In episode 85 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow talk about the steps to structure, how to move from unstructured content to structure, and what each level of maturity looks like.
“It’s important to keep in mind when you move from step two to step three that your authoring tools may change. The writers might have gotten used to working with one set of tools in steps one and two. But as you move to structure, the tools that you’re using for unstructured content may not support the underlying framework for the structure that you’re moving forward with.”
– Bill Swallow

Related links: 

* Moving to structured content: Expectations vs. reality (podcast) 
* The challenge of digital transformation

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @billswallow

Transcript:
Gretyl Kinsey:                  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 the steps to structure, how to move from unstructured content to structure, and what each level of maturity looks like. This is part one of a two-part podcast.
GK:                  Hello and welcome everyone. I am Gretyl Kinsey.
Bill Swallow:                   And I’m Bill Swallow.
GK:                  Today we’re going to be talking about structured content and all the different steps it takes to get there. Let’s just go ahead and dive right into what is the first step or the baseline when we’re talking about moving from unstructured content to structured.
BS:                   Well, I guess the very first step that you’re on is that you have content.
GK:                  Yes.
BS:                   Congratulations. You have content. It exists. It’s probably written well. It is probably being authored by a bunch of different people or authored by people using a variety of different tools. Basically there’s no general rhyme or reason as to how the content is being produced, but it looks good, it serves its purpose, it’s published, it’s out there, people are reading it, but there’s generally no underlying structure. You might be using Microsoft Word and various other tools, no actual templates involved, all the formatting is kind of ad hoc and all hand produced.
GK:                  Yes. I think this is what we consider as the baseline or the bare minimum when it comes to content. It’s there, it’s well-written, it’s usable and you have it and it’s working, but you’re not really able to leverage it necessarily and do a lot more sophisticated things with it, and so you may have some limitations if you’re at step one. For example, with how you publish your content if everything is very manual in the process of creating it, then that’s probably true on the publishing side as well. So you’re not really getting mass automation there. You may also be limited in your ability to share content across maybe different departments, different types of documents. A lot of times when we see companies who are in what we would consider the step one, they tend to be in silos with unstructured content, and so you’ve got sort of different types of unstructured content all over the place and none of it is really connected or working together.
BS:                   Right. With regard to being able to share the content,