Angie Cullen

When building a business case around a social Intranet, there are a few key components to consider.  Here are five suggested features that you might ask your potential vendors to demonstrate.

Forum Collaboration
By using a forum or threaded discussion  tool, you can engage your employees around specific topics and challenge them to start talking about topics that matter to them. For instance, Project Managers might discuss the project they are working on along with the status of that project, IT employees may share valuable technology updates, and HR personnel may share links to recruiting best practices.  Be sure that the tool  allows employees to create a profile and specify the topics they are interested in. This also provides a way for employees to get to know their colleagues and share information.

Social Tagging and Ranking
Although search engines are getting smarter by the minute, nothing replaces the ability for an employee to indicate whether an article or piece of content was useful to them in their job. Especially if the search engine takes that ranking into account in ordering their search results (e.g. articles they ranked higher, should be placed higher in the results). In addition, if employees are able to add their own keywords that helps influence search results, they will be able to find information that is more meaningful to them much more quickly.

Document Storage & Collaboration
With a document storage and collaboration tool, employees can find and share documents easily.  This tool will allow employees to create, open and edit documents by placing them in a centralized location that’s easy to access. Having this tool will allow multiple users to work and collaborate in real-time, based on the permissions that are set by the owner, on a document simultaneously.  A document collaboration tool can also help you cut down on storage costs. Employees will no longer need to email a status report, PowerPoint deck, or Excel spreadsheet to the entire project team (these multiple copies take up storage on the email server). Instead, they can simply email a link to the single copy stored on the Intranet and use check in/check out functionality to edit that single document.

Expertise Finder
Employees consistently rank the company directory as one of the most used functions of their Intranet. An expertise finder takes that directory one step further and allows users to identify employees that hold specific knowledge or expertise. This is paired with the ability for employees to create their social profiles and self-report their skills. Similar to tagging content, employees should also be able to tag other employees with terms that they could use in the future to find that expert again (e.g. tagging someone as “Intranet administrator”)

Knowledge Base or Wiki
Your employees have a great wealth of knowledge and given the opportunity many of them want to share it. Be sure to ask your potential Intranet vendors whether they offer a knowledge base or wiki functionality that would allow your employees to quickly, easily share nuggets of knowledge that may assist other employees. Keep in mind that it must be easy to use and be integrated with the search functionality so employees can use a single search to locate people or content.

These five key components  are just a few of the items to consider when reviewing potential software solutions for a social Intranet. Be sure to ask each of your vendors to demonstrate the functionality and consider inviting a few of your end users or members of your Intranet Governance Council to the demos to get their input, as well.

Have additional features that you think would be critical to a social Intranet? Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think is important or what has turned out to be a popular social feature for your employees.

Sean R. Nicholson

It never ceases to amaze me how few people trust their organizational intranets. A tool that was designed specifically for the purpose of helping employees do their job better and faster is often the joke of the water cooler. Yet organizations knowingly ignore the fact that employees don’t use or trust the information stored on their intranet.

Periodically, I have the great opportunity to sit in front of a group of employees and ask them about their intranet experiences. Often, it’s in anticipation of an intranet revamp, so the need for a “do-over” or an evolution has already been defined at some level. While the individual users and comments might be different, they usually go start with something like this:

Me: Who here uses the Intranet fairly consistently?  (half the hands in the room go up).

Me: For those of you whose hands aren’t up, why don’t you use it?

Response #1: The content stinks.

Response #2: I can never find what I’m looking for.

Response #3: Yeah, and when you do find something that looks right, it’s two years old.

Response #4: The last time I searched the intranet for the latest information on new Java libraries, the first five search results were the hours and

specials at the local coffee shop.

Me: For those of you with your hands up, (you can put them down now) tell me how you choose to use the intranet?

Response #1: I use the employee directory. It’s right most of the time because it’s tied to our active directory and employees are added/removed as they join or leave the company.

Response #2: I use it to see what’s being served in the cafeteria. They do a good job of updating the menu each morning.

Response #3: I used it to download the forms to change my 401(k). I did have to choose between last year’s forms and this year’s forms, but I navigated directly to the HR landing page, and didn’t use the search tool.

…and the conversation goes on for another hour. Each employee sharing their stories of frustration or limited successes with the intranet platform. One failure feeds another employee’s stories and the negative sentiment in the room grows. Frustrations often include multiple logins, confusing navigation, multiple windows, and ugly design but the