In a recent blog, “Top Ways to Get Your Content and Data Ready for AI,” Sara Mae O’Brien-Scott and Zach Wahl gave an approach for ensuring your organization is ready to undertake an AI Initiative. While the previous blog provided a broad view of AI-readiness for all types of Knowledge Assets collectively, this blog will leverage the same approach, zeroing in on actionable steps to ensure your content is ready for AI. Content, also known as unstructured information, is pervasive in every organization. In fact, for many organizations it comprises 80% to 90% of the total information held within the organization. Within that corpus of content, there is a massive amount of value, but there also tends to be chaos. We’ve found that most organizations should only be actively maintaining 15-20% of their unstructured information, with the rest being duplicate, near-duplicate, outdated, or completely incorrect. Without taking steps to clean it up, contextualize it, and ensure it is properly accessible to the right people, your AI initiatives will flounder. The steps we detail below will enable you to implement Enterprise AI at your organization, minimizing the pitfalls and struggles many organizations have encountered while trying to implement AI.

1) Understand What You Mean by “Content” (Knowledge Asset Definition) 

In a previous blog, we discussed the many types of knowledge assets organizations possess, how they can be connected, and the collective value they offer. Identifying content, or unstructured information, as one of the types of knowledge assets to be included in your organization’s AI solutions will be a foregone conclusion for most. However, that alone is insufficient to manage scope and understand what needs to be done to ensure your content is AI-ready. There are many types of content, held in varied repositories, with much likely sprawling on existing file drives and old document management systems. 

Before embarking on an AI initiative, it is essential to focus on the content that addresses your highest priority use cases and will yield the greatest value, recognizing that more layers can be added iteratively over time. To maximize AI effectiveness, it is critical to ensure the content feeding AI models aligns with real user needs and AI use cases. Misaligned content can lead to hallucinations, inaccurate responses, or poor user experiences. The following actions help define content and prepare it for AI:

• Identify the types of content that are critical for priority AI use cases.
• Work with Content Governance Groups to identify content owners for future inclusion in AI testing. 
• Map end-to-end user journeys to determine where AI interacts with users and the content touchpoints that need to be referenced by AI applications.
• Inventory priority content across enterprise-wide source systems, breaking knowledge asset silos and system silos.
• Flag where different assets serve the same intent to flag potential overlap or duplication, helping AI applications ingest only relevant content and minimize noise during AI model training.

What content means can vary significantly across organizations. For example, in a manufacturing company, content can take the form of operational procedures and inventory reports, while in a healthcare organization, it can include clinical case documentation and electronic health records. Understanding what content truly represents in an organization and identifying where it resides, often across siloed repositories, are the first steps toward enabling AI solutions to deliver complete and context-rich information to end users.

2) Ensure Quality (Content Cleanup)

Your AI Model is only as good as what’s going into it. ‘Garbage in, garbage out’, ‘steady foundation’, ‘steady house’, there are any number of ways to describe that if the content going into an AI model lacks quality, the outputs will too. Strong AI starts with strong content. Below, we have detailed both manual and automated actions that can be taken to improve the quality of your content, thereby improving your AI outcomes. 

Content Quality

Content created without regard for quality is common in the everyday workflow. While this content might serve business-as-usual processes, it can be detrimental to AI initiatives. Therefore, it’s crucial to address content quality issues within your repositories. Steps you can take to improve content quality and accelerate content AI readiness include:

• Automate content cleanup processes by leveraging a combination of human-led and system-driven approaches, such as auto-tagging content for update, archival, or removal.
• Scan and index content using automated processes to detect potential duplication by comparing titles, file size, metadata, and semantic similarity.
• Apply similarity analysis to define business rules for deleting, archiving or modifying duplicate or near-duplicate content.
• Flag content that has low-use or no-use, using analytics.
• Combine analytics and content age to determine a retention cut-off (such as removing any content older than 2 years).
• Leverage semantic tools like Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to apply expert knowledge and determine the accuracy of content.
• Use NLP to detect overly complex sentence structure and enterprise specific jargon that may reduce clarity or discoverability.

