Knowledge is Power
Knowledge is Power
September 1, 2005: Including a knowledge audit and governance ought to be essential steps of any portal or content management project. Information management expert Linda Shave outlines how to go about it
Over the past few years we have seen an increase in web applications and portal technologies. Unfortunately, during this period, the implementation of web applications and portal technologies has generally been in isolation and designed to meet specific business needs. This has also resulted in a plethora of portlets and communities that are unmanaged and, in a lot of cases, house out of date content.
This disparity has not formed the perfect platform for an enterprise content management solution, which many companies are considering in order to manage enterprise-wide information. This is especially so, given the volume and nature of documentation and content that is being collected and the current focus of relevancy, reliability, and integrity.
So what are the benefits of including knowledge harvesting and governance into your enterprise content management and portal design and why should these measures be implemented?
Firstly, to ensure a useful portal, it is essential to spend time on the design stage, as this will pay dividends in the long term. This is an ideal point to include a knowledge audit into your design. A knowledge audit can assist not only in identifying and bringing information together but also in providing a single, unified view of who, what, when, where, why and how information is captured, searched, evaluated and used. Knowledge management also provides a structure for integrating people, content, business processes and workflow together through a single platform. Thus meeting the ever-increasing need for business compliance as well as providing a platform for ‘searching’ as people are becoming more search-centric rather than ploughing or wading through all the categories.
The timely inclusion of the right resources at the right time, measurable and achievable milestones for user testing of the content site and inclusion of roles and responsibilities for the ongoing content life cycle management will ensure you and your stakeholders will be better positioned to bring together what your business really needs. Such inclusions will also aid in better acceptance and uptake by users and imbue confidence that what you are publishing is accurate, meaningful and useable content.
Secondly, businesses are in a constant state of flux; rules change, legislation changes and your markets change. Given that all businesses operate in a constant state of change, it is essential that you keep abreast of all change that may affect your business. Your portal is the window to your business. Thus recognising and ensuring continuous growth of your portal, appropriate recordkeeping policies, procedures and processes around the content and continuous improvement need to be planned for. We must remember and take into account that data integrity, compliance and performance are critical to the ongoing ‘usefulness’ of portals. We must always think of information as an ‘asset’ and try to understand the value short and long term of these ‘assets’. We must also educate the workforce on portal security and the value of information ‘assets’ to the business.
Thirdly, an enterprise content management and portal project not only risk failure to meet business needs and benefit realisation, they also run the risk of non-compliance without a sound Portal Governance Model (see figure 1) and associated policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities. Having said this, the ownership for portal governance sits with the Portal Governance Stakeholders (see figure 2). It is the Portal Governance Stakeholders, who have the responsibility to align these projects with strategic objectives, and act as chief decision makers in identifying, addressing and eliminating obstacles.
The Portal Governance Stakeholders also play an important role in identifying who has the business ownership of content, as well as identifying knowledge owners and administrative responsibilities for the ongoing maintenance, including performance management, business process management, publishing and alignment of policies and procedures around the whole enterprise content management life cycle.
Finally, there are a number of factors to be taken into consideration prior to developing a clearly defined portal and commencing on an enterprise content management project. Including a knowledge audit, recordkeeping, risk management and business continuity into the initial project design can and will provide not only a stable structure for compliance but also provide a search-centric platform and the capability and flexibility for meeting the continuous change and growth of the business. The list below is a guideline only which you might like to take into consideration. Whilst this list is not exhaustive, it could be tailored to meet your individual needs.
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