About the Client
The company: well-known consumer software company with several major brands/products related to financial services.
Our stakeholders were part of the IT department and were responsible for managing self-help content on a corporate intranet site.
The Challenge
It’s something we see at almost every organization we work with: content silos.
For every content management system (CMS,) digital asset management system (DAM), learning management system (LMS), and other similar platforms, there’s a different content strategy, publication workflow, governance approach (if there even is a governance approach), and taxonomy (if there even is a taxonomy). There can be legitimate reasons to use separate strategies and workflows. But disparate workflows often manifest in the user experience as a dizzying maze of microsites, subdomains, and shape-shifting navigation menus.
In this case, it was a corporate intranet site. Our stakeholders were determined to make it more navigable and user-friendly. They had already rallied significant resources to build a custom intranet homepage and deploy an enterprise search platform that indexed content from at least a dozen independently managed platforms/systems (Confluence, ServiceNow, JIRA, etc. etc.). They had technical resources, user researchers, designers, management buy-in, and motivation.
What they didn’t have was a content strategy framework and guidelines that all the various content teams and platform managers could align on (and customize for their context).
Factor’s Approach
Assessment
We started with an assessment of the current state of their intranet content strategy and operations, across different content silos. We focused on the following:
- Content
- Metadata/Taxonomy
- Systems/Technology
- Workflows
- Governance
When we’re looking at content, here are some of the questions we ask:
- What is it (what kind of content)?
- What is its primary purpose/goal/intent?
- Who is the intended audience?
- How is its performance measured?
- What is its lifecycle?
- Who owns/manages it?
- Where is it published (surfaces)?
- When was it published?
- Where is it authored (source)?
If a good content strategy is in place, we can easily answer these questions. We may see the answers in the form of metadata, in creative briefs, in workflow documentation, etc. If the questions are difficult to answer, it’s a good indication that there’s room for improvement somewhere.
Through our assessment, we found— unsurprisingly— that some content silos had more mature strategies and governance than others.
Solution
Content Strategy Best Practices
We built a business case for why content strategy is worth the effort. For example:
- When employees are able to locate effective content, IT call center volume is reduced.
- When there’s a cross-platform content auditing capability, content managers can identify redundant or out-of-date content, and archive it.
- When the initial goal of the content is documented, analysts are able to determine how effective it was.
Where possible, we called attention to existing strategies and workflows that aligned with best practices, showing how others working within the same organization already benefit from them.
Content Framework
We drafted an outline of the strategy and governance components, which laid the groundwork for them to complete this work on their own.
We built this framework out in an Airtable, which had three main tabs:
- Content types
- Content goals
- Common metadata properties
Recommendations / Roadmap
Our roadmap outlined high-level tasks along with the skills and expertise required to carry them out. This proved to be a good starting point for facilitating a ‘next steps’ discussion with the wider stakeholder group.

Return
As outsiders, one of our strengths is our ability to provide organizations with a fresh perspective that spans silos and identifies target areas to align, reconcile, and increase efficiency. Though we love being along for the whole ride, we are always happy when we can give our clients the training and tools they need to complete projects on their own.
Our stakeholders now have:
- A sense of their own maturity as it relates to content strategy best practices, where they are actually doing well vs. where they need to upskill or build new capabilities, and who will be responsible/accountable for the work.
- A better grasp of content strategy, what it could look like in practice, and a jumping-off point to build out their own.