Content Restructuring

In the blog, “Improve Enterprise AI with Semantic Content Management” we note that content in an organization exists on a continuum of structure depending on many factors. The same is true for the amount of content restructuring that may or may not need to happen to enable your AI use case. We recently saw with a client that introducing even just basic structure to a document improved AI outcomes by almost 200%. However, this step requires clear goals and prioritization. Oftentimes this part of ensuring your content is AI-ready happens iteratively as the model is applied and you can determine what level of restructuring needs to occur to best improve AI outcomes. Restructuring content to prepare it for AI involves activities such as:

• Apply tags, such as heading structures, to unstructured content to improve AI outcomes and enhance the end-user experience.
• Use an AI-assisted check to validate that heading structures and tags are being used appropriately and are machine readable, so that content can be ingested smoothly by AI systems.
• Simplify and restructure content that has been identified as overly complex and could result in hallucinations or unsatisfactory responses generated by the AI model.
• Focus on reformatting longer, text-heavy content to achieve a more linear, time-based, or topic-based flow and improve AI effectiveness. 
• Develop repeatable structures that can be applied automatically to content during creation or retroactively to provide AI with relevant content in a consumable format. 

In brief, cleaning up and restructuring content assets improves machine readability of content and therefore allows the AI model to generate stronger and more accurate outputs. To prioritize assets that need cleanup and restructuring, focus on activities and resources that will yield the highest return on investment for your AI solution. However, it is important to recognize that this may vary significantly across organizations, industries, and AI use cases. For example, an organization with a truly cross-functional use case, such as enterprise search, may prioritize deduplication of content to ensure information from different business areas doesn’t conflict when providing AI-generated responses. On the other hand, an organization with a more function-specific use case, such as streamlining legal contract review, may prioritize more hands-on content restructuring to improve AI comprehension.

3) Fill Gaps (Tacit Knowledge Capture)

Even with high-quality content, knowledge gaps that exist in your full enterprise ecosystem can cause AI errors and introduce the risk of unreliable outcomes. Considering your AI use case, the questions you want to answer, the discovery you’ve completed in previous steps, and the actions detailed below you can start to identify and fill gaps that may exist. 

Content Coverage 

Even with the best content strategy, it is not uncommon for different types of content to “fall through the cracks” and be unavailable or inaccessible for any number of reasons. Many organizations “don’t know what they don’t know”, so it can be difficult to begin this process. However, it is crucial to be aware of these content gaps, particularly when using LLMs to avoid hallucinations. Actions you may take to ensure content coverage and accelerate your journey toward content AI readiness include: 

• Leverage systems analytics to assess user search behavior and uncover content gaps. This may include unused content areas of a repository, abandoned search queries, or searches that returned no results. 
• Identify content gaps by using taxonomy analytics to identify missing categories or underrepresented terms and as a result, determine what content should be included.
• Leverage SMEs and other end users during AI testing to evaluate AI-generated responses and identify areas where content may be missing. 
• Use AI governance to ensure the model is transparent and can communicate with the user when it is not able to find a satisfactory answer.

Fill the Gap

Once missing content has been identified from information sources feeding the AI model, the real challenge is to fill in those gaps to prevent “hallucinations” and avoid user frustration that may be generated by incomplete or inaccurate answers. This may include creating new assets, locating assets, or other techniques identified which together can move the organization from AI to Knowledge Intelligence. Steps you may take to remediate the gaps and help your organization’s content be AI ready include:

• Use link detection to uncover relationships across the content, identify knowledge that may exist elsewhere, and increase the likelihood of surfacing the right content. This can also inform later semantic tagging activities.
• Identify, by analyzing content repositories, sources where content identified as “missing” could possibly exist.
• Apply content transformation practices to “missing” content identified during the content repository analysis to ensure machine readability.
• Conduct knowledge capture and transfer activities such as SME interviews, communities of practice, and collaborative tools to document tacit knowledge in the form of guides, processes, or playbooks. 
• Institutionalize content that exists in private spaces that aren’t currently included in the repositories accessed by AI.
• Create draft content using generative AI, making sure to include a human-in-the-loop step for accuracy. 
• Acquire external content when gaps aren’t organization specific. Consider purchasing or licensing third-party content, such as research reports, marketing intelligence, and stock images.

