Introduction to the Special Issue: Content Management —Perspectives From the Trenches

The articles in this special issue focus on content management. Here, content management is used to refer to a particular type of content management: component content management. Component content management is an interdisciplinary area of practice characterized by methodologies, processes, and technologies that rely on principles of reuse, granularity, and structure to allow communicators to create and manage information as small components rather than as entire documents. An example of component content management is a product user guide that can be generated on demand. A customer who has questions on how to use particular product features, for instance, might select relevant topics from a menu available on a product support webpage or mobile application and, upon submitting a request, receive a just-generated customized guide that meets his or her immediate information needs. When information is created and managed as small components, these components can be assembled and published in myriad ways, as in the case of the above example. By shifting the focus of information development from entire documents to reusable units of information, content management has brought on a magnitude of changes to the field of professional and technical communication over the past 15 years. It has changed work processes and practices and, in doing so, redefined what it means to be a communicator. The promise of component content management