Content Strategy

Content Migration and Enrichment

A common challenge in most knowledge management initiatives is the migration of digital content from legacy repositories into a newly launched, enterprise content management (ECM) or digital asset management (DAM) system. Because of the large numbers of assets in legacy repositories and databases, this activity can often be one of the most costly and time-consuming parts of a KM system implementation.

Business Value

Content cleansing, consolidation, and migration help organizations better manage their content and lower storage and related software costs. Content enrichment, when combined with enhancements to enterprise search software, greatly improves the findability of digital assets.

Deliverables

Iknow’s deliverables from Content Migration and Enrichment projects typically include:

  • A content migration plan, including recommended tools used to execute the migration.
  • A content enrichment plan.
  • Implementation assistance for performing content migration and content enrichment tasks.

Content Governance and Lifecycle Management

Content governance and lifecycle management are the policies, practices, and procedures that ensure that an organization’s available content is timely, accurate, and relevant. Content governance helps create trust in the information so that employees can use it with confidence.

Business Value

A strong and well-managed program for content governance and content lifecycle management is key to ensuring that content shared across the organization is valuable and relevant to end users.

Deliverables

Iknow’s primary deliverables for Content Governance and Lifecycle Management include:

  • Content governance strategy, which includes detailed descriptions of how each major content type is handled, from creation through expiration. Specifically, this description, or map, would show who creates it, how the content is approved for use, and who the intended content consumers are.
  • The roles and resources required to implement content governance policies and practices.
  • A risk mitigation plan that addresses security, privacy and confidentiality, and other concerns that relate to the safeguarding of content.
  • Implementation assistance.

External Content Strategy, Sourcing, and Rights Management

Iknow offers a full set of services to help organizations evaluate, acquire, and manage their external content sources.

Business Value

Making sure you have the right flow of external information into your organization is critical to success. Too much and you become paralyzed (and waste resources); too little and you make uninformed decisions.

Deliverables

Iknow offers a full suite of services around external content acquisition, rationalization, and maintenance, including:

  • External content strategy.
  • Source identification—finding and evaluating new sources of content.
  • Source rationalization—helping organizations optimize their spending on the “right” content sources.
  • Contract negotiation—helping you get the best prices and contract terms.
  • Business process design/redesign and optimization. Making sure the content reaches and is used by decision makers.
  • Implementation assistance.

Content Strategy Development

Because much of an organization’s knowledge is codified in the form of content, the content strategy is a core element of any good knowledge management program. The business goal of a content strategy is to put the right content into the hands of the right people to help them make better decisions and work more effectively.

Business Value

A content strategy is essential for successfully managing an organization’s content. Without a clearly defined content strategy, the organization will likely end up with content silos, ineffective search, and limited knowledge sharing.

Deliverables

Iknow’s primary deliverable is a content-strategy document. Depending on the project scope, it could include a detailed roadmap for content-related improvements and preliminary requirements for items such as content review/approval processes, classification, archiving, and security.

Iknow also offers assistance for implementing a content strategy.

Content Audit

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.

Business Value

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.

Deliverables

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.
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