Example results
What your results look like
These are the full results for a fictional publisher, Hardback Publishing, built from 7 colleagues' responses. It's exactly what you get after running an analysis: scores across the five areas, where your team agrees and disagrees, written findings and your colleagues' own words. Yours stay private to your organisation.
Hardback Publishing: content maturity across the five key areas
Aggregated results for Hardback Publishing's content efficiency and effectiveness.
Strategy
Culture
Operations
Substance
Infrastructure
Score distribution
How respondents scored across each area – bigger bubbles mean more agreement across different aspects and between different respondents
Executive summary
Hardback Publishing is a strong content organisation with a weak content operation. The craft is not in question: editorial quality scores highly and consistently across the team, and people are rightly proud of it. The gap is everything around the words – the systems, governance and shared ways of working that turn good books into a content operation that scales.
The lowest scores, and the most agreement about them, sit in Infrastructure. Title data lives in per-imprint spreadsheets, the website and catalogue systems don't share a source of truth, and no one owns the standards that would hold it together. Culture shows the widest spread of any area, a sign the organisation hasn't yet agreed what 'content' even means, let alone who owns it.
The encouraging news is that the hardest thing to build – quality – is already there. The work ahead is organisational, not editorial: name an owner for content as a whole, put a single source of truth under title data, and agree the standards the talent can already meet.
“Editorially we're excellent – that has genuinely never been the problem here.”
“Every imprint runs its own spreadsheet. There is no single source of truth for a title's data.”
Strategy aspects
Strategy provides the direction, underpinnings and framework for all content activities. Maturity in this area depends on whether organisations have a comprehensive content strategy that connects to business objectives, employ evidence-based decision-making, invest in a strategic way, utilise effective storytelling approaches, and implement coherent, holistic channel strategies. Strong content strategy aligns all content efforts with organisational goals and ensures systematic approaches to content success.
In the strategy area, your organisation is 73% mature.
Analysis of what you told us
There is strategic intent here, but it isn't shared. Several people described a strategy that exists on a slide rather than in the work, and three functions – editorial, marketing and web – each running their own version of the plan. The result is competent local decisions that don't add up to a direction.
The clearest opportunities are evidence and channels: the sales and audience data the team needs already exists but isn't joined to content decisions, and each channel runs to its own rhythm. Investment is fragile too, with content support first to be cut and rarely measured.
“Marketing, editorial and the web team each have a plan. None of them is the same plan.”
In detail
Culture aspects
Culture encompasses the organisational mindset: behaviours and attitudes that shape how content is valued and approached. This foundational area covers whether content is seen as strategically important, whether leadership supports content excellence, and whether the organisation fosters innovation, sustainability and audience-centricity. A mature content culture creates the conditions for effective content work across all other areas.
In the culture area, your organisation is 57% mature.
Analysis of what you told us
Culture is the most divided area in the assessment – the team's scores are spread right across the scale, which usually means the organisation hasn't reached a shared understanding. Here that shows up as two different definitions of 'content' (the books versus the website) and no single person who owns content across the house.
There's genuine appetite to innovate and a deep knowledge of readers as book buyers, but little slack to act and a thin understanding of those same readers as digital users. The ambiguity isn't a people problem; it's a leadership and clarity problem.
“No one in the room owns content as a whole. It falls between editorial and marketing.”
In detail
Operations aspects
Operations covers the day-to-day practices, processes, and capabilities that enable consistent content delivery. Maturity in this area depends on whether organisations have skilled content professionals, effective workflows and planning processes, robust training and development programmes, appropriate skills, sustainable maintenance practices, and strong collaboration across teams. Effective content operations ensure content work is efficient, sustainable, and continuously improving.
In the operations area, your organisation is 63% mature.
Analysis of what you told us
The operation runs on the quality of its people rather than the quality of its system. Workflows vary title by title and depend on who's leading, so the work is resilient to good people and fragile to their absence.
There's a missing role – plenty of editorial talent, but no one whose job is the content operation across imprints – and the habits that keep content healthy over time, like revisiting the backlist or working across the editorial/marketing line, haven't formed.
“Things get done because people are good, not because the system is. When someone's off, it stalls.”
In detail
Substance aspects
Substance focuses on the quality, effectiveness, and characteristics of content itself. Maturity in this area depends on whether content demonstrates creativity, maintains high quality standards, ensures accessibility and readability, employs diverse formats strategically, expresses brand consistently, and is discoverable by intended audiences. Content substance determines whether content achieves its intended impact and serves users effectively.
In the substance area, your organisation is 83% mature.
Analysis of what you told us
Substance is the organisation's clear strength, and the team agrees on it: editorial quality scores highly and consistently. The craft of writing and editing is not where the problems lie.
The soft spots sit where strong substance meets weak plumbing: a deep backlist that's hard to surface, web copy that reads inconsistently across imprints, and accessibility that has simply never been checked. These are infrastructure and governance issues showing up as content ones.
“The writing and editing are world-class. It's everything around the words that creaks.”
In detail
Infrastructure aspects
Infrastructure encompasses the systems, frameworks, knowledge and foundations that enable effective, efficient content operations. This area covers content governance, information architecture, technology systems, content models and the resources necessary to support content work. Robust content infrastructure ensures consistency, efficiency and scalability whilst providing the technical and organisational backbone for content excellence.
In the infrastructure area, your organisation is 42% mature.
Analysis of what you told us
Infrastructure is the lowest-scoring area, and the team is united in saying so. Title data lives in per-imprint spreadsheets, the website CMS and catalogue system don't share a source of truth, and information is re-keyed by hand – slow, error-prone work that undermines everything downstream.
Underneath sit deeper gaps: no shared content model (a 'book' means something different in every system), an information architecture that grew imprint by imprint, and no way to tell which content is doing any work. Governance is the root cause, and the highest-leverage place to invest.
“Our website CMS and the catalogue system don't talk to each other, so we key everything in twice.”
In detail
See where your organisation stands
An analysis takes about 30-60 minutes, and it's free. Invite colleagues to see where your team agrees, and where it doesn't.
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