By evaluating the content coverage for a particular use case, you can start to predict how well (or poorly) your AI model may perform. When critical content mostly exists in people’s heads, rather than in documented, accessible format, the organization is exposed to significant risk. For example, an organization deploying a customer-facing AI chatbot to help with case deflection in customer service centers, gaps in content can lead to potentially false or misleading responses. If the chatbot tries to answer questions it wasn’t trained for, it could result in out-of-policy exceptions, financial loss, decrease in customer trust, or lower retention due to inaccurate, outdated, or non-existent information. This example highlights why it is so important to identify and fill knowledge gaps to ensure your content is ready for AI. 

4) Add Structure and Context (Semantic Components)

Once you have identified the relevant content for an AI solution, ensured its quality for AI, and addressed major content gaps for your AI use cases, the next step in getting content ready for AI involves adding structure and context to content by leveraging semantic components. Taxonomy and metadata models provide the foundational structure needed to categorize unstructured content and provide meaningful context. Business glossaries ensure alignment by defining terms for shared understanding, while ontology models provide contextual connections needed for AI systems to process content. The semantic maturity of all of these models is critical to achieve successful AI applications. 

Semantic Maturity of Taxonomy and Business Glossaries

Some organizations struggle with the state of their taxonomies when starting AI-driven projects. Organizations must actively design and manage taxonomies and business glossaries to properly support AI-driven applications and use cases. This is not only essential for short-term implementation of the AI solution, but most importantly for long-term success. Standardization and centralization of these models help balance organization-wide needs and domain-specific needs. Properly structured and annotated taxonomies are instrumental in preparing content for AI. Taking the following actions will ensure that you have the Semantic Maturity of Taxonomies and Business Glossaries needed to achieve AI ready content:

• Balance taxonomies across business areas to ensure organization-wide standardization, enabling smooth implementation of AI use cases and seamless integration of AI applications. 
• Design hierarchical taxonomy structures with the depth and breadth needed to support AI use cases.
• Refine concepts and alternative terms (synonyms and acronyms) in the taxonomy to more adequately describe and apply to priority AI content.
• Align taxonomies with usability standards, such as ANSI/NISO Z39.19, and interoperability/machine readability standards, such as SKOS, so that taxonomies are both human and machine readable.
• Incorporate definitions and usage notes from an organizational business glossary into the taxonomy to enrich meaning and improve semantic clarity.
• Store and manage taxonomies in a centralized Taxonomy Management System (TMS) to support scalable AI readiness.

Semantic Maturity of Metadata 

Before content can effectively support AI-driven applications, organizations must also establish metadata practices to ensure that content has been sufficiently described and annotated. This involves not only establishing shared or enterprise-wide coordinated metadata models, but more importantly, applying complete and consistent metadata to that content. The following actions will ensure that the Semantic Maturity of your Metadata model meets the standards required for content to be AI ready:

• Structure metadata models to meet the requirements of AI use cases, helping derive meaningful insights from tagged content.
• Design metadata models that accurately represent different knowledge asset types (types of content) associated with priority AI use cases.
• Apply metadata models consistently across all content source systems to enhance findability and discoverability of content in AI applications. 
• Document and regularly update metadata models.
• Store and manage metadata models in a centralized semantic repository to ensure interoperability and scalable reuse across AI solutions.

