TL;DR

After the goods and/or services you supply and the people who make that possible, your information is one of the most important things your business owns. Getting it right is integral to performance across multiple areas of your business (and to preserving the sanity of staff in multiple departments.

What is an information owner?

Every business produces information: product data, customer insights, documentation, policies, pricing, taxonomies and internal knowledge. The problem is that responsibility for maintaining it is rarely clear. If we’re honest, this is a job that (for reasons beyond comprehension) generally ends up sitting with marketing, but which ends up getting less attention than it deserves as a result. This is an endeavour that should be responsible for:

• Taxonomy: – the logical organisation and categorisation of products, services and content so that both users and machines can find and understand them; this is the conceptual organisation of information on your website. What are the most common search terms to find your site and how does it map onto your offering? What information is better served as a faceted taxonomy and what as a hierarchy? An information owner should be constructing and maintaining taxonomies. 
• Navigation: – this is about journeys through your information. How are people getting to you and how are they, then, finding the information, products and/or services they were expecting or which you believe they may require?
• Hierarchy: – along with taxonomies, this is about structuring your information (at a folder, page and on-page level). What is the most important information you want to convey? How can you communicate this hierarchy in both HTML and structured data formats?
• Naming: – this is about consistency both in code and in text around what things are called and how that relates to user use of language and user expectation. Consistent nomenclature helps control and reflect user behaviours and can improve UX.
• Relationships: – rather than customer relationships, this is about the relationship of things to other things – while your taxonomy, which organises your information, relationships is about edges and how things in different sections of your taxonomy are related to one another.

Why is information ownership important?

Consider something as simple as the renaming of a product category. Marketing updates the website, but your paid media still uses the old terminology, customer support is referencing outdated documentation, your analytics dashboards are splitting the data between two names and limiting the insights you can gather, and internal links continue pointing at legacy URLs. Nobody here made a mistake individually, but because nobody owned the information as a whole, everyone made a mistake collectively.

There is one, simple reason that your information should be owned (that doctors just don’t want you to know) and that’s because it’s one of your most valuable assets. It connects every part of your business and every department. Poor oversight, poor control, it costs you money. Through badly informed business decisions, through lost rankings, through incorrect assumptions, through a lack of retained institutional knowledge – there are dozens of reasons, but all of them should be marked as a loss on the balance sheet.

The problem is – information ownership tends to fall between the cracks; it’s either owned by several departments which each maintain parts of it and only partially even in their own domain, or it’s owned by one department (yes, marketing, the everything department) and its maintenance falls down the priority list in favour of more immediate demands, or it’s owned (surprisingly often) by nobody at all. 

However, clearly defined information ownership can improve operational performance and efficiency across the business – making it easier to onboard staff and clients, update strategies, improve search visibility, properly track customer journeys, preserve institutional knowledge and avoid system and tool redundancy.

What can be done to improve information ownership?

The long and short of this is that it’s about processes and mapping of responsibility – we know that the majority of businesses can’t allocate the budget to have an entire role dedicated to information hygiene – but everyone can map what information originates where and who is responsible for maintaining it in an ordered and accessible way.

We recommend undertaking a specific project (should take no more than a day) to take account of what information is coming into the business, what its uses are and who is responsible for its maintenance – and this includes institutional knowledge (who is the only user of that one tool with the interface that looks like it was built in MSDOS and without which the entire warehouse inventory disappears – are they disseminating that knowledge?) – and how is that information combined and used to produce insights to help the business grow. 

Like most things – leaving information ownership without a defined set of processes is the best way to make sure it either doesn’t happen, happens intermittently, or gradually falls down the list of priorities until nobody remembers it needed to happen in the first place. As an example, consider creating a simple Google Sheet or Excel doc with the following:

• Where information originates
• Who owns it
• Where it’s stored
• Who consumes it
• How often it’s reviewed

Final thoughts

Information isn’t just another business asset, it underpins almost every decision your business makes, and when it’s inconsistent, poorly organised or nobody’s responsibility, the problems this creates don’t stay confined to one department; they spread across marketing, sales, customer service, operations and leadership.

Businesses that perform consistently well tend to have one thing in common: they treat information as something worth managing, not just producing. Whether that responsibility sits with marketing, operations or another function matters less than making sure it belongs to someone. If nobody owns your information, everyone ends up paying the price.

Yes, as primarily an SEO consultancy, we like to see that your data is well maintained – it helps us in numerous ways, but it’s more than an SEO thing, it can help at every level of your business.