rulerOne of the most common businesses phrases these days is “Content is King.” Knowledge workers in many organizations create new content and contribute to a company’s collective knowledge every day. But is this content measured by effectiveness? Are the measurement methods effective themselves? Is that content contributing to your knowledge management?

Many organizations measure content by usage – how many times content was used, who used the content, etc. This is especially common in customer service environments that are trying to provide information to resolve customer issues very quickly.

But this approach has its flaws. A large portion of corporate content is created for historical records, generating conversations, helping to drive policies or solving business issues. Most content gets created in the silos and personal networks that surround the curator. So even if this content had huge potential value, many people outside that close relationship network will never know that it exists. Its value goes down because no one is able to access it. It never contributes to overall knowledge management initiatives.

The two main barriers to measuring content’s effectiveness are accessibility and reporting. In addition to a lack of access to content, there’s an absence of solid guidelines to measure if this content is valuable.

Here are a few things to ask yourself when determining if a piece of content is valuable:

  1. Will I need to use this information again or will others find it useful?
  2. Who is the information being created for (who is the audience)?
  3. Does the audience know this information exists? Are there tangential audiences who would gain value from it?
  4. When the audience needs this information do they have an easy way to get to it?
  5. When the audience uses the document do they have a way to rate or rank it?
  6. Can you measure how many times the document gets used across multiple lines of business?
  7. Is there a clearly defined lifecycle for this document and is its lifecycle documented?
  8. Who owns the content should it need to be updated and is there an easy way to determine when it needs to be updated?

Coveo consolidates and normalizes the collective content of your organization, so you can get a sense of the value of this very important content and how it contributes to knowledge management initiatives. When content can be accessed effectively, it turns into that most valuable corporate asset, Knowledge.

Here is how Coveo transforms knowledge management initiatives:

  1. Easy autonomous and secure access to all the contextually relevant content based on your personal needs at any point in time. Coveo even recommends relevant content based on your own context.
  2. Connects the dots between related structured and unstructured content so you see the full view of the information you need.
  3. Connects the people best suited to help you understand this content via expertise finding; people are found through the content they create or contribute to.
  4. Provides two feedback mechanisms – ranking of the document so others can see if you found it valuable and managing the quality of the content (KCS Methodology) via dynamic tagging.
  5. Usage analytics, how often was this document used, by who, why and when – this information helps organizations promote good content, realize gaps in information and recognizes trends and people behaviors within specific roles.

Knowledge management initiatives are a core focus for many organizations, but they may be letting valuable content remain hidden. How does your enterprise-wide content contribute to knowledge management initiatives?