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What do a slice of bread and a single-spaced memo have in common? A supply chain.

Regardless of the product or service a company sells, many businesses are realizing they have one product in common — content. Reports, timesheets, and parts manuals, for example, that once wound their way through disparate, fragmented systems, are being centralized by business leaders into a single production line, or "content supply chain."

In an economic era where companies rely on their information products as much as their own products and services, corporate America has put content in the context of the bottom line. Drawing on the 20th-century concept of a manufacturer's supply chain, businesses are producing internal and external content literally like hotcakes.

The sense that content creation was an IT thing — let the CIO handle it — is gone. A piece of content and a slice of bread, for example, are the results of similar supply chains. And in an information economy, the content is just as important to your life as the bread.

Though many organizations do not sell content in the form of books or magazines, all organizations produce, use and distribute content of some kind, for both internal and external use.

A content supply chain is the sequence of activities necessary to create, use and distribute content and content products. Many corporate decision-makers now think of their company's content supply chain as the information-age version of an industrial-age supply chain.

Taking the example of a loaf of bread, the supply chain starts with grain farmers and travels by truck to a bread factory. From there, it heads to a mixing vat, an oven, a slicer and then to a packager. It then goes to another truck, to a wholesaler, to a retailer and finally to the consumer. Content follows a similar path. (See chart below.)

Much like a slice of bread, content is produced using a supply chain — the sequence of activities necessary to create, use and distribute content and content products. (Click on chart for larger image.)

Further, the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization's content supply chain can make or break its profit margin. In fact, a large corporation spends between 5 and 9 percent of its revenue annually on customer-facing documents alone (e.g., product catalogues, brochures, monthly statements). For Fortune 500 companies, that can work out to billions of dollars. Added to production and management of all the internal documents — analyses, memos, status reports, timesheets, etc. — and the true magnitude of an inefficient or ineffective content supply chain becomes clear.

Whether that content is a data set from a customer service center, a page in a product manual or a paragraph in an eBook, it must be optimized for the demands made on content today, not least of which is reliable search and retrieval, information sharing and collaboration. While there are technologies and processes available to approach the steps of a content supply chain individually, such as data conversion, systems engineering, etc., the greatest obstacle to overcoming content supply chain issues is a fragmented awareness of their nature and import.

Many information-intensive organizations in industries like publishing, defense, aeronautics, pharmaceuticals and libraries have learned this the hard way.

Step one is understanding that you have a content supply chain, whether or not you have been aware of it to date. Once you are aware of it and can see the whole thing, you go beyond short-term, à la carte fixes to system-wide problem solving.