We live in an era where organizations are collecting more information than ever before, making it difficult to harvest its value. To cut through the clutter and find that value, companies should consider the following questions: Does this information have a life cycle, and if so, in relation to what? Is all the information valuable? How do I quantify how much knowledge I have?
Given the nature of information – spread across multiple systems and silos in a variety of formats – many organizations skip an important first step: to look at the stewardship of content creation and usage. Advanced indexing technology allows organization’s employees to see across all of this information in a single, consolidated view that is relevant to the user’s context. By giving your entire organization this access, it will become evident which information is useful and what is not.
So what are the benefits of monitoring your organization’s content creation and usage?
- Removal of obsolete content and reducing content size – if your “bad data” has been removed, then more good data will be served up
- Faster, more accurate decision-making and problem-solving – obtaining higher levels of relevance
- Elevating the knowledge level of your organization – it is beneficial if everyone at your organization is using relevant data
- Time to contribution – if new employees are being served up relevant and useful content, training time will decrease
Now that we’ve discussed the value of this practice, here are some types of organizations that can really benefit from this collective knowledge accessibility:
- Organizations focused on increasing customer experience – ensuring the customer is being told the same information from all contacts within the company
- Customer Service organizations – self-service customers have no need to look elsewhere and service agents have an enhanced ability to handle inflow support questions without blockages when searching for information
- Engineering organizations – with the ability to leverage the collective design and innovation of your organization, engineers can stop re-inventing work that has already been done
- Consulting organizations – benefiting from easily accessible shared experiences and methodologies that work across the collective population remotely
When your organization can identify and take action on content in the way that it is most valuable, then you are allowing your content to become a differentiating asset versus simply being a repository of data – in turn, obtaining a great return on knowledge (ROK).
Has your organization determined which content is most valuable? How are you measuring a return on that knowledge?