Managing meaningful insight in the financial industry

With content, just as in life, finding what is really meaningful and valuable is the challenge. Gathering two of our favorite web content management experts, one external, one internal, I sat down (virtually) to try to figure it out. 

Peter Zarling has been a long-time financial industry customer, in charge of content management and other digital capabilities that support public-facing websites. My colleague Wiegert Tierie, a content management leader, has been a pillar of knowledge within the original Tridion organization, then SDL and now RWS. When it comes to mapping out how organizations are tackling the search for content control and value, these two seasoned experts are masters!

You've both spent a large portion of your careers talking about how to optimize content for the enterprise. If you had to encapsulate your main philosophy about content in a couple of phrases, what would you say?

Peter: The goal of content should be to support your business goals as effectively and efficiently as possible. It needs to be well thought out to both resonate with your target audiences, as well as be simple to create and maintain across a broad ecosystem. To me, every organization should spend some time and energy figuring out what content is critical for their organization, and work to use that content as broadly as possible. Rather than create content from scratch every time there’s a use case, creators should be able to check a knowledge base to see what’s already there and has been effective for them that can already be used. This helps with both efficiency and effectiveness.

Wiegert: In thinking about content, there are levels of strategy to be considered. What are you trying to make happen at the business/organization level; what content is needed to support that? Then what is the strategy for managing that content properly? You need to know where you are trying to get to at all those levels, and how it fits together.

Most people agree on how to measure the success of a business strategy (e.g., ROI, market share), but what about content strategy and content management strategy?

Wiegert: Content strategy is about what message we are trying to convey at every customer touchpoint - what are we saying and to whom, and how do we orchestrate the content to deliver value at each customer touchpoint. Consistency is key. A good content strategy clearly indicates what we need to say, everywhere. We judge the success of the content, or campaign, by conversions, or views, for example. There should be a correlation between the content and getting to the next step in the customer journey. Measuring that can be a challenge.

Peter: And content management strategy success is judged on how well we are leveraging systems and capabilities to deliver useful and accurate content, in a cost-effective way, at scale. Content management strategy might include centralization in order to promote reuse and ensure consistency. For example, in the banking business, you might want to have a content management strategy around disclosures, and that strategy could be to have the fewest number of disclosures possible, via re-use of existing disclosure content components. Each business needs to evaluate what content is important to them, and then both build strategies and measure success around those assets.

What are the most popular content management themes in the financial industry today?

Peter: In my experience, it's about 3 things: 

1. Helping make the journey easier for customers, no matter what task they are trying to accomplish. More and more customers want to work via their phones. Therefore, mobile is an essential part of content management strategy. They have to know where to find the right content and that content has to be useful. Content needs to find them at the right moment, via personalization, and hopefully in the future, AI can also help with that. We are drowning in content. Content is proliferating and churning, and there is so much of it that with our human brains we no longer can absorb it to extract knowledge. Automation is essential. 
2. Ease of authoring. Authors and publishers need to be able to work with tools that are intuitive, that don’t impede their ability to be efficient, as well as reduce risks associated with publishing in the digital age. And during the authoring process, they need to be easily informed when there are content components they can re-use. When updating a content component, those updates should automatically be proliferated everywhere that content is used. For regulated industries such as financial services, it’s critical that you can also show exactly where that content published to so it’s traceable for audit purposes.
3. Accessibility. This touches on both of the above two areas, but it’s worth calling out on its own. We're talking more and more about systems and content accessibility in the financial services industry lately, not just from the perspective of different abilities but also from the viewpoint of catering for communities and audiences with limited English proficiency, who can be severely disadvantaged through language limitations.

We're seeing an explosion of publicly available content - is there a parallel internally within enterprises, and particularly financial institutions?

Wiegert: Yes, the problem of too much content exists internally as well. And it's in too many siloed repositories, with too much overlap or possibly even contradictory! And too much manual effort to share it, like copying and pasting. A common challenge, if you have multiple content platforms, is to understand what content is core to all these platforms, and that leads to having a content strategy. And then, content management needs to provide a blueprint that supports shared content, so that the same content is not getting recreated over and over, needlessly. It enables consumption of the same content on multiple devices, supported by a content strategy that facilitates re-use.

Peter: Agreed, and yes, financial institutions definitely have this challenge. Having a "single source of truth" is a goal for many, though with any company that has its roots in the pre-digital age, there are usually many sources that say the same thing, only on different sites, or duplicated in an internal versus external locations. It’s extremely difficult to achieve an overarching content strategy. My advice would be to start small. If your company has multiple products or Business Lines, start there rather than to try and create something too large. Take something meaningful from there, digest your learnings, and expand those learnings to something else, building out adjacent areas of commonality.

What are common organizational considerations when trying to implement a content management strategy?

Peter: Executing in a matrix organization is a challenge. There are often competing priorities, and different fiefdoms of content. It's often the case that content management does not rise to the overall priority list. There are a lot of other problems to fix, and sometimes it can be challenging to quantify the benefit of content management - the hidden costs of not having accurate and timely information are hard to dig out…but they can represent millions per year!

Wiegert: The perfect is often the enemy of the good here. You don't have to have it all perfectly worked out to get started. You can start with some initial efficiency goals and when they have been achieved and are the norm after a few months, you can move on to the next level of cost savings. It’s the balance between doing the right things versus doing things right.

Is starting small the same thing as being tactical? Can it still build into a strategy, and how do you ensure that it does?

