Content has become more and more complex over the past couple of decades. Each stage of content creation, production, delivery, and maintenance has far more complications—and implications. The newest factor, AI-mediated generation of content, has upped the ante to the point where the term “content debt” has become a hot topic even outside of the industry.
In most organisations, content sits within a single department. Sometimes it belongs to marketing. Sometimes it hides inside product, or gets bolted onto communications. Wherever it lands, the organisation chart puts responsibility for content into one department’s mandate. For content to perform as a business asset, content comprises four dimensions: strategic, editorial, operational, and infrastructure. None of those dimensions should be isolated within a single department. The Content Integrity Model illustrates how content needs to be treated as a cross-team initiative.
This article highlights how different departments need to be involved in any project where content is a component, and how the contributions interact with contributions from other departments.
The strategic dimension
The strategic dimension guides what content is for:
What business drivers does content support?
Who benefits from the content?
How does it support growth or retention?
These are some of the questions that should be asked by the people who set direction. The ownership of the strategic dimension ensures that content teams inherit actionable goals. When the necessary strategic goals haven’t been articulated, content teams are left to produce content assets that are comfortable, in the “we’ve always created a white paper to go with Product X” way; there is output with no meaningful metrics. When product owners don’t understand what content is supposed to achieve, the exercise of content production comes down to “anything will do, just check the box.” The strategic dimension is where the strategic target contributes to the content mandate, and where product owner roadmaps can be adopted by the content teams.
This is also where governance decisions get made: which content matters most, what risk is acceptable, and who has the authority to say no. Skip this layer and every other dimension inherits fuzzy directions. In the organisation chart, this dimension should be the responsibility of the C-suite, business unit heads, product leadership, and content strategists.
The editorial dimension
Editorial work is what most people think of when they hear “content”. This is where editorial integrity takes shape, though to be honest, most people think of grammatical correctness and accuracy. The overlooked aspects of content are things such as regulatory compliance, accessibility, risk management, plain language adherence, and market readiness. In today’s environment, it also means checking for cognitive bias, semantic categorisation, and the metadata enrichment that is needed for AI models to understand and use the content to generate answers. Even then, none of this makes the content supportive of the strategic goals if the goals aren’t clearly communicated. And while more and more content is drafted by AI, there is a strong need for oversight, semantic enrichment, and adjustment of the AI model to continuously improve the LLM results.
This is where decisions around language are made: how the content gets written for editorial impact as well as to comply with applicable regulations, and how content gets modularised and contextualised for re-use. In the organisation chart, this dimension is the responsibility of the content teams, ideally with a strong content director or C-suite Content Officer, and generous support from other teams.
The operational dimension
Operational integrity is about how efficiently content can be processed and automated for production. Operational integrity connects to the strategic dimension, to ensure that content can be delivered to the teams that need it, such as sales, support, and development teams, on a predictable cadence.
Content operations is rarely recognised as a need because content is rarely seen as a value stream. This gap in operational ownership has implications in several areas:
The inability to scale content production to meet increased demands
Limitations on how to leverage existing content assets across output formats and markets
Lack of proper tools and technologies that benefit content teams
Control over content is removed from the content experts
In an organisation chart, this dimension is relegated to project managers and increasingly, to the people running AI-assisted workflows, but without the input of content operations strategists and localisation strategists. This needs to change, with a Content Operations Specialist at the helm, and cross-functional support in specialised areas, such as semantics and technology integration.
The infrastructure dimension
Infrastructure is the dimension organisations consistently underfund when it comes to content-specific technologies. The infrastructure can make the difference between whether content can be produced and delivered with operational efficiency, or whether content and software development teams alike will struggle to get content to meet its potential (editorially or strategically). Often, infrastructure is the deciding factor as to whether an AI system can retrieve accurate information. Infrastructure failures take control away from content teams, degrades operational efficiency, and prevents content from being leveraged to meet strategic goals.
In most organisation charts, infrastructure is usually left with a technology team under the CTO’s purview, with responsibility for acquisition lying with Procurement. Who is generally missing is a Content Operations Specialist; even if there is a Content Director or similar, their opinions are often ignored because they don’t have an engineering background. (The number of times I’ve seen this happen is appalling, as is the fall-out of companies setting up a subpar infrastructure, then compensating by getting their technology teams to build expensive and barely-effective workarounds.)
Redrawing the organisation chart
Treating content as a business asset means treating it as a cross-functional discipline, with named accountability in all four dimensions. It’s also the only version of the conversation that produces content of value to the business. Most content debt comes from organisations that looked at content as a second-rate asset, without investing in its production and maintenance. None of this means restructuring the company around content, but it does mean recognising the importance of content and giving it the respect it deserves. A content initiative needs an executive sponsor with clout, a content leader with a strong understanding of content ecosystems, and technical partners who listen and understand what content producers need and can own and improve the systems.
Note: Proofreading done by Claude. Writing done by me. The em-dash is mine, all mine.