What is Content?

In most of the presentation and discussions that I have, I continued to be surprised (or not) by the general lack of understanding of what content is all about.

I guess this stems from the mental models that have been burnt into us over the years. What does content mean to you?

If you are a web guy or gal is it the stuff in the web page, or the web page itself? Or is it the word document that you are working on? Is it the whole document including the format or only the stuff that matters in the midst of the colours and format?

What about the data that you see on the screen in the transactional system such as the order entry application or the ERP system? Well all of them count and in all cases there is content.

The issue that we have is that content is so bound with the application or the format that it is hard to leverage, and further more to this as people often have different operational boundaries the content is though of in context to the application and format not to the business process or to the flow of how the content should move through the organisation. But content in its own right is not the be all and end all, as if the content cannot be placed in context then it has no meaning.

We can draw lessons from the web world and see that much has been done to separate content from format, but how do we manage, process and deliver this context contextually across the business processes and in and out of the formats that are required while also maintaining control of it.