The Solution

To support the creation of a taxonomy for the healthcare organization’s call center, EK facilitated a taxonomy design workshop with key stakeholders from the call center, consisting of several succinct sessions with dozens of participants from across the organization. In order to gain a better understanding of the healthcare organization’s current user needs, EK facilitated five different activities: a Personas Activity, a User Stories Activity, a Content Types Activity, a Metadata Fields Activity, and a Taxonomy Governance Activity, using the online whiteboard tools Mural and RetroTool. EK also facilitated guided discussions on Taxonomy, Core Workflows, and Content Governance. EK compiled these findings into a Taxonomy Workshop Report which contained our recommendations surrounding baseline taxonomy design, content types, and information architecture, as well as suggestions for content management and taxonomy governance, including a proposed taxonomy governance model. 

Following the delivery of the Taxonomy Workshop Report, EK held additional sessions with the company stakeholders to better understand their current content management and governance processes. To summarize these findings and analyses, EK delivered a Content Governance Plan which provided detailed recommendations on how the healthcare organization could effectively store and manage their content in the short- and long-term. More specifically, the Content Governance Report included a Content Governance Model with associated roles and responsibilities that aligned to governance and KM best practices; governance processes and workflows for adding, updating, and archiving content; a structure for content governance team meetings; preliminary content management best practices for formatting and tagging content; and recommended next steps for the healthcare company to ensure optimal value was being derived from their call center content.

The EK Difference

To garner buy-in from users, EK facilitated multiple sessions following the delivery of the Taxonomy Workshop Report to answer both technical and non-technical questions about the report itself, as well as how the taxonomy would actually function within the knowledge management platform. By engaging in conversation with call center stakeholders, EK was able to answer pointed questions about specific aspects of the taxonomy report that otherwise would not have been addressed, further streamlining acceptance and adoption and allowing us to communicate the value of the taxonomy in business terms to a wide and diverse user group. EK also incorporated this direct stakeholder feedback into the Content Governance Report, highlighting and providing strong evidence for the most important and meaningful components based on what was learned during the additional sessions. 

Additionally, EK leveraged our years of experience and subject matter expertise in taxonomies and content management consulting to tailor our workshop agenda and materials to the specific challenges being faced by the call center, ultimately delivering more applicable and actionable plans that align with both industry best practices and the strategic goals of the overarching organization.

The Results

During this 2-month effort, EK identified and defined the high-level, prioritized metadata fields for the taxonomy design, as well as the foundational structure for the information architecture and governance model necessary to support the KM platform implementation. Following the taxonomy work, EK also defined high-level content governance roles and responsibilities, as well as policies and procedures, to help the multinational healthcare organization maintain its content going forward. EK delivered all of this in a Taxonomy Workshop Report and Content Governance Report, and maintains a positive relationship with both the knowledge management platform and the healthcare organization to date. 

The post Taxonomy Workshop and Content Governance for a Multinational Healthcare Company appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Enterprise Knowledge CEO Zach Wahl was interviewed for the Support Automation Show, a podcast by Capacity, hosted by Justin Schmidt. In the podcast, Justin holds conversations with leaders in customer or employee support who are using technology to answer questions, automate processes, and build innovative solutions to any business challenge.

In Wahl’s appearance, he covers how Knowledge Management can support the maturation of customer service, help desks, and self-service, and covers topics including Content Governance, Knowledge Graphs, and Artificial Intelligence.

The podcast is available at https://podcasts.bcast.fm/e/qn0my3y8

The post Wahl Interviewed on The Support Automation Show Podcast appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Every organization has content/information that needs to be treated as confidential. In some cases, it’s easy to know where this content is stored and to make sure that it is secure. In many other cases, this sensitive or confidential content is created and stored on shared drives or in insecure locations that employees could stumble upon or hackers could take advantage of. Especially in larger organizations that have been in operation for decades, sensitive content and data that has been left and forgotten in unsecured locations is a common, high-risk problem. We call hidden and risky content ‘Phantom Data’ to express that it is often unknown or unseen and also has the strong potential to hurt your organization’s operations. Most organizations have a Phantom Data problem and very few know how to solve it. We have helped a number of organizations address this problem and I am going to share our approach so that others can be protected from the exposure of confidential information that could lead to fines, a loss of reputation, and/or potential lawsuits.

We’ve consolidated our recommended approach to this problem into four steps. This approach offers better ways to defend against hackers, unwanted information loss, and unintended information disclosures.

1. Identify a way to manage the unmanaged content.
2. Implement software to identify Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Personal Health Information (PHI).
3. Implement an automated tagging solution to further identify secure information.
4. Design ongoing content governance to ensure continued compliance.

Manage Unmanaged Content

Shared drives and other unmanaged data sources are the most common cause of the Phantom Data problem. If possible, organizations should have well-defined content management systems (document management, digital asset management, and web content management solutions) to store their information. These systems should be configured with a security model that is auditable and aligns with the company’s security policies.

