A unified content strategy and content reuse model is necessary to leverage content in both academic and business organisations. When the strategy and the reuse model is not in place it can lead to redundancy and even loss of organizational knowledge and learning. In this article, I will explain the different types of reuse and outline some simple reuse strategies that are being used in different contexts.

Ann Rockley, author of  Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, has identified two methods for reuse: 1) opportunistic reuse (when an author makes a conscious decision to reuse content) and 2) systematic reuse (planned reuse where content is automatically inserted). Put simply, opportunistic reuse is what you do on a daily basis – cutting and pasting stuff from one context into another. Systematic reuse is when you have a content reuse model in place and all this cutting-and-pasting is managed automatically under different contexts (e.g. header and footer content on a news website). In this article, we’ll focus on systematic reuse.

Consider this scenario: you pay a consultant to provide content for a course you want to develop. He comes back with a PowerPoint full of bullet point lists. How do you profit from this interaction?

Now, any which way you look at this, you lose. Even if you have the consultant deliver the course for you, you lose, as the consultant can walk out on you anytime. If you are going to deliver the course using your own instructors, you lose as your instructors will first have to decipher the PowerPoint (even if they get help from the consultant).

So, how do you win in such a scenario? You can if you decide beforehand on how you plan to use the content in the long run. This plan is known as a content strategy. Once you have this strategy in place, you’ll be clearer on how you could use and reuse your content. 

For example, depending on your strategy to offer this course in a face-to-face seminar mode or in a synchronous online mode or as a stand-alone e-learning mode, you can dictate to your consultant that you want the content in specific forms and not in the form of bullet points.

The above reuse scenario was for a specific strategic intent -- delivery-based reuse. Here you leverage and reuse content to maximize the commercial benefits to the organisation (create the content once and reuse many times under different contexts with different commercial implications. See Harvard Business Publications example below).

There is another type of reuse, and this time the strategic intent is to leverage the intellectual capital of the organisation.

Consider this scenario: a project team in an engineering company goes through a unique implementation and as a result of which new knowledge is created and new methods are learnt by its members. How does the company make sure that this learning is available to the rest of the organisation?

If the company had a content strategy (in this case called a knowledge management strategy) in place then it could have had a process designed to capture the learning from such unique implementations. For example, the knowledge management strategy could outline that team members create a project retrospect document and an after-action review (AAR) document. These meta-documents can help capture, in a very informal manner, the lessons learnt in a project. It is through these documents that a certain amount of knowledge can be reused in the organisation. (Another knowledge management strategy could be to encourage conversation and chatter in the organization to help knowledge flow through the natural channel of storytelling.)

If the company did not have a content strategy in place then all the learning about this new implementation would reside only in the practices of the few who were involved in the project, and be hidden to the rest of the organisation.

The same line of thinking can be applied to the classroom. For example, students only see the well-structured part of the instructor in classrooms, which is manifested by her lesson plans and her list of planned activities. But students can also learn a lot from all of the ill-structured research and analysis that the instructor does in order to arrive at the well-structured part. This is why teacher-weblogs are starting to get popular these days. Teacher-weblogs allows students to tune into their teacher and understand and learn from all of her musings on a day-to-day basis.

Yet another type of reuse, one that is quite familiar to e-learning designers, is based on the strategic intent to reuse objects to limit the duplication of efforts across departments or institutions.

Here an instructional designer working on a course on, say, plant life, creates the entire course in the form of small, independent modules. These small independent modules (e.g. one of them could be on photosynthesis), called learning objects, are then given some meta-data and put into a digital repository.

Now, if another instructional designer wanted to create a course on, say, on the greenhouse effect, he/she could first search the digital repository for the existence of related learning objects and on finding it (e.g. the one on photosynthesis), could reuse it in the new design. This way, the availability of the learning object on photosynthesis is helping to limit the duplication of effort across departments.

As you can see from the above examples, having a unified content strategy is important in formulating a reuse model. And more importantly, having a unified content strategy is important to cultivate a mindset for reuse. Let me explain.

A manager at a large control-engineering organisation recently discussed some of his content-related issues with me. His main problem was trying to get his engineers to share (reuse) their ideas and practices for the benefit of the organisation. The engineers refused to work in the ‘sharing ideas for reuse’ mode and stressed the importance of working in the ‘ideas for me and my project’ mode. Now because of this difference a lot of know-how is locked up in project-based silos and this can be only be comprehended by the project members themselves. I would blame the existence of such a mindset on the lack of any unified content and reuse strategy.

Let’s take a look at some examples of reuse based on a specific strategic intent.

Harvard Business Publications (http://www.hbr.org)
I’ve always marveled at the way Harvard Business Publications (HBS) manages to reuse its quality content. Consider this: an article that is published in Harvard Business Review magazine can also appear in a Harvard Business Review paperback series book or in a Harvard Business Review OnPoint collection, or it can also be downloaded as a single PDF issue. The same article has many delivery options under different commercial contexts.

Association of Knowledgework (AOK) (http://www.kwork.org)
AOK is an online community for knowledge managers. Every month AOK invites an outstanding knowledge professional to be the guest moderator in the discussion group. Now, as one can imagine, a lot of discussion is generated in that period with many people writing and responding to many posts. So, here’s a question: after the discussion period, how does one reuse the knowledge and learning that was generated in those discussions?

This reuse problem is not an issue for those members originally involved in the discussion, but becomes a serious hindrance for outsiders or non-members. It is painstaking for outsiders to go through each and every post in order to understand the important points discussed in the conversations. For this reason, AOK assigns a member -- a community historian -- to take the responsibility to produce a synthesis of the entire discussion. This outcome is a single PDF document that contains all the “gems” of the conversation. This document now has a higher reuse factor compared to the entire discussion.

“Content is king” is the buzzword on the Web, but it would be a foolish king if it did not have an overall or unified content strategy in place to govern the land. As seen from the examples above, giving some thought on how you want to use and reuse the content you have or plan to have can save you from a lot of heartache later on. So remember to plan wisely and to plan early.