationship with your clients. For us, we’re being brought in by someone who has some kind of a leadership role within content. And we rarely have to convince those people that working across silos is something that’s important. But helping them make that case to their executive or their leadership is something that we can do because at its core content, strategy is change management.

Blaine:
And so it’s important that you recognize when you’re trying to do the work of content strategy, especially big organizations, there is a change management piece and if you don’t manage how the people are going to be impacted by the changes that you’re suggesting, you’re never going to have success.

Larry:
Right. In that sense, like a management consultant coming in to help that process along. How big is your team? I think there’s three of you at Content Strategy Inc.

Blaine:
We engage with subcontractors and whoever it is that we need to take on the projects. We find that the core team is nimble enough to be able to shift from project to project, and we scale up as we need to.

Larry:
Gotcha. Yeah, that’s pretty the modern way of doing that kind of thing. I’m reminded here that this comes up all the time with these interviews as I do them, you said content strategy is about 90% about people and management and doing that. Is that true in your experience?

Blaine:
Yeah. Change management is the people side of change and the way that project management manages that sort of product development side. And so, absolutely I think content strategy is change management, especially when you’re working in the governance side of content strategy because that’s all about the people doing the work.

Larry:
That’s the main reason I wanted to talk to you today is that because you are such a guru on governance. A lot of what you do, your first focus, it sounds like it’s on the process, like how to get these people together, how to craft good workflows and procedures and things to keep the content going, but then it’s also about not just articulating that, but making sure it actually happens. And I think that’s what governance is mostly about.

Larry:
Tell me about, is that an accurate way of summarizing what you do and can you give me some examples of how that unfolds in your projects?

Blaine:
When we’re looking at governance, we’d like to start with the what. What is it that’s happening? And so that’s where processes become really important because that tells us what it is, what are the steps that are required to get the work of content done. And we have found it really easy to think about different content processes as they’re tied to the life cycle of content. So our content life cycle, there’s some kind of a of a phase where we’re strategizing and ideating the kinds of content that we need to serve the business.

Blaine:
And then you plan that content and then the next step is to design and create that content. And then you go into a phase where you’re maintaining content and evaluating that content to make sure that it’s doing the job that you want it to do. And that just continues to cycle around. For each of those different phases, there’s a different process that will be in place to do the job. So for the design and create content phase of the life cycle, there is a specific process that will be used.

Blaine:
Whether organizations and content teams are aware of this process or not, there has to be a process in place to design and create content because that work is getting done. Process is just how you do it.

Larry:
Right. I’m curious now how often you’re helping them articulating creative process versus just helping them identify it. Is it mostly the latter?

Blaine:
Well, you start by discovery. And so it’s always good to sort of figure out, “Well, what is it that’s actually happening here?” And after you figured out what’s really going on, that’s where you can start using that information to diagnose, “Well, where can we be more efficient? How could we make this better? Are there things that we’re not doing that we should be doing to make our content better and more successful?”

Larry:
And tell me about that. What are the metrics or KPIs or like how do you assess the success of content, figure out how the process plays into that? And then I guess this gets into your ongoing maintenance sort of mode. Just kind of keeping the loop tied on that to make sure that the content’s always good.

Blaine:
We think that when content is first considered in that strategize and ideate phase of the life cycle, we think that that’s when metrics and success metrics should be defined. Because that’s the phase at which you’re trying to identify, we’ve got these needs of the business, we’ve got these goals that we’re trying to achieve, how are we going to have content help us achieve those goals? It’s at that point that you want to decide what success looks like and how you’re going to measure it.

Blaine:
And so you’ve defined that right when you first start thinking about the content. So by the time you get to the content being created and published and distributed in whatever form, you already know how long you’re going to let that sit before you do any evaluation and you know how you’re going to do that evaluation and you’re going to know what success looks like. That’s all built in from the very beginning.

Larry:
Right. Okay. That’s how you do it. And I’m curious about, there’s all these different intentions of content, like during how Gerry McGovern talks about task accomplishment and top task management, and then there’s content marketers who are concerned with pushing people through a customer journey or customer service wanting to take fewer calls and having better knowledge base, whatever. Are there common sets of metrics or how do you … Tell me a little bit about how you visualize success for each kind of content you’re working with?

Blaine:
Really it depends on the kind of content as you said, the audience that the content is created for will help you determine what success will look like and then that success will be measured in whatever way is most applicable to that. You can also measure the success of your content operations. Like how long does it take you to go through a review cycle with a piece of content? How long does it take you to maintain your content? Are you maintaining your content regularly?

Blaine:
When it comes to evaluation and metrics, it’s not just the content that you want to measure, you also want to measure how effective your operation is.