Typically we work with our clients to define a security model and an information architecture for their CMS tools, and then migrate content to the properly secured infrastructure. The security model needs to align with the identity and access management tools already in place. The information architecture should be defined in a way that makes information findable for staff across business departments/units, but also makes it very clear as to where secure content should be stored. Done properly, the CMS will be easy to use and your knowledge workers will find it easier to place secure content in the right place.

In some cases, our clients need to store content in multiple locations and are unable to consolidate it onto a single platform. In these cases, we recommend a federated content management approach using a metadata store or content hub. This is a solution we have built for many of our clients. The hub stores the metadata and security information about each piece of content and points to the content in its central location. The image below shows how this works.

Once the hub is in place, the business can now see which content needs security and ensure that the security of the source systems matches the required security identified in the hub.

Implement PII and PHI Software

There are a number of security software solutions that are designed to scan content to identify PII and PHI information. These tools look at content to identify the following information:

• Credit card and bank account information
• Passport or driver’s license information
• Names, DOBs, phone numbers
• Email addresses
• Medical conditions
• Disabilities
• Relative information

These are powerful tools that are worth implementing as part of this solution set. They are focused on one important part of the Phantom Data issue, and can deliver a solution with out-of-the-box software. In addition, many of these tools already have pre-established connectors to common CMS tools.

Once integrated, these tools provide a powerful alert function to the existence of PII and PHI information that should be stored in more secure locations.

Implement an Automated Tagging Solution

Many organizations assume that a PII and PHI scanning tool will completely resolve the problem of finding and managing Phantom Data. Unfortunately, PII and PHI are only part of the problem. There is a lot of content that needs to be secured or controlled that does not have personal or health information in it. As an example, at EK we have content from clients that describes internal processes, which should not be shared. There is no personal information in it, but it still needs to be stored in a secure environment to protect our clients’ confidentiality. Our clients may also have customer or product information that needs to be secured. Taxonomies and auto-tagging solutions can help identify these files. 

We work with our clients to develop taxonomies (controlled vocabularies) that can be used to identify content that needs to be secured. For example, we can create a taxonomy of client names to spot content about a specific client. We can also create a topical taxonomy that identifies the type of information in the document. Together, these two fields can help an administrator see content whose topic and text suggest that it should be secured.

The steps to implement this tagging are as follows:

1. Identify and procure a taxonomy management tool that supports auto-tagging.
2. Develop one or more taxonomies that can be used to identify content that should be secured.
3. Implement and tune auto-tagging (through the taxonomy management tool) to tag content.
4. Review the tagging combinations that most likely suggest a need for security, and develop rules to notify administrators when these situations arise.
5. Implement notifications to content/security administrators based on the content tags.

Once the tagging solution is in place, your organization will have two complementary methods to automatically identify content and information that should be secured according to your data security policy.

Design and Implement Content Governance

The steps described above provide a great way to get started solving your Phantom Data problem. Each of these tools is designed to provide automated methods to alert users about this problem going forward. The solution will stagnate if a governance plan is not put in place to ensure that content is properly managed and the solution adapts over time.

We typically help our clients develop a governance plan and framework that:

• Identifies the roles and responsibilities of people managing content;
• Provides auditable reports and metrics for monitoring compliance with security requirements; and
• Provides processes for regularly testing, reviewing, and enhancing the tagging and alerting logic so that security is maintained even as content adapts.

The governance plan gives our clients step-by-step instructions, showing how to ensure ongoing compliance with data protection policies to continually enhance the process over time.

Beyond simply creating a governance plan, the key to success is to implement it in a way that is easy to follow and difficult to ignore. For instance, content governance roles and processes should be implemented as security privileges and workflows directly within your systems.

In Summary

If you work in a large organization with any sort of decentralized management of confidential information, you likely have a Phantom Data problem. Exposure of Phantom Data can cost organizations millions of dollars, not to mention the loss of reputation that organizations can suffer if the information security failure becomes public.

If you are worried about your Phantom Data risks and are looking for an answer, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

The post The Phantom Data Problem: Finding and Managing Secure Content appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

Working closely with the organization’s SMEs and system migration team, EK developed an enterprise taxonomy to serve as the nexus between content template design, content governance strategies, and a semantic search experience. Specifically: 

• EK redesigned and standardized content types to allow for the standardization of content in both quality and appearance. They benefit from defined taxonomies to both describe and tag the content.
• EK analyzed the organization’s content against 6 evaluation parameters to determine what content needed to be updated, archived, or maintained-as-is. This resulted in an actionable content inventory, clean-up, and migration plan for the organization to systematically clean-up their content before migration. 
• A semantic search user interface was developed to guide the user experience and allow users to more quickly take action on the information they’re looking for, leveraging benefits from both content types (to standardize quality and appearance) and taxonomies (to standardize the language of describing content).
• The taxonomy standardizes the language around content and information and facilitates content tagging, describing the quality of content in search results, and takes a user-facing form as interactive search filters/refiners.

