The need for a Content Services Organization (CSO)

We are standing in the midst of a significant revolution in the management of organizational knowledge and its expression as content. 

This revolution touches the publishing and engagement systems that handle content, the organizational structures and roles that produce and manage content, and every other part of the content ecosystem.

Everything that relates to how we structure and communicate knowledge is changing, along with how that knowledge is consumed and used by humans and machines. We cannot avoid the mass proliferation of content (nor should we), yet we can reorganize to manage it in a sustainable way. 

[A] proposes a new solution: within the context of a new Content Orchestration Model (COM), form a chartered Content Services Organization (CSO) and empower it with durable leadership in the form of three major practices: Content Strategy, Content Engineering, and Content Operations.

The Structure and Function of a Content Services Organization (CSO) 

Since the demand for more relevant content interactions across platforms grows by the day, publishers are moving towards producing much smaller units of content that can be recombined. Accomplishing this environment of content intelligence, [A] believes, involves these three separate practices:

Content Strategy

Content Strategy organizes the vision for customer experience and establishes the business justification for investments to be made in improving how content is handled. This involves defining the necessary metrics that will be used to measure progress against the plan. 

Content Strategy also identifies what content an organization must acquire, manage, and leverage, and what content experiences it must enable to meet its business goals.

Content Engineering

Content Engineering makes sure that correct practices, platforms, and technologies are in place to take the Content Strategy from plan to a technically realized reality as a resource to development teams. 

In short, content engineers hold the keys that unlock the gates that both separate very talented and often isolated members of a content marketing team, as well as the full potential of what the team can accomplish.

Content Operations

Content Operations is the organizational function that performs the day-today business of acquiring, managing, and leveraging content. Content Operations also executes against strategy and manages all content production workflows that take place when applying content structural and semantic standards. These standards include the Core Content Model™ and centralized semantic annotation, terminology, and tagging standards.

Together, these practices make up the foundation for the Content Services Organization.

Further Reading on the CSO:

Read the [A] Guide to the Content Services Organization whitepaper, which goes more in depth about this topic. The paper also explains why the practices we have listed need to be included in a full, holistic picture that includes a Core Content Model™ and a Master Semantic Model.

Download the CSO whitepaper!




The following Table of Contents lists key issues and solutions explored in the downloadable paper:

  • An Omnichannel Content Explosion
  • Symptoms of Content Organizational Dysfunction
  • How Do Survive the Content Tsunami?
  • What Is Content Strategy?
  • What Is Content Engineering?
  • What Is Content Operations?
  • How Do We Differentiate Content Strategy, Content Engineering, and Content Operations?
  • Content Engineering Is Key To The Content Orchestration Triumvirate 
  • The Orchestration Layer
  • A Convergence Between Marketing and Technical Communications
  • How Context Should Influence Content
  • Current Models: How Old Bridges Can Collapse
  • Intelligent Content Requires Redefined Teamwork
  • New Organizational Models Can Improve Communications
  • Managing Content In a Fractal Enterprise
  • A New Framework for Collaboration Across Multiple Roles
Organizations are now learning to structure content, enrich it with semantics in order to achieve customer-driven personalization and  to become multifunctional across all  touchpoints on a customer journey. It just takes  making steps towards intelligence. One step at  a time. 

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