Larry:
Right. It’s only the last few months that I heard that phrase content operations. But it sounds like something that you’ve been concerned with for quite awhile. Did I just miss something there? Has this been around for a while or is this notion of content operations … Is that actually a newish way of looking at things?

Blaine:
I think it is a newish way. I think that’s Rahel Bailie who has started to popularize the use of the term. Operations is just a word that we use to describe the regular standard operating procedure within an organization. And so most organizations have got operations teams that just maintain the regular things that have to happen. So much of content in the past has been thought of from a project perspective, but content is not something that you ever finish and leave because content by its very nature, we’ve just been talking about how important evaluation is.

Blaine:
Maintenance is super important to content. If you’re not maintaining your content, that’s how you end up with a product page for a product that was discontinued 10 years ago still living on your website. If you don’t have maintenance in place, that can happen. And so referring to content operations with that word is a way of shifting content out of being a project and more into a, this is the thing that you have to do regularly, and if you really want to have content do the job for your company that you want, you’re going to continue to resource that appropriately knowing that it has to happen daily.

Larry:
Right. I can see you’re back to what you said earlier about change management. That’s really a change in how folks do their jobs there. Do you often get pushback or resistance or just confusion? I can picture a lot of different ways that could unfold as you try to help people shift their mindset around that. Is that generally hard, easy, in between?

Blaine:
Again, it depends on the organization. Some organizations are open to restructuring, they’re open to adding new positions. It’s rare that you’ll walk into a consulting opportunity and a company says, “Hey, we’re going to add as many people as you tell us we need.” It’s quite rare that we can create content teams or scale them up as much as they might need to be. Often, it’s trying to find efficiencies in one place so that you can put those resources someplace else to do other jobs that aren’t being done.

Larry:
Right. That sounds like one of the benefits of just having a content strategy is being smarter about how you use your resources. Is that a common kind of deliverable or result that you get with your work?

Blaine:
It’s certainly one of the things that anyone can sell content strategy and content governance is that it’s gonna make us more efficient, it’s going to make our content more successful and have greater impact and it’s going to mean that we can do more with less.

Larry:
Can you tell me a little bit more about the measuring content success ’cause a lot of … I think every content organization is challenged to show ROI for the content that they’re creating. Can you tell me some success stories there about people who have really shown to the bean counters of the success of their content?

Blaine:
Again, this is one of the hardest and most difficult things for content teams to do. It can be as simple as how many page views you get to a website, it could be how many downloads you’ve got of a particular product briefing that you’ve got. One of the most clever ways that we’ve been able to show ROI, it had nothing to do with us, but it had to do with a business analyst who sat on a team and we were helping an organization create a new knowledge center to support their frontline customer service staff.

Blaine:
This business analyst realized that they created a great big calculus to show that if a customer service representative could save 20 to 30 seconds on a phone call because they could find the information in the knowledge center, that on average that would save the company $250,000 a year just in the time savings that would accrue over the team and over the year. And so that’s a really creative way of being able to show a return on this really cumbersome, boring task of rewriting knowledge center content.

Larry:
I’m curious there. I’m just wondering like you can predict like for how many page views at a certain topic in there gets. And then compare that to the actual customer support logs or however they’re keeping track of that. Have you been able to demonstrate in actual like reduction in support usage with better manuals like that?

Blaine:
Well, that’s not something that we’ve done with that project. That project is still ongoing, so we haven’t come out the other end to be able to show that. You also have to know that if you want to show a difference then it means you need to measure baselines at the start. And it’s very rare that you go into a project and you say, “Hey, let’s measure a whole bunch of baselines so that we have something to compare it to after we do all this work,” because you’re running so fast just to get the project done.

Blaine:
You can’t retroactively go back and measure things. But again, that’s something that in an ideal world as we’re preparing proposals and things like that, content strategists would be smart to if you can, build in a phase of doing some baseline analysis at the beginning so that you can show an impact after the things that you’ve implemented.

Larry:
You mentioned earlier that you’re thinking about success metrics right from the get go in your early stages. But even there, ideally you want to have that baseline set before you to show up. That gets me wondering about, and I know everything is so unique to every organization and every situation, but are there any emerging best practices or standards in the industry for how categories of content should be performing or something like that? I’m just kind of grasping here.

Blaine:
Not that I know of. And again, because content, it’s a very simple word that means so many different things in so many different contexts. And so there is nothing that I know of. I know that content marketers probably are farther ahead than anyone in this because they’re constantly looking at how well their content is doing the job of moving people through funnels. I think that they’re probably farther ahead, but I don’t know whether that context is very applicable to a utility who is just trying to make sure that people can find easily how to report an outage in their neighborhood, for example.

Blaine:
Those are very different problems, very different audiences and very different content.