The taxonomy was enhanced via a corpus analysis and auto-tagging process that extracted concepts from the organization’s content and recommend taxonomy terms to be applied to the content.

The EK Difference

After meeting with users representative of all business units at the organization, EK designed an enterprise taxonomy, accompanying architecture model, and governance plan to ensure the taxonomy stays representative of the company’s information and content on an ongoing basis. This initial taxonomy work guided the design of both content type definition and the search experience, as users will interact with this taxonomy to both describe, tag, and search for content.

As the primary goal of this project is to provide the organization with a strategy to ensure successful system migration, governance plans for both the taxonomy and state of content are integral to the success of this migration effort. At EK, our hands-on experience spanning from design to implementation allowed us to coherently define touchpoints across the taxonomy development effort, search and content type design, and a recommended content governance plan, while acknowledging and working within system constraints. We were able to develop a highly customized solution that fit perfectly within the organization’s existing technical landscape, increasing the rate of interactivity and trust between users and the system as information was both more findable and more easily accessed.

The Results

EK’s KM-oriented taxonomy, content, auto-tagging, and search strategies yielded the following benefits: 

• An 83% response rate for the taxonomy design activities ensured the taxonomy is reflective of the colloquial ways staff describe and talk about content;
• EK’s migration and cleanup plan identified that about 45% of their content (totaling 22,500 content items) were either outdated or obsolete and were identified as candidates for automatic archival without the need for additional manual efforts. This allowed the organization to shave the content that needed to be migrated by almost half and provided them with an actionable clean-up plan, including roles, responsibilities, and a timeline, that they could tackle before migrating content into the new system;
• The taxonomy was applied to content through a one-time auto-tagging process with an accuracy of 86-99% depending on the metadata field. This reduced the need for manual entry of metadata by auto-tagging 44% of all metadata fields and supporting search by making outputs of the taxonomy workstream immediately actionable, thus resulting in the increased findability of work resources; and
• The actionable content cleanup and governance strategy allowed for the identification of content items that were both ready for archiving and in need of review or updating, reducing the expected migration-related human effort by nearly 80%.

System-Migration-and-Enterprise-Search-Design-Powered-by-Enterprise-Taxonomy-Automated-Tagging-and-Content-GovernanceDownload

The post System Migration and Enterprise Search Design Powered by Enterprise Taxonomy, Automated Tagging, and Content Governance appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

People

The People factor is the one that is most important to first address in any content management effort, it involves the individuals and underlying culture that surround content management within an organization. People can include content creators, editors, and publishers, and culture can include the general attitudes and views that employees hold when creating and managing content. Common challenges our clients face when facing the People factor of content management include: 

• People are overly reliant on technologies and content repositories to store their information and documents without considering user-centric design elements that are needed for the technology to work effectively; 
• There are no defined roles, responsibilities, or processes in place for maintaining, organizing, and updating content. 
• There are no systems of recognition or reward for those who make meaningful efforts to create and maintain content to encourage good behaviors and adherence to best practices; and 
• The common cultural attitudes towards content are not recognized or seen as having an impact on the organization as a whole. 

These challenges can make it difficult for organizations to keep their content up to date, applicable, and organized. It also means that employees rarely take the initiative to organize their own content as it isn’t promoted across all levels of the organization. In order to help alleviate these challenges, I often recommend the following: 

• Promote the maintenance of content by clearly communicating the benefits to content creators, managers, and consumers;
• Provide staff with the opportunities and guidelines to integrate content and knowledge management into their daily tasks in order to ensure  collective buy-in and active upkeep of content;
• Facilitate working sessions, meetings, and leverage other communication methods to help people recognize that content repositories are places to foster organizational learning and maintain institutional knowledge, even among colleagues that they don’t interact with on a day to day basis, not just giant folders in which to throw documents for storage purposes;
• Define roles and assign clear responsibilities to employees for creating and managing their content;
• Train employees so that they understand what they are expected to do to perform content management and how they can do it successfully; and 
• Create a recognition system such as an easily accessible dashboard that shows who has updated content most recently. This can visualize the work people have done and encourage other users to participate, especially those who want to be recognized for the work they are doing within a new system to tag, upload, or share content, and need to know that their work contributes not only to their own success, but to the success of others.

It is important for organizations to provide their staff with better opportunities to manage their content and change their attitudes towards content management. For example, a principal revenue collection agency was facing challenges keeping their content up to date and easy to find, which resulted in staff frustrations and slow response times by call agents. EK helped to design a plan that helped to standardize the way information is captured and managed in SharePoint, as well as better provide staff with the training and abilities to maintain their old and newly created content which resulted in greater efficiency and decreased in time finding applicable content during high-pressure calls from citizens.