Semantic Maturity of Ontology

Just as with taxonomies, metadata, and business glossaries, developing semantically rich and precise ontologies is essential to achieve successful AI applications and to enable Knowledge Intelligence (KI) or explainable AI. Ontologies must be sufficiently expressive to support semantic enrichment, traceability, and AI-driven reasoning. They must be designed to accurately represent key entities, their properties, and relationships in ways that enable consistent tagging, retrieval, and interpretation across systems and AI use cases. By taking the following actions, your ontology model will achieve the level of semantic maturity needed for content to be AI ready:

• Ensure ontologies accurately describe the knowledge domain for the in-scope content.
• Define key entities, their attributes, and relationships in a way that supports AI-driven classification, recommendation, and reasoning.
• Design modular and extensible ontologies for reuse across domains, applications, and future AI use cases.
• Align ontologies with organizational taxonomies to support semantic interoperability across business areas and content source systems.
• Annotate ontologies with rich metadata for human and machine readability.
• Adhere to ontology standards such as OWL, RDF, or SHACL for interoperability with AI tools.
• Store ontologies in a central ontology management system for machine readability and interoperability with other semantic models.

Preparing content for AI is not just about organizing information, it’s about making it discoverable, valuable, and usable. Investing in semantic models and ensuring a consistent content structure lays the foundation for AI to generate meaningful insights. For example, if an organization wants to deliver highly personalized recommendations that connect users to specific content, building customized taxonomies, metadata models, business glossaries, and ontologies not only maximizes the impact of current AI initiatives, but also future-proofs content for emerging AI-driven use cases.

5) Semantic Model Application (Content Tagging)

Designing structured semantic models is just one part of preparing content for AI. Equally important is the consistent application of complete, high-quality metadata to organization-wide content. Metadata enrichment of unstructured content, especially across silo repositories, is critical for enabling AI-powered systems to reliably discover, interpret, and utilize that content. The following actions to enhance the application of content tags will help you achieve content AI readiness:

• Tag unstructured content with high-quality metadata to enhance interpretability in AI systems.
• Ensure each piece of relevant content for the AI solution is sufficiently annotated, or in other words, it is labeled with enough metadata to describe its meaning and context. 
• Promote consistent annotation of content across business areas and systems using tags derived from a centralized and standardized taxonomy. 
• Leverage mechanisms, like auto-tagging, to enhance the speed and coverage of content tagging. 
• Include a human-in-the-loop step in the auto-tagging process to improve accuracy of content tagging.

Consistent content tagging provides an added layer of meaning and context that AI can use to deliver more complete and accurate answers. For example, an organization managing thousands of unstructured content assets across disparate repositories and aiming to deliver personalized content experiences to end users, can more effectively tag content by leveraging a centralized taxonomy and an auto-tagging approach. As a result, AI systems can more reliably surface relevant content, extract meaningful insights, and generate personalized recommendations.

6) Address Access and Security (Unified Entitlements)

As Joe Hilger mentioned in his blog about unified entitlements, “successful semantic solutions and knowledge management initiatives help the right people see the right information at the right time.” But to achieve this, access permissions must be in place so that only authorized individuals have visibility into the appropriate content. Unfortunately, many organizations still maintain content in old repositories that don’t have the right features or processes to secure it, creating a significant risk for organizations pursuing AI initiatives. Therefore, now more than ever, it is important to properly secure content by defining and applying entitlements, preventing access to highly sensitive content by unauthorized people and as a result, maintaining trust across the organization. The actions outlined below to enhance Unified Entitlements will accelerate your journey toward content AI readiness:

• Define an enterprise-wide entitlement framework to apply security rules consistently across content assets, regardless of the source system.
• Automate security by enforcing privileges across all systems and types of content assets using a unified entitlements solution.
• Leverage AI governance processes to ensure that content creators, managers, and owners are aware of entitlements for content they handle and needs to be consumed by AI applications.

