How would you fill out this label?
What do you call the industry of companies who produce goods and provides services that helps a organization manage its content?
Each and everyday we at TechWhirl, other websites, companies and consultants discuss the benefits of single-sourcing, using a standard data format and making the creating, managing, publishing, distributing and preserving of content an asset (Content Management Life Cycle). By definition a group of companies who work toward a common end product – for today let’s say a single-sourced company – is an industry.
We know the companies involved
Mattel – no
MadCap – yes
As a group, we generally know the audience.
Cat groomers – no
CIOs – yes
But what about the actual name? (some of you are saying this is easy, but wait for our survey results)
Some names such as the Publishing Industry have been taken by other industries. Say you work in the Publishing Industry and you’ll find yourself explaining about books. Knowledge Management is dead to us too because that’s mostly about extracting information rather than the production process.
Al sometimes uses Enterprise Publishing because the follow-up question – what’s that? – allows him to draw the analogy of writing, editing and publishing a book to what everyone does at their own companies … every single day. We know a few people use this in presentations but it’s certainly not commonly used.
We’re asking today because because there appears to be no standard name used by companies who produce good and services that fit into the Content Management Life Cycle. Our research has been ad hoc and mostly focused on when we expanded our focus from technical communicators to the wider life cycle. As part of that process, we reached out to some to some of our colleagues to ask their opinion with the following options provided:
- Tech Comm Software
- Technical Communications Industry
- Technical Publishing
- Knowledge Management
- Content Industry
- Content Management Life Cycle Industry
- Content Management
- Content Market (markets are buyers, industry are sellers but was provided)
- Enterprise Publishing Industry
- Publishing (see above)
- Content Production Industry
- Content Publishing
- Enterprise Content Management
- Content Management Pipeline
- Mumble, mumble … so did you go anywhere fun this summer for vacation?
The poll today and obligatory request for discussion in the comments is “What is the name of our industry?” We’ve pared down the list to what we think are the top contenders. You’ll quickly notice that Technical Communications Industry didn’t make the list because there is a Tech Comm industry, but it’s a subset of the wider name we’re looking to identify.
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