From asset to albatross: What to do when your content is the problem
Your company spent a lot of money on content: writers wrote it, subject matter experts reviewed it, editors polished and published it, and it was really great. Time passed and no one kept it up to date. Now customers and clients complain that they can't find anything, or that what they do find is out of date, or that different pages contradict each other.
This is something that happens to organizations when they haven’t addressed their content maintenance and governance needs. Content that was once an asset has turned into a weight. There’s so much of it and you're not sure where to start fixing it. In my years of consulting, then fix has (almost) never been better software or starting over from scratch.
The fix is getting the right people in a room, agreeing on what your content is for and who it's supposed to serve, then putting effort and budget behind it. This article walks through how content quietly goes wrong, why the usual fixes don't stick, and what a realistic first step for improvement looks like.
Good content gone bad
Companies just accumulate content. It takes curation to keep it manageable. Across the projects I’ve worked on, the same handful problems show up again and again:
A technology purchase drives redesigns. The old system is outdated or no longer supported, so an organization buys a new one and rushes to move everything over. Staff copy and paste from the old system into the new one. This is what I call a “lift and shift.” The organization is on a new platform, but no customer, client, or publishing issues are fixed. The mess simply moves to a nicer-looking home.
Nobody owns the content. Keeping content accurate takes ongoing attention where people are responsible for the task. In an immature content governance environment, content accuracy is a grassroots movement. Employees at the lower levels believe in keeping the content up to date, but have little support from their managers. When they change roles or leave, the upkeep quietly stops. Nobody reviews content for accuracy or consistency, and it becomes out of date without anyone noticing.
Teams that create content work in silos. Marketing writes to sell. The training team writes to teach. Support writes help articles. Each team uses its own labels, its own tone, its own publishing methods, and has its own idea of who the audience is. Typically, no one is responsible for coordinating across teams or no content “centre of excellence.” The result is an organization that contradicts itself without realizing it.
The structure underneath wasn’t set up for the way people look for things. Most systems come with default settings that are rarely adjusted to fit the business or users. Metadata isn’t used, people can't filter or browse to what they need, and you can't get a clear picture of what's working.
You may recognize one of these. You may be experiencing all four at once!
Why the usual fixes don't stick
New software feels like decisive action. However, if the underlying problems aren’t addressed, a new platform just gives you a cleaner place to repeat similar mistakes.
The deeper issues aren’t technical. In most cases, it’s a people problem and a budget problem. Your organization needs to agree on a few things and put consistent effort towards them:
Who are we serving and what do they need?
What business goals are we trying to accomplish with this content?
Who is responsible for keeping each piece current?
What are our processes for content creation, maintenance, and archiving?
Where do our teams overlap, conflict, or duplicate each other's work?
How do we coordinate better?
Projects that skip answering these questions usually end up at the same dead end.
The first step: get the right people aligned
The most important part is also the hardest. It’s not technical, it’s focused on people. Talk to the right people and get their buy-in and support.
The people who matter here fall into two groups:
The leaders and managers who are accountable for results, carry the business goals, and make budget decisions
The people on the ground who create, manage, and maintain the content day to day
Both groups have business needs, business goals, insights on user needs, and requirements. You need to talk to both of them.
In practice, this alignment work happens in two stages.
The first step is one-on-one conversations. Before any group meeting, it helps to talk to people individually. Some people simply won't speak up in a crowded room, and you lose their perspective if the only forum is a big meeting. Private conversations build trust, surface concerns early, and give quieter voices time to shine. The questions I ask are simple:
What's your role?
What do you understand this project to be?
What do you need it to accomplish?
What might get in the way?
How would we get past that?
Giving people the chance to get their concerns off their chest prevents a lot of friction later. It builds trust and helps people feel heard. Their individual opinions and needs are taken into consideration.
The second step is a workshop to align everyone. Once you've heard from people individually, you bring them together. A good alignment workshop builds a shared understanding of the goal, clarifies who's responsible for what, airs disagreements, and commits to a plan.
This is where silos start to break down. In large organizations, teams don't know what other teams have been working on. When they come together, they have amazing insights, research, and knowledge to share with each other. It can be quite inspiring. When people help shape the plan, they can support it through to the finish.
In these alignment workshops, you bring various interview results to the table and discuss them. You’ll need to discuss:
The competing visions for the project
Similar and competing business needs
Main audiences and which will you prioritize
Further efforts to learn more about the users (aka user research)
Barriers you may or will encounter and how to get past them as a team
Content revision and maintenance
The overall vision of success that the group agrees on
Rewriting and reorganizing content is genuinely hard. It is the hardest part of any website or intranet project. The people who own content need to know early what's coming, so the organization can plan for who's going to do the work. Just like with the rest of a website redesign project, content research, design and rewriting needs its own plan.
You don't have to fix everything at once
You don't have to overhaul everything all at once. You don't need a massive budget or a multi-year program to begin. You can pick one painful area, get the right people aligned on it, and work from there.
If you can reveal the competing visions for the website, you can discuss what a united vision would be and what content is needed to support that vision. Then you can review your website to see if you have the right content for that. The shift from "content we're stuck with" to "content that works for us" starts with a shared understanding of what your organization wants to achieve and how the content supports it.
If your content has started to feel like an albatross and you're not sure where to start, that conversation is what Key Pointe helps you work through. Reach out and let's talk about what's weighing you down.