Entitlements are important because they ensure that content remains consistent, trustworthy, and reusable for AI systems. For example, if an organization developing a Generative AI solution stores documents and web content about products and clients across multiple SharePoint sites, content management systems, and webpages, inconsistent application of entitlements may represent a legal or compliance risk, potentially exposing outdated, or even worse, highly sensitive content to the wrong people. On the other hand, the correct definition and application of access permissions through a unified entitlements solution plays a key role in mitigating that risk, enabling operational integrity and scalability, not only for the intended Generative AI solution, but also for future AI initiatives.

7) Maintain Quality While Iteratively Improving (Governance)

Effective governance for AI solutions can be very complex because it requires coordination across systems and groups, not just within them, especially among content governance, semantic governance, and AI governance groups. This coordination is essential to ensure content remains up to date and accessible for users and AI solutions, and that semantic models are current and centrally accessible. 

AI Governance for Content Readiness 

Content Governance 

Not all organizations have supporting organizational structures with defined roles and processes to create, manage, and govern content that is aligned with cross-organizational AI initiatives. The existence of an AI Governance for Content Readiness Group ensures coordination with the traditional Content Governance Groups and provides guidance to content owners of the source systems on how to get content AI ready to support priority AI use cases. By taking the following actions, the AI Governance for Content Readiness Group will help ensure that you have the content governance practices required to achieve AI-ready content:

• Define how content should be captured and managed in a way that is consistent, predictable, and interoperable for AI use cases.
• Incorporate in your AI solution roadmap a step, delivered through the Content Governance Groups, to guide content owners of the source systems on what is required to get content AI ready for inclusion in AI models.
• Provide guidance to the Content Governance Group on how to train and communicate with system owners and asset owners on how to prepare content for AI.
• Take the technical and strategic steps necessary to connect content source systems to AI systems for effective content ingestion and interpretation.
• Coordinate with the Content Governance Group to develop and adopt content governance processes that address content gaps identified through the detection of bias, hallucinations, or misalignment, or unanswered questions during AI testing.
• Automate AI governance processes leveraging AI to identify content gaps, auto-tag content, or identify new taxonomy terms for the AI solution.

Semantic Models Governance

Similar to the importance of coordinating with the content governance groups, coordinating with semantic models governance groups is key for AI readiness. This involves establishing roles and responsibilities for the creation, ownership, management, and accountability of semantic models (taxonomy, metadata, business glossary, and ontology models) in relation to AI initiatives. This also involves providing clear guidance for managing changes in the models and communicating updates to those involved in AI initiatives. By taking the following actions, the AI Governance for Content Readiness Group will help ensure that your organization has the semantic governance practices required to achieve AI-ready content: 

• Develop governance structures that support the development and evolution of semantic models in alignment with both existing and emerging AI initiatives.
• Align governance roles (e.g. taxonomists, ontologists, semantic engineers, and AI engineers) with organizational needs for developing and maintaining semantic models that support enterprise-wide AI solutions.
• Ensure that the systems used to manage taxonomies, metadata, and ontologies support enforcing permissions for accessing and updating the semantic models.
• Work with the Semantic Models Governance Groups to develop processes that help remediate gaps in the semantic models uncovered during AI testing. This includes providing guidance on the recommended steps for making changes, suggested decision-makers, and implementation approaches.
• Work with the Semantic Models Governance Groups to establish metrics and processes to monitor, tune, refine, and evolve semantic models throughout their lifecycle and stay up to date with AI efforts.
• Coordinate with the Semantic Models Governance Groups to develop and adopt processes that address semantic model gaps identified through the detection of bias, hallucinations, or misalignment, or unanswered questions during AI solution testing.

For example, imagine an organization is developing business taxonomies and ontologies that represent skills, job roles, industries, and topics to support an Employee 360 View solution. It is essential to have a governance model in place with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and processes to manage and evolve these semantic models as the AI solutions team ingests content from diverse business areas and detects gaps during AI testing. Therefore, coordination between the AI Governance for Content Readiness Group and the Semantic Models Governance Groups helps ensure that concepts, definitions, entities, properties, and relationships remain current and accurately reflect the knowledge domain for both today’s needs and future AI use cases.  