Larry:
Right. That’s right. It just occurred to be a part of why I thought you might have an answer to that, but one of the things … I can’t remember if we mentioned this at the start, but Blaine ran through his upcoming Confab talk when he was in Seattle last week. And you identified some common patterns across different organizations processes, and I was just grasping there for even more commonality across more generically in the field.

Larry:
Can you tell me about that discovery you made about the commonality in processes? It sounds like even at different phases and stages of the content strategy process, you’ve found that there’s some common ways that things unfold. Can you talk more about that?

Blaine:
This is where content at a high level is the same no matter what context you’re in and no matter what kind of content it is. We’ve been working with companies for a number of years to develop processes to help to discover the processes that they have in place to do content and to improve those processes and socialize them through their companies that they can do content more efficiently. And what we’ve discovered is that at a high level, these processes are all the same. If you’re thinking about a process to design and create content, for example, you’re going to have a phase where you create a draft, and there’s going to be a series of reviews that happen with that content.

Blaine:
Then you’re going to create a final draft and you’re going to have some kind of a quality assurance phase, a final look to make sure that everything is correct and then you’re gonna set your maintenance schedule and then you’re going to publish that content. And so it doesn’t matter what content you’re talking about or what channel or what industry, that’s kind of the steps that you have to go through to create content. We’ve discovered that that’s true for all of the different phases of the content lifecycle, that at a high level, those steps, to do those things are the same no matter where you are, where you get value from those.

Blaine:
Like it’s all well and good to have that best practice process that you can work from, but where you will get value from those within your organization is by using that as a starting point and then drilling down deeper to figure out what’s different in your organization? How many review cycles do you need? Do you need to have a translation step that you need to add in that somebody else wouldn’t? Do you have multiple quality assurance steps because you’ve got one person who’s checking for the deployment of the code and you’ve got someone else who’s checking the writing standards to make sure that they’re in place.

Blaine:
The best practice processes are great and they provide a good starting point, but really the value comes in using those with your own content teams to figure out what’s happening in your organization.

Larry:
Interesting. By having the best process articulated, part of that process is how you need to drill down to figure out the exact details and how it manifests.

Blaine:
And it provides you a starting point so you don’t have to try and imagine it or try and figure that out. You can start with something because you know that there is going to be a draft created at some point.

Larry:
Right. And that’s probably across the content world, just getting started, it’s like the hardest thing. So that’s a tremendous gift right there. One thing I wanna circle back on. We’ve used the word governance a couple of times and in my experience I’ve found that even pretty experienced content strategists and other strategists and people of different kinds aren’t super always super clear on what that term means. Can you just tell me your definition of governance and how it manifests in your work?

Blaine:
For us, governance is how you manage the work of content, very simply. And so it encompasses a lot of different things. It encompasses the tools that you have in place to do the work of content. It encompasses the technologies that will support that work, whether that’s a CMS or any other technological tools. It encompasses the people. How are you managing the people? How are they structured? Do you have them sitting on separate teams and coming together? What’s your publishing model? Is that a distributed publishing model where you’ve got people on different teams all doing their own content and then that all kind of aggregates under a publishing window?

Blaine:
And it also includes roles and responsibilities, which are super critical to help everybody understand what their role for content is, what they’re accountable for, and then what they can let go of. And we find that roles and responsibilities is one of those areas of governance that is really important and tends to not be in place as much as it should be.

Larry:
That’s another one of those people things I think that comes up a lot where it’s like if it’s not super clear, you might be one of those go getters who takes on too much or you might be a bureaucratic slack who let’s things slide. So by clarifying that you avoid those kinds of situations.

Blaine:
One of the biggest problems that content teams have some times is everybody thinks that they are the final boss of that content. And so you can never get content finished because you’re always in another review cycle and somebody over ruling somebody else and at some point you have to establish while the buck stops here, I’ve got final say. And if you don’t identify that, you can just end up in that downward spiral.

Larry:
Got It. Nice. Thanks. Hey Blaine, I noticed this always goes so quickly. We’re coming up on time. I always give my guests the opportunity before we wrap up, is there anything last? Anything that I haven’t brought up that you want to mention or just anything that’s on your mind about content strategy these days?

Blaine:
No. I’m going to be at Confab in April. I’m really excited to be there. I haven’t attended before and everybody has told me what an amazing opportunity it is to be there. And so that’s kind of where my head is at right now.

Larry:
I can tell you. I went to Confab for the first time last year, and I can confirm that it’s a fabulous event and I’m going back up. But because you rehearsed your talk here in Seattle, you’ve actually given me permission to go to a different one during that time span. I may still come to your talk anyway.

Blaine:
If you’ve already seen me, there’s lots of really smart people who are going to be there. I encourage you to expand your knowledge.

Larry:
I will. Well, thanks so much, Blaine. This has been great. Really good catching up and I appreciate all your insights.

Blaine:
It was a pleasure speaking with you.