Content

In order to implement proper content management, an organization must know the type of content that lives within all their KM systems, or within the systems they prioritize for change. The term “content” can apply to a wide array of information, and any knowledge that is written, stored, and readily accessed (such as knowledge articles, blogs, podcasts, presentations, etc). The content factor can feel the most daunting due to the following challenges: 

• Organizations do not know what content exists, where it exists, or whether it is up to date;
• There are no content creation and editing processes and procedures in place, and if they do exist, staff are not trained or aware of the proper processes; 
• There is no standardized approach as to which metadata needs to be completed to describe, structure, and manage content in a consistent manner; and
• Content management is not embedded in daily practices and is often seen as an extra task for employees, meaning it is consistently deprioritized.

Organizations need structures in place to maintain and govern their content. Without it, content enters the cycle of being created, duplicated, becoming outdated, and then remaining in the system in which it was originally placed. The following solutions can begin to address an organization’s content management challenges:

• Conduct an in-depth content inventory and analysis to identify and map the content critical to the organization. This analysis should be highly detailed and cover many areas of the organization and topics in order to give those on any content management initiative an accurate starting point. This can also lead to the prioritization of content that needs to be addressed first in following content management initiatives; 
• Design and implement content types, which can lead to structural guidelines and easy content creation for employees, ensuring that content stays consistent. 
• Designing and implementing a taxonomy, which can be used to tag content the same way throughout the enterprise and allow content to be more searchable and findable; and 
• Create and socialize content governance guidelines that include processes for editing, uploading, and publishing content. These guidelines should include a process to check content on a regular basis for accuracy and consistency. 

Conducting content analyses and inventory assessments are important to help organizations what they’ve got, what’s working, and what’s not. For instance, a leading Fortune 500 Company had an excess of outdated, siloed, and hard to find content, which put an increased burden on staff trying to find the content to do their jobs. EK performed a detailed and extensive content inventory across the organization’s main content repositories in order to assess their state of content. As a result of the content inventory, EK was able to provide the organization with short- and long-term actions they can take to mitigate the risk of duplicate and outdated content and ensure that staff have confidence that they are accessing the right content at the point of need.

Technology

The last piece to the effective implementation of content management is technology. Although technology can be the most appealing or tangible element of content management, it’s important to view it as an enabling factor rather than an end unto itself. Without the previously discussed foundations in place to support people, culture, and content, your organization will likely not realize the full benefit of new tools. Technology should enable and empower people to do their day to day work while ensuring they can seamlessly maintain their content and apply best practices, while avoiding common KM technology mistakes. 

Organizations often face the following technology challenges: 

• Different parts of the organization prefer different tools and systems, and there are no overarching guidelines in place for selecting and implementing new technologies; 
• Technologies used by the organization are siloed and don’t interact with one another. If a change is made to content in one system, the same content housed in a different system remains unchanged; 
• Employees don’t have a common or integrated content management system, so information is either siloed into limited access folders or stored on personal computers and file systems; and 
• Employees use different technological tools on a day to day basis, but these tools are not integrated well with proper content management guidelines and practices.

Organizations should take an integrated approach to technology, investigating the dynamic ways in which they can integrate search, content management, metadata management, and a taxonomy, which will give them an extremely robust system and foundation upon which content can be built and accessed. Technologies enable content improvement and allow the cultural and content changes being implemented to be successful. The following solutions can help organizations successfully integrate technology with content management strategies:

• Consolidating systems or creating new avenues for information to flow between existing systems;
• Implement a “Headless” Content Management System (CMS) that is focused on the creation and accessibility of content despite the source platform;
• Integrating repositories with an enterprise search interface that makes finding content intuitive and user-friendly, helping overcome content silos; 
• Define and apply usage metrics and other analytics, which can help provide constant feedback to content teams and help them learn ways to improve the accessibility and usability of content;
• Implement additional solutions that will integrate content repositories through a metadata hub that creates a “single source of truth” for all content and  allows content to be surfaced and reused; and
• Designing artificial intelligence solutions based on ontologies and knowledge graphs to improve content findability and discoverability by enabling content recommendations, chatbots, and other advanced semantic features. 

Integrating content management with new or existing technologies at organizations is an important step in the content management process. The learning team for an international retailer was struggling to search for, find, and deliver learning content to in-store associates due to not having a standardized taxonomy. EK partnered with the organization to assess the current state and define the target state of the retailer’s content management maturity, which ultimately resulted in a fully customized, iterative, task-based content management strategy, implementation roadmap, and KM systems architecture to help the learning team achieve their target state. The KM systems architecture design featured recommendations to leverage new and existing technologies including a metadata management hub, taxonomy management system, knowledge graph, and search engine. This plan results in greater technical capabilities and content management maturity for this organization and will rapidly improve their staff’s efficiency and their content’s findability. 

The path to creating a robust technological environment for content varies depending on the organization, but the philosophy behind it should always remain the same: technology exists to amplify content efforts, provide structure and support processes, and help reinforce good content management behaviors. 