Conclusion

Unstructured content remains as one of the most common knowledge assets in organizations. Getting that content ready to be ingested by AI applications is a balancing act. By cleaning it up, filling in gaps, applying rich semantic models to add structure and context, securing it with unified entitlements, and leveraging AI governance, organizations will be better positioned to succeed in their own AI journey. We hope after reading this blog you have a better understanding of the actions you can take to ensure your organization’s content is AI ready. If you want to learn how our experts can help you achieve Content AI Readiness, contact us at info@enterprise-knowledge.com. 

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Harnessing Project Cortex’s full power, however, will not be as simple as turning on a switch, and there are also pitfalls that could hamper its rollout at your organization. Below, you will find three actions you can take right now to maximize the usefulness of Project Cortex once it is enabled in your organization.

Tidy Up Your Content

One of Cortex’s main strengths and features is its ability to surface content – it can deliver contextual knowledge in the form of topic cards to users as they are working through various Microsoft 365 apps, including SharePoint, Teams, and Outlook. Cards will generally consist of a short description, a directory of related experts, and links to associated content. On many occasions, cards will be curated by knowledge managers, and often, these cards will also be generated automatically by AI. 

All too often, organizations and teams have their content in disarray: duplicates (or near duplicates) of content items, outdated information, or obsolete guidance are scattered throughout their sites. By cleaning up your content, you will make it easier for knowledge managers to load topic cards and topic pages with high-quality knowledge, and more importantly, reduce the risk that Cortex will display inaccurate and incomplete information when the AI automatically brings together associated content. Tidying up content is not magic, but it does take planning and effort. Like the old adage goes, garbage in, garbage out.

Maximize the Use of Taxonomies

Cortex will be smart enough to detect important terms in emails, uploaded documents, SharePoint pages, and other Microsoft 365 content. For each of these important terms, Cortex can create topic cards and topic pages automatically. However, we can help Cortex’s AI algorithm by teaching it which topics are important and relevant. We do so by creating a taxonomy of topics within Microsoft 365’s Managed Metadata Services. Say, for instance, a manufacturing company creates a taxonomy of their product offerings – Microsoft 365 would know to create a topic card and a topic page for each of their products, and surface product information for users as they read their emails or contribute to a Word document without having to interrupt their work. If you want better topic cards appearing on users’ screens as they work, then you need a well-designed taxonomy complementing Cortex’s AI capabilities.

In addition to powering topic cards and topic pages, the taxonomy will also serve as a common tagging scheme across Microsoft 365 apps including SharePoint, Word, OneDrive, Teams, and Yammer. Essentially, the Managed Metadata Services delivers on the promise of taxonomies by providing a layer that connects users to similar resources and to other experts on the topics relevant to their work. 

Set up the Right Levels of Access to your Content

Even though Project Cortex will excel at surfacing knowledge and documents, it will not do so indiscriminately. Indeed, it will respect each individual content item’s security and access policies. Users referencing a topic card or topic page will not be able to read nor gain entry to restricted documents or private conversations. The challenge organizations face is to find the balance between setting up access frameworks that are not too restrictive or too permissive, and creating a site architecture that allows the organization to implement these frameworks.

Finding a balance can be difficult. At one end of the spectrum, teams can be too risk-averse and feel overprotective of their content, restricting access to a fault and excluding others across the organization who would benefit from leveraging that content overprotective. Organizations may also set up their SharePoint sites, teams channels, etc., and their respective access to mimic their org chart – essentially replicating knowledge and information silos within Microsoft 365. For example, a project team may keep all of their expenses within a completely restricted document library – for somebody in accounting (who may have a valid reason to read and use this information) it may be impossible to access it. Regardless of the rationale behind limiting access, frameworks that are too restrictive may impair the delivery of useful knowledge to users who have a valid (and sometimes urgent) reason to reference it, thereby rendering the full power of Project Cortex and the Microsoft graph moot.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are frameworks that are completely open. There may be numerous reasons for this openness. Sometimes it may be a deliberate design to encourage knowledge-sharing and transparency, but on other occasions, openness may be a result of weak governance roles and procedures or the lack of guidance for site and content owners. Regardless of the underlying reasons for the lack of security, the risk in this scenario is that Cortex may prove too good at surfacing knowledge and deliver confidential or sensitive information to users who may not have the appropriate privileges to view it.

