Enterprise Content Management

The company lacked a cohesive content strategy, leading to fragmented management, outdated systems, and inefficiencies across digital channels. While multiple initiatives aimed to improve content workflows, progress was hindered by limited strategic alignment and leadership buy-in.

At the same time, ambitious goals around personalization, AI-driven search, and expanding partnerships required a stronger content foundation. Key challenges included:

• Decentralized Content Management – Content was siloed across different channels, creating inconsistencies and inefficiencies.
• Outdated Systems & Processes – Legacy platforms, particularly in Product Information Management (PIM), made updates complex, slowed innovation, and increased maintenance efforts.
• Lack of Standardization – The absence of a taxonomy framework led to inconsistent terminology, impacting search discoverability and data accuracy.
• Scalability Constraints – Expanding partnerships and integrating new content and product types required a more structured and adaptable content management approach.

Without addressing these foundational gaps, the company risked missed revenue opportunities, inefficient content operations, and reduced customer engagement. A centralized, scalable content strategy was essential to unlock AI-driven personalization, optimize search visibility, and enable seamless integration of new content and products.

To develop a scalable and future-ready content strategy, the project followed a structured approach, focusing on understanding the current state, defining a strategic vision, and establishing governance for execution.

Current State Inventory & Assessment

The first step was to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the company's content ecosystem, including:

• Identifying all existing content systems and mapping their roles in the content supply chain.
• Analyzing how content is generated, managed, and distributed across platforms, channels, and partners.
• Documenting capabilities, inefficiencies, and risks within the existing landscape, including modernization needs.
• Using a business capability mapping approach to understand and align content workflows, technology systems with business objectives—identifying gaps, redundancies, and optimization opportunities.

Recommended Content Strategy

Beyond technology modernization, the strategy also focused on process improvements and governance to ensure a sustainable approach to content management. This included:

• Introducing an omnichannel content culture with clear guiding principles and governance across business and technology teams.
• Defining content roles and workflows, emphasizing the concept of content ‘suppliers’ and ‘consumers’ to create structured ownership.
• Aligning content systems with business and technology goals to ensure scalability, flexibility, and operational efficiency.
• Assessing AI capabilities within existing and proposed systems to enhance personalization, automation, and intelligent content creation.

Implementation Roadmap

A high-level roadmap was developed to guide the execution of the content strategy, outlining:

• Key initiatives and milestones, ensuring alignment with broader strategic programs (e.g., MarTech, multilingual content strategies).
• Process and governance enhancements, ensuring teams operate within a structured framework for content management.
• Prioritized system modernization efforts, focusing on flexibility, modularity, and future-proofing.
• Phased implementation approach, minimizing disruption while achieving long-term scalability.

By combining technology modernization with process-driven governance, this approach created a strong foundation for omnichannel content strategy, enabling seamless expansion, AI-driven personalization, and efficient content operations.

To address the challenges of fragmented content management, scalability, and omnichannel personalization, the solution focused on four key areas: Product Information Management (PIM), Content Centralization, AI-Driven Content Generation, and Process Governance.

Product Information Management (PIM) Optimization

The first step was to consolidate disparate product information systems into a unified PIM platform, ensuring data consistency, accuracy, and scalability. This involved:

• Developing a comprehensive product data model that eliminates duplication and ensures structured, future-ready information.
• Establishing a cross-functional governance framework to define and maintain product attributes.
• Exploring Product Experience Management (PXM) to integrate rich media (visuals, videos, virtual tours) alongside textual data, creating a holistic product representation.

Omnichannel Content Platform & Taxonomy Integration

A centralized content platform was introduced to manage all content types - text, images, videos, and metadata - under a unified structure.

• Content components were interconnected through taxonomy, ensuring seamless searchability, categorization, and reuse.
• The platform enabled structured content management, reducing fragmentation and allowing efficient content distribution across channels.

AI-Driven Content Generation & Dynamic Content Optimization

To support scalability and personalization, AI and automation were leveraged to dynamically generate and optimize content:

• AI-Generated Descriptions – Content contributors provided rich descriptive attributes, enabling AI to generate tailored descriptions based on audience, occasion, and language.
• Dynamic Content Optimization – Real-time content assembly using existing assets (text, images, videos) to deliver channel-specific messaging without duplication.
• Content Lineage & Metadata Management – Ensuring a single source of truth with full traceability, maintaining accuracy and consistency across channels.

Process Governance & Reusability

Beyond technology, a structured process framework was implemented to ensure efficiency, governance, and scalability:

• A content creation and reuse model was established, allowing content to be built once and repurposed across platforms.
• Content lineage tracking ensured traceability of content sources, supporting accuracy, compliance, and consistency across customer touchpoints.

The Outcome

This integrated approach modernized content management, enabled AI-powered personalization, and improved omnichannel scalability. The company could now expand partnerships and introduce new content types with greater efficiency.

While the implementation of the proposed solution is still underway, early improvements are already evident in key areas:

• Strategic Alignment – There is now a clear, shared understanding between business and technology teams, as well as leadership, on both the current and future state of content management.
• Common Language & Governance – A standardized content terminology framework has been introduced, ensuring that teams across functions speak the same language, reducing misalignment and confusion.
• Informed Decision-Making – Content-related initiatives across the organization can now be evaluated against a unified strategy, ensuring alignment with broader priorities and preventing disconnected or redundant efforts.
• Future-Ready Integration – The strategy provides a scalable foundation, ensuring that future solutions can be integrated seamlessly without the risk of creating isolated or throwaway work.

Any organization that creates and shares content—especially with customers—can benefit from a structured, scalable content strategy like this. The principles of content management closely mirror those of data management:

• Centralization & Governance – Just as organizations use centralized data lakes, content should be managed in a centralized repository to ensure consistency, quality, and accessibility across all functions.
• Quality & Standardization – Content must be governed, cataloged, and maintained through structured processes, taxonomy, and metadata management to avoid fragmentation.
• Lineage & Integrity – Tracking content lineage ensures that accuracy and relevance are preserved as content moves across systems and channels.
• Omnichannel Flexibility – Content should be channel-agnostic, enabling reuse across multiple functions, markets, and customer segments without duplication or loss of quality.

While this project was applied to a hospitality organization, the approach is universally applicable across industries. As companies diversify their products and services, their content strategy must evolve to support multiple product types and categories without requiring a fundamental system overhaul.

This future-ready approach ensures scalability, adaptability, and seamless integration of new products, services, and partnerships, positioning organizations for long-term growth and innovation.