Conclusion

If implemented right, an organization can expect to see the following outcomes from a content management initiative: 

• Content becomes findable and the systems are easy to navigate;
• Out of date content is updated regularly or is removed until it can be updated, reviewed, and/or deleted;
• Employees know what the systems are used for and are confident in the accuracy of content and the information they find within the systems;
• Staff know their roles regarding content, and have a collective buy in to the benefits of proper content system management;
• Systems are integrated with one another, allowing for expanded accessibility and usability of content;
• Content is consolidated where it can be accessed by the people who need to access it, and content that is intended to be restricted access follows similar or even the same governance rules to maintain consistency across a system and ultimately the enterprise. 

Understanding the changes that need to be made to the workstreams of People, Content, and Technology can allow an organization to work towards a more mature and robust content management environment. This will promote employee satisfaction, reduce time searching for content, and create a more effective and collaborative work environment at any organization. If you’re interested in starting on the path to more effective content management, implementing a content management system, or have questions, contact us at EK.

The post Three Important Factors to Consider for Implementing Effective Content Management appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

When talking with our clients about their knowledge management needs, we frequently hear examples like this that highlight the importance of accessing information at the time of need so that staff can do their jobs efficiently. Oftentimes staff members can’t quickly find the content they need, or they’re sifting through outdated, unusable information, or the content may not even exist. 

It is important to note that accessing information at the time of need is only the end component of the larger process. In order to make accessing the content possible, it must first be captured in a meaningful format so that others may act on it. For many organizations, this is such a broad challenge, they don’t know where to begin even when they know they’re suffering from the results of poor content capture.

In these cases, we guide organizations to approach this strategically, focusing on capturing the highest value content in order to make a seemingly insurmountable challenge achievable. The first step in this approach is to identify important moments when key content is created, before finally capturing that valuable content in a consistent way at the time of creation and making it accessible across the organization. The key is starting small and identifying these high value moments of content capture.

How Do We Identify High Value Moments of Content Capture?

So, you’ve decided to start small and standardize your content capture behind a high value moment. How do you figure out when these moments occur in your business cycles?

EK’s approach to content capture does not revolve around a piece of content, but instead around what event triggers the creation of the piece of content. These high value moments are key moments in your company’s business processes or cycles. To put it simply, consider the moments when your company is at its highest point, and when your team is coming together to celebrate. Think about the times when you pop open a bottle of champagne.

In a pharmaceutical company, these moments might be getting approval for a study from the government or the conclusion of a successful clinical trial. For a real estate company, these moments might be closing a large deal with a client, starting development on a new building, or launching a new service.

Publicly-traded companies, on the other hand, are often defined by the moments their stock price rises and falls. Evaluate the moments when your stock rises exponentially and identify the patterns of activities that led to this rise. These activities are your high value moments of content capture. 

One of EK’s own personal high value moments is at the close of a project. Our EK Rockstars take advantage of this high value moment to not only celebrate our successes, but ensure that essential pieces of content are effectively preserved.

Successfully identifying these high value moments of content capture is important because at these specific moments, an individual or team is taking an action and consciously or unconsciously drafting a plan to move forward. Knowledge should be captured at the moment it is created, as these moments are when opinions are shaped and when the content is the most relevant in context. This allows more of the tacit knowledge, or knowledge shaped by experiences that often lives in an individual’s head, to be effectively captured as well. During the time of creation, an individual can most efficiently and appropriately capture the implicit ideas and stories around a piece of content, such as: Why is this information important? What is the story behind this piece of content? Why or why was it not successful? Incorporating this information into the capture of the content ensures it is not lost over time. The tacit knowledge behind a piece of content gives other staff members key information and context through which to apply the content to their own needs down the line.

How Do We Capture the Content at These High Value Moments?

Now that you’ve identified your company’s high value moments of content capture, how do you institutionalize a consistent practice of content creation and preservation around this moment? Use the following considerations to implement the process:

1. Include Highly-involved Individuals
2. Standardize Workflow
3. Set Expectations
4. Embed Processes

1. Include Highly-involved Individuals

First, think about the people who are the most involved in generating knowledge associated with the important moment. The knowledge derived from these individuals comes in two main forms: structured content and tacit knowledge from experience. It is essential that both of these types of knowledge are captured for

 the high value moment. Interview the staff members you have identified to be highly involved. Take account of what pieces of content they are producing associated with the high value moment, and ask them about what may not be captured in the content itself, such as the story and context behind a deliverable and why it was or was not successful. Depending on insight from your highly-involved individuals, the types of content you decide to capture may range from project deliverables to meeting notes to lessons learned. 

At the close-out of a project at EK, the key pieces of knowledge formulated by the team members highly involved in the project include lessons learned. EK Rockstars take advantage of the high value moment of a project close-out to not only preserve and store final deliverables in a consistent format, but also gather all project members together to hold a retrospective to capture lessons learned and areas for improvement to be preserved for future reference. This retrospective allows the project members to reflect on the significance of the project, recording the tacit knowledge that will be essential for future teams to improve upon past performances.

2. Standardize Workflow

Next, think about the workflow of the creation and preservation of content during these high value moments and begin their standardization. For each piece of knowledge created during the high value moment, you should be able to clearly answer the following items: what the knowledge is, where this knowledge is stored (i.e. in what system), who is responsible for capturing it, when it should be captured, and why it is important to do so. 

