In episode 81 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Alan Pringle discuss document ownership and the role it plays in content development workflows and governance.
“You’ve got to quit the focus on the tools. The tools are not going to solve mindset problems. Those are two distinct different things. You’re talking about technology, and you’re talking about culture. Culture is a lot harder to change.”
—Alan Pringle

Related links: 

* Content lifecycle challenges

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @alanpringle 

Transcript:
GK:                   Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about document ownership and the role it plays in content development workflows and governance.
GK:                   Hello, and Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
AP:                   And I am Alan Pringle.
GK:                   I want to start off this discussion about document ownership with just asking a very basic question. What is it? What is document ownership?
AP:                   Document ownership means answering the question, who is responsible for the creation of this content, for the review of this content, approval of it, any other things that you do around content? So who is responsible for basically the parts of that life cycle?
GK:                   Absolutely. I think it’s important to point out too, that those responsibilities for all those different aspects of the content and that development workflow are different from one organization to the next, and it depends on things like the size of your content team, the resources that you have available, the kinds of content you’re creating. We’ve seen some organizations where there’s just a really small team in charge of creating content, and so you might have one person who kind of owns the entire document life cycle from its creation all the way to its approval and release, and then in other cases, things are a little more segmented. You might have some folks who are in charge of writing, some who are in charge of editing, some who give the final approval. So, it really kind of depends on the organization, but there is a tendency, I think, for there to be some kind of an ownership model in place so that all those responsibilities are laid out and everyone knows what has to happen to get that content out the door.
AP:                   There’s another kind of side angle to this, another kind of ownership, and what happens if your company is acquired? What happens if there is a merger? Then you’ve got these two corporate cultures and what they perceive as the correct document ownership process. Then you’ve got to figure out how to integrate those two together, so it’s like ownership on top of ownership and that can be quite the challenge.
GK:                   Oh yes, absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about that challenge and how it kind of feeds into some other challenges that we see a lot around document ownership. One, of course, is just how document ownership differs when you look at an unstructured versus a structured content workflow. When you’ve got an unstructured workflow, then I think we more frequently see cases where documents tend to truly be owned by a specific person, a specific group, someone who’s responsible for the document from end to end, whereas in a structured workflow, since the content is more modular and you tend to have things ...