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Content maturity models are solid frameworks to assess your organization’s state of play in relation to content and operations. They’re also useful for starting conversations with stakeholders and subject experts as a way to start the process of getting buy-in to invest in improving content operations.
If maturity models are used as a blueprint or roadmap for success, they can be problematic and demotivating. Every organization is different and will need its own version of a maturity model that is contextual to their circumstances.
In this post, I’m going to offer some advice, based on my own experience, that will help you use content maturity models effectively.
Let’s start with what is meant by content operations maturity before we look at example models to assess your organization’s maturity. As stated by Content Science, content operations maturity is “a way to articulate the degree to which your organization can make content strategies and plans happen.”
With that definition in mind, any tool, process, framework, or model can be helpful in setting a course and providing a basis to build from. But they won’t suit every situation at every organization. They should support what you’re trying to achieve—not get in the way. They should encourage and enable— not discourage and isolate.
Content maturity models fit into this school of thought. Find existing models, or maybe even create your own, but don’t take them for a prescription of every step you should follow. Use them for your own uses and needs, use them in ways I’ll outline in this article to ensure they are helpful.
As I refer to content maturity models, I mean publicly available models and frameworks that have been created and shared by various organizations and practitioners. Perhaps by coincidence, each one has five stages with labels and descriptors that summarize what an organization will look like at each stage in terms of maturity. They are used to determine the current state and ability of an organization in a certain area, or for a particular discipline. Additionally, they aim to assess an organization in relation to continuous improvement. So they are trying to tell you lots of things about what you are doing and what you’re not doing—hence why they need to be used with clear caveats and parameters.
This is the content operations maturity model from Kapost:
They have labeled the five stages to summarize the behaviors and characteristics seen at an organization for each of those stages. Here’s an example that outlines the Reactive stage from their article Where Do You Fall on the Content Operations Maturity Model?
From their preliminary research, Kapost estimates that 15% of organizations are in the Reactive stage. This stage is categorized as:
Key characteristics:
Other models use a similar naming convention and subsequent descriptions of their stages.
The model developed by Content Science and featured in The Content Advantage by Colleen Jones defines their five stages as:
Here is the description of those stages:
