Iknow uses an approach called a “Content Audit” to uncover the full breadth of an organization’s content—where it is stored, how it is organized, and determine its role and value in business decision making. We typically cast a wide net to identify content in file stores and central repositories, content management systems, digital asset management systems, on personal hard drives, in a variety of paper formats located in employees’ offices, and in centralized corporate libraries.
We begin a Content Audit by conducting individual interviews, group interviews, and surveys and then develop a current-state assessment of an enterprise’s content based on these findings. We summarize this information in various tabular formats, information maps, and other effective visualizations.
Iknow usually identifies improvement opportunities on how content is created, accessed, and used. Our recommendations often cover:
- Consolidating content repositories to streamline and reduce IT costs
- Strengthening content classification through the use of taxonomies and metadata
- Implementing governance policies and procedures over the entire content lifecycle
- Increasing content and knowledge sharing
- Creating new content types, if relevant to the business
- Introduce a new enterprise content management (ECM) systems architecture.
Iknow’s primary deliverable is a Content Audit report. This report often includes:
- Current-state content assessment
- Future-state projections of enterprise content growth rates and future-state content management systems architecture
- Content management improvement recommendations.
A Content Audit is usually the first step in addressing an organization’s desire to “get their arms around” the explosion of business content. Companies cannot make intelligent decisions about how to manage their content without having a thorough inventory of their content and an assessment of its value.
The information in a Content Audit can be used as the basis for making strategic decisions regarding enterprise knowledge stewardship and operational decisions such as content cleansing and content enrichment. The Content Audit also is the foundation for risk mitigation related to content. For example, using out-of-date content can result in costly mistakes, so dated content should be purged. On the other hand, legacy content may need to be saved to comply with government regulations and, therefore, the disposition of the content must be carefully supervised and controlled.