Digital governance in the era of AI: All noise, very little signal

Shelley Keith-Panulla — Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
Tim Senft — Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

How do you successfully manage large web properties with a lot of stakeholders? How do you ensure current, accurate information in the authoritative, conversational generative AI search era where archives and outdated info can hurt search result authority and damage user trust even more than in the before-times?

https://events.highedweb.org/heweb24/session/2158392/digital-governance-in-the-era-of-ai-all-noise-very-little-signal?i=GyhwxsGi06j5rSOU9YU-UkabtAkrHexs

Notes:

• Goals
  • Define these very clearly and make them public!
  • Point both your audience and editors to them
  • Example: Strengthen cross-collaboration
    • When someone comes with a unique request – you can point to the defined goals
      “Does this strengthen cross-communication?”
• Roles
  • Clearly defined expectations
  • Example: Publisher – add and publish content (articles, events, pages)
• Policies
  • Only need to be used for reference
  • All about mitigating risk
  • Example: “The marketing and communications team have full access to fix and update all content”
• AI
  • Important to understand how AI search is going to change search. They are starting to pull and rewrite content… trather than directing people to your site.
    • They noted at least 80% of their content is at risk
    • Write for AI, by writing for users
• WordPress plugin for governance (sent in a request to get a copy)
  • Content reviews
    • Including cycle and reminders
  • Clarifies page content
  • Clarifies page steward
  • Commit messages for all page content
  • Keeps internalized notes
  • Users in admin get reports
• Note:
  • We’ve talked a lot about revision cycles, but could never define a general time frame.
  • I love the idea of setting a time per page
    • Dashboard/email fro content that needs reviewed
    • Would not be able to publish without reviewing content + note