The right security and access framework will ensure that knowledge is shared with users who need it while protecting the organization’s sensitive information.

Conclusion

Project Cortex is one of the most exciting developments for Microsoft 365 in recent years. Its potential to empower organizations to leverage their own institutional knowledge is unlike anything Microsoft has ever released. Although it is just rolling out this year, and many organizations have had limited exposure to it so far, these three tips can help ensure that you hit the ground running once you enable it. You can start today no matter how far along your organization is with Microsoft 365.

Interested in making the most of your SharePoint and Microsoft 365 instance? Contact Enterprise Knowledge to learn more.

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As with any initiative regarding business content, we first need to understand the depth, breadth, and amount of content that exists, as well as some key information about the content itself. Starting with a high-level inventory, identify the content repositories (Document Management systems, file shares, Google Drive, SharePoint document libraries, CMS systems, etc.) and capture information about each piece of content using the key fields in the table below. If the content in scope for your current effort is somewhere in the range less than 1000 items, you can do so manually, using a spreadsheet with columns for each of these fields:

However, if you are faced with the haunting task of inventorying millions of content items, consider using tools to automate your process. Helpful tools would include a duplicate finder, disk space software, or content analysis tools (such as Duplicate File Detective, FolderSizes, TreeSizes, etc.).

If your content is complex or scattered across multiple libraries, sites, and systems, the concept of inventorying content items individually is enough to make anyone give up or lose momentum. Check to see if your CMS can generate a list of all items (documents, pages, etc.). Certain CMS solutions can also provide the majority of the information gathered in a typical content inventory.

Regardless of whether you will make a manual action or create rules to remove content that matches the characteristics from scope for migration or retainment, here is where the ROT analysis can help you shine.

In addition to the acronym coined by Zach Wahl, NERDy, the knowledge and information management community has oft spoken about content “ROT” and the importance of cleaning content. So what is ROT and how can we use yet another acronym to facilitate the clean-up and overall improvement of our business content?

ROT stands for:

To assess for content ROT, we can ask the following questions:

• Is this item Redundant?
  • Are there duplicates of the same item?
  • Can this information be found elsewhere?
• Is this item Outdated or Obsolete?
  • When was it last modified?
  • When was it last accessed?
  • Is the information within the item still relevant?
  • Is the information within the item accurate?
  • Is there a newer version?
  • Is the item subject to a retention schedule?
    • Has it met its retention period?
  • Is the item subject to a workflow or review and update process?
• Is this item Trivial?
  • Is this a business related item?
    • Or is it personal?
  • Is this a system generated file?
  • Is it a file extension other than .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, etc?

Then, consider making the following recommendations from the results of your high-level inventory:

• Maintain as-is: Content item is up-to-date, relevant, and meets and branding and editorial guidelines. No recommended action.
• Archive: Content item is no longer relevant. Recommendation is to archive or delete
  content item. This could mean leaving content that hasn’t been accessed in decades behind, or a more in-depth archival process.
• Update: Content item is relevant but inaccurate or doesn’t contain the most recent
  information. Recommendation is to update content item with most up-to-date information
  and/or ensure that the content item meets branding and editorial standards.

To track these recommended actions, you may want to include a few columns in your inventory spreadsheet to track the clean-up decisions you are recommending. These could be:

Now that we’ve identified which pieces of content should be maintained as-is, updated, or archived, it’s time to design content types, establish content governance, and create archival and/or deletion processes.

Do you need help strategically cleaning your content to prepare for a migration, a content strategy and governance plan design, or making your content more easily findable? Let us help.

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