Peter: You can absolutely still be strategic, while starting small. At the same time as you are starting small to get the hang of it and solving tactical problems, you have to be able to tell the story of how your smaller efforts fit in a larger strategic picture that is meaningful to the organization. And you’ll have to explain that over and over again, to everybody to ensure they are educated on the strategy. It also really helps to have buy-in at the senior levels of the organization, so when there are competing priorities, you’ve already established why you are doing what you’re doing.

Wiegert: That's right. Tactical is doing the thing that is immediately expedient, while strategic thinks about how it builds to the future. When website content management was new, in the late 1990s, a lot of organizations were handling it completely tactically, just to have a site as fast as possible - pure html, no structure, no form, no long-term plan. No reuse, and no ability to make changes from the global level. The tools for web content management now support a longer-term, strategic approach that encourages reuse (including translation reuse), makes sure content is findable, and enables easier maintenance via the ability to do global changes that cascade into all the necessary places. There will always be the temptation toward instant gratification, but it pays to take a long-term approach.

How can we start getting on top of the content proliferation challenge?

Peter: It's helpful to think about what base of content you need, whatever organizational scope you're looking at. Then when you build the content, you look at the content base and see if you have something to reuse, using services to pull the content in. There may still be custom content, but you should be able to get 80% reuse. This applies to chatbot and personalization engine content as well. If you have a good content foundation, you build using common components and then layer in custom content as necessary.

Wiegert: And then to help with identifying reusability, as well as making the content findable, classification and tagging are needed. We have passed the point where human memory can handle identifying where the valuable content is. So, to make it scalable at the enterprise level, you have to have a machine doing classification. The emerging way of making progress on this is to use semantic AI - automation and artificial intelligence that assigns meaning to content.

Peter: These rules and automatic classification also have to be extensible to other systems, so that you have consistent treatment across system boundaries. Tagging it consistently enables you to start scanning and pulling in other content. To do this in an organized and consistent way, you need to build a standard tag library. When you have a standard tagging method, it allows for new search capabilities, and knowledge structures that are based on your organization's knowledge graph.   

Wiegert: In a way, semantic tagging is also a path to achieve customized behavior, even with standard, OOTB systems. Efficient tagging could free organizations from content structure considerations or LOB differences. This is equally important for customers with on-premise and cloud deployments.

So semantic tagging has a lot of promise…are there any challenges with it?

Wiegert: The challenge is that the human brain can do classification in many ways, with more sophistication, but perhaps less consistency. You have to start more broadly with machine classification, to make it practical. We've learned from experience with many customers that semantic tagging is easier when categories are diverse. If you have categories based on too much nuance and granularity, you can end up with categories that have only one thing, or very few things, in it. An example could be categorization of news – it’s easier to come up with categories if you have diverse content. If you only have a sports section, distilling relevant categories within that one area is more difficult.

Peter: You could start small though - don't try to do all at once. Start with a smaller, defined set of content and expand the semantic tagging as your knowledge graph evolves. I definitely agree semantic tagging should be automated - it is a laborious task that you cannot trust to humans -- with all of their rugged individualism -- to produce consistent results. You have to be able to sift through the content and identify it in a programmatic way.

What is the ultimate goal with a content strategy? 

Wiegert: With a good content strategy you make content a strategic asset - considered part of your balance sheet. A good content strategy enables an organization to be ready for whatever the future may bring. A good content management strategy enables you to preserve and maintain that strategic asset in such a way that you can reuse it regardless of future developments.

Peter: The practical approach will be a mix of both strategic and tactical. In my own experience, starting with highly reused content was key. Finding ways to reduce duplicate editing has been important to reducing risk and saving time and money. But you have to be able to measure success, and you have to have successful messaging that ties to the organization's strategic goals. 

Is it fair to say that for today's financial institutions, the key ways that content management contributes to content strategy and therefore to business strategy are in cost control, reduction of risk and customer understanding?

Peter: I would say that's fair. In the cost area, a common concern these days is to control the number of authors needed to generate content, and strategic planning and reuse of content certainly supports that. Risk management is definitely a core goal of content management, although it's hard to quantify and measure. We were mentioning disclosures before - those are all about risk, so managing them successfully in the CMS is vital. But still a challenge to quantify. In the financial industry, a common way to achieve this is to define and count "incidences of risk", and aim to reduce them. You can even assign weights to different types of incidents, to make it more granular. This meta-approach to calculating risk is something that could be applied in any industry.

Wiegert: You also have to be able to show that content is more successful with your content management strategy. Content success is measurable in the web world in well-defined ways, like web analytics metrics, but we're often not clear enough on how content management is making content strategy more successful. Things like reduction in conflicting content, time to execution of new content, reduction in time customers require to find relevant content.

Peter: Content management success metrics and messaging are definitely key. In past roles I've often wished for more control over defining and using success metrics, and this is an area I hope to explore more in my career.

Wiegert: With the acceleration of AI, that is going to be a fast-changing area!

Thanks to Peter and Wiegert for a good exchange on successful content management - both broadly and in the financial industry. We heard from them that starting small is fine, but that it is key to put a strategy together first, for how content management will measurably contribute to content strategy, and thence to business strategy…and that it is vital to keep showing that correlation. When you do that, you are positioning content as a strategic asset, which optimized for reuse and alignment across all teams, helping future-proof your organization so you are ready to roll with the tide and times.