To standardize the process, there are many tools and techniques to consider. Content types present a strong benefit, in both templating a key piece of knowledge, but also applying consistent metadata so that the content can be surfaced in search and located via browsing. When you map out exactly what the pieces of knowledge associated with the moment should look like, as well as what metadata should be applied, this content will be uniformly preserved any time the high value moment occurs. Additionally, you may consider developing a tool as simple as a checklist. In this way, following the high value moment, staff members will know exactly what they need to capture and how. 

Since high value moments often mirror decision-making moments and the time of need for other staff who will be searching for or creating similar content in the future, it is thus important that staff actively work to capture and preserve their content and knowledge in a standardized fashion accessible to others. When staff get into the habit of capturing their content in a consistent way at the time it is created, it will become more of a given that content will then be available to them at their time of need.

3. Set Expectations

Within this process, it is essential that expectations are clear regarding who is responsible for each step of the process. Someone must own each step, whether it is the individual most involved in the moment, or another specified individual, such as in the business development team. These tasks must be built into the responsibilities involved in the project or high value moment. Furthermore, the expectations should be included in job roles and discussed in performance reviews to ensure their effective completion. 

4. Embed Processes

Overall, it is essential that the standardization of the content capture process is embedded into existing processes at your company. Content authors do not want to feel like they need to go through countless steps in order to complete one task. Consider ways to integrate workflows for writing, saving, and updating content in existing systems and tools.

For example, at EK, we recognized the need for a comprehensive team space in which to write and develop our thought leadership. Upon the creation of this team space, each team member can now work in an environment where the technology enables our collaboration, and there is no need to create final copies of the content in a separate location. The technology and content types we created enable a seamless workflow.

When this process becomes a clear, integral part of an organization or team’s content workflows, accessible knowledge throughout the organization is no longer reliant on knowledge contributors sharing their knowledge when they have time or when it is convenient to them. Identifying these high value moments and encouraging content capture at the very moment it is created both increases the knowledge available to all and furthers collective ownership of KM practices.

How Do We Evaluate the Successful Completion of the Process?

After creating and implementing a standardized workflow for capturing the content, you should evaluate the quality of your content capture process and the content that has been captured to date. How can you ensure that you are, in fact, successfully capturing key content? At its core, following a high value moment, the validation consists of evaluating whether all the key content has been successfully preserved in the standardized format you previously defined. Is the content located in the central location that was specified? Are all of the correct metadata tags applied, such as client name, subject area, and project type? Are the individuals responsible for the content creation, upload, and updates performing their roles? The point of this exercise is not to get the whole process perfect each time. Start identifying patterns around what is working and what is not working, and analyze if there are specific teams or groups for which this process is working more effectively than others. In this way, you can begin identifying opportunities for growth and adaptation to your staff’s needs. 

Closing

High value moments of content capture represent important opportunities for your company to effectively and consistently preserve the content you need for success. Without a consistent method and plan for capturing this essential content, there is no guarantee staff will be able to access information at their future times of need.

Do you need help identifying your company’s high value moments and better capturing content at these points in your business cycles? EK is here to help. Please contact us to learn more. 

The post High Value Moments of Content Capture appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

First, let’s describe what an orchestra is. An orchestra is an ensemble of instruments that includes woodwind, brass, string, and percussion sections. A group of musicians performs various pieces of music with these instruments, creating a captivating experience for an audience. Under the direction of the conductor, everyone needs to play music in harmony to ensure that the audience enjoys the music performance. An orchestra performance is an example of leadership, collaboration, coordination, learning, and exemplary execution, a lot like the characteristics needed to successfully manage knowledge in any organization. 

For the purpose of this blog, organizational content is the equivalent of the music that is delivered by an orchestra to the target audience. Let’s take a look at how similar content management is to an orchestra performance.

Orchestra Performance
Content Management
Music
Organizational Content
Conductor	Instruments	Musicians	Music Sheet	Audience
Content Lead	Content Types	Content Authors and Content Owners	Business Taxonomy	End Users (internal or external)

The Conductor (Content Lead)

An orchestra conductor has a vision of how the orchestra should sound when playing each piece of music. The conductor keeps an orchestra in time and together, lets each musician know their time of entry, and is able to give each musician direction about what they should be doing at any given moment during the performance. One of the main responsibilities of a conductor is to fully understand each piece of music and effectively communicate to the musicians so that they understand it completely, which is mostly done with gestures and the aid of a baton. Additionally, by being readily available to the musicians prior to the performance as well as visible from a podium during the performance, the conductor ensures that the communication channels with all orchestra members are effective at any given time (e.g. during rehearsal, on stage, etc.).

Similarly to an orchestra conductor, a Content Lead needs to have not only a clear vision of all key content areas in the organization, but also the ability to effectively communicate with content authors and content owners, so that they can create, tag, and maintain quality content. Defining a content governance plan, a taxonomy governance plan, and identifying effective communication channels and tools (what would be the gestures and the baton for the orchestra conductor) are essential to transfer that content management vision to content authors and content owners successfully. Examples of communication channels and tools may include recurring group meetings, one-on-one discussions, centralized content repositories, portals, and any other tools that can help govern content and taxonomies consistently. 

The Instruments (Content Types)

From the lively and sparkling sounds of violins to the dry and rattling sounds of percussion instruments, the graceful and clear sounds of a flute to the vibrant brass sections, listening to all the instruments playing together and in harmony in an orchestra is an impressive musical spectacle. Each instrument has a different appearance, a different purpose, and requires a specific technique to be played. They all produce different sounds that when put together, produce a magnificent piece of music. 

Even though content types are not as graceful as musical instruments, in content management, content types represent types of instruments, each with a purpose to create and manage a specific type of content. Content types are like templates for categories of content with corresponding taxonomies that allow managing information in a centralized, reusable way. Some content types are designed to create announcements, others to create corporate policies, but together, all content types help communicate key organizational content to the end users in a standard and consistent way. 

The Musicians (Content Authors and Content Owners)

Without exception, successful orchestras around the world have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. If the conductor has done a good job communicating the expectations of the musical performance to the musicians, and the musicians have mastered playing their own instruments, then they can play their instruments accordingly and transmit a unified vision of the music to the audience. Every musician must not only follow the same set of music sheets, but also understand their own role, the roles of their fellow musicians, and when the handoffs need to take place during the performance. 

Similarly, in content management, the content authors and content owners are like the musicians. They are tasked with very specific roles, in this case to create, tag, manage, and disseminate organizational content. If they have a good understanding of the organization’s content management objectives and have the knowledge management skills needed to perform their roles, they can effectively create and maintain organizational content, communicating a clear and unified vision of the content to the end users. In the same way that musicians spend time practicing and learning the skills to master their instruments, content authors and content managers need to clearly understand how to leverage content types and taxonomy to create and manage content and master the skills needed to meet their content management responsibilities.

The Music Sheet (Business Taxonomy)

In an orchestra, even though every instrument gets their own music sheet, the conductor gets a full score, or in other words, a music sheet that contains the musical notation for all instruments, so that the whole orchestra starts playing together at the same time and performs at the same tempo throughout the performance. 

An enterprise taxonomy represents that standard point of reference that can help orchestrate organizational content, so that content authors and content managers can ultimately leverage content types and taxonomy together to collaborate and produce consistently tagged, high-quality content.

The Audience (End Users)

Focusing on a particular target audience when planning and rehearsing for a performance helps musicians connect with their audience during the actual performance. Who is the audience? What is the music really trying to convey to the audience? From behind their music stands, the musicians sitting nearest the audience typically sit at a diagonal facing partly toward the conductor and partly toward the audience, so that the audience can be more engaged. Those in the front rows can look at the musicians closely, see them smile at the end of each musical piece, and more naturally react to the music with joy.  

In content management, learning about your audience is indispensable to serve end users with the content they need, when they need it. Depending on the type of organizational content and where it will be displayed (e.g. Intranet, portal, dashboard, etc.), your audience may be internal, such as employees, or external, including customers, partners, and even prospective groups. Understanding your audience means gaining a clear understanding of their motivations, needs, goals, and challenges, so that the content is delivered in a manner that meets their content needs, resonates with them, and appeals to them. The use of personas and user stories help organizations move from knowing their audience to most importantly, understanding their audience and delivering timely, targeted content. In the same way that a venue may solicit feedback from the attendees to identify how well received the orchestra performance was, there are multiple approaches that organizations can take to measure the effectiveness of their content and identify whether the content is performing as expected. Only if content is measured, it can be managed and improved.   

Conclusion

By helping your organization focus on these five elements, you could find yourself delivering an exemplary knowledge management performance alongside a content management team that earns a standing ovation. Next time you go to an orchestra performance, and while you enjoy the music, try closing your eyes and think about all that was required to make that performance happen. 

Need help with orchestrating your organization’s content management journey? Contact us.  

The post Five things that Content Management and an Orchestra Performance Have in Common appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

For those who are unfamiliar with the World Cup, each soccer team (or “football” team, if you are outside of the US) fields 11 players, and broadly speaking, each team is composed of a mix of attackers, defenders, midfielders, and a goalie. Ideally, a team brings together players that fit into their soccer philosophy (I.e. their approach to the sport, and the play style that defines their team), players whose skills complement their teammates’, and players who are willing to put their own interests aside in search for a larger objective: bring home the cup. 

Similarly, every effective content governance process requires a team. We can call it a Governance Council, a Governance Board, or whatever fits best with your organization’s language. No matter the name, this is the decision-making body that shapes content strategy and oversees content operations with a single objective: helping the organization’s knowledge workers achieve their goals through content. In this case,”bringing home the cup” may include helping a customer find the perfect gift for their loved one, providing the help-desk agent with some relief by maintaining an accurate and up-to-date self-service knowledge base, or making it easier for a new employee to navigate the organization’s HR bureaucracy.

The first key to better governance is choosing the right people to bring into the Governance Council. This involves ensuring that your key players possess diverse profiles and can bring a variety of skills and experiences to the table. In soccer, this diversity translates to wanting both offensive and defensive players: Perhaps strikers who are good at heading balls in from set plays, offensive midfielders who can dribble past defensive lines, wingers who can outpace any defender, a strong defender who can stop any offensive play, and finally a goalkeeper with cat-like reflexes. Similarly, for content governance purposes, we need a variety of members who can provide their expertise and advocate for their users’ needs. Having diverse voices on the Governance Council stops it from becoming an echo chamber, avoids groupthink, and lays the foundation for the rest of the governance work. So, who needs to be a part of this team?

We can categorize participants in two classes: Our business stakeholders and our core support group.

The core support group is composed of experts in diverse fields, such as communications, user experience (UX), search, and IT. As the name suggests, it is the core support group’s main task to support the content strategy – processes such as authoring, tagging, systems integration, searching, and defining workflows fall under their core responsibilities. These experts can talk to the capabilities and limitations of the organization’s systems and processes. 

The organizational stakeholders are representatives of units from around the organization whose interests lie in having good, quality content. Content enables them to achieve their objectives. This may be to engage with their target audience, it may heighten their visibility across the organization, or help their employees be more efficient in their jobs. It is important that organizational stakeholders have been empowered to make content-related decisions on behalf of the unit they represent. Moreover, it is important that they feel ownership over their section of the site, so that they can claim responsibility over the content and can be held accountable for keeping the site relevant, informative, and up-to-date. This responsibility and accountability provides additional leverage when requesting new features for the site because it signals a business need, and thus, establishes a direct relationship between decisions about the content platform and business benefits.

Finally, every team needs a good captain. Good captains set the tone for their team, they support their teammates, and they make sure that every member is doing their part to play according to the strategy to ultimately win the game. For Content Governance, the team captain is the Content Strategy Owner. The content strategy owner steers every individual’s efforts towards the vision and the goals that the organization is delivering through its content strategy.

A significant amount of the work that occurs within this governing body revolves around conversations. Conversations allow us to collectively make sense of the content needs and challenges, achieve a shared understanding of the work that needs to happen, and align our various priorities. The Content Strategy Owner ensures that the Governance Council is having the right conversations at the right times, with the right inputs. In Part 2 of this blog series, you will be able to learn what inputs your team will need to accomplish their goals.

Do you need help defining a content strategy and governance at your organization? Let’s continue the conversation. Contact us at info@enterprise-knowledge.com and tell us more.

The post The Importance of Content Governance, Part I: Enhancing Content Governance By Involving the Right People appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

” However, even the best content requires the proper level of care and attention in order to remain great. Governance provides support for content to grow and evolve so that it continually benefits the organization. 

For many, Content Governance is a difficult topic to approach, as some find it to be dry and cumbersome. While Governance might not be the most exciting part of a content management strategy,  it is critical in ensuring that a content strategy continues to create value over time by adapting to an organization’s changing landscape and priorities. Talking about the value delivered by governance can be hard to do, but it is easier if we take a different approach and talk about what happens in the absence of content governance:

• No consistency in the quality of the content. There may be some exceptionally good content, but there may also be some really poorly written content.
• Duplicates… duplicates everywhere. Duplicates and near duplicates seem to sprout out from every section of the site. Folks are re-inventing the wheel constantly.
• Check-box content. Content is created for creation’s sake. New content is a box to be checked and a chore. 
• The site is overrun with zombie content. There is obsolete content out there that just refuses to die. What’s worse is that this out-of-date may infect newer content with inconsistencies and outdated information.
• Finger-pointing and finger-wagging. There is no real accountability, no clear responsibilities, and everyone just blames the next person.
• Audiences riding in the blind-spot. Segments of the site’s audiences are not considered or simply excluded and the decisions around content can run them over.

Does this sound familiar?

Content Governance defines a framework for working with content. It provides strategic direction to content initiatives and steers the organization’s efforts towards achieving its vision. Investing a little time in defining a governance plan goes a long way in ensuring that the content that exists across a department or an organization is engaging, consistent, and continuously satisfying users’ needs well into the future.

Content Governance, however, is not only about making rules and establishing policies. Focusing too heavily on rule-making can calcify content operations if they are not properly aligned to organizational priorities and content needs, and they can spark conflict if stakeholders’ concerns are not holistically addressed. 

In my upcoming blog series, I will discuss how Content Governance is enhanced by opening spaces for conversations and facilitating decision-making. Each article will focus on one of the three key elements that is required to make this happen:

Part One: Involve the Right People

Part Two: Provide Meaningful Inputs

Part Three: Encourage Action

Do you need help defining a content strategy and governance at your organization? Let’s continue the conversation. Contact us at info@enterprise-knowledge.com and tell us more.

The post The Importance of Content Governance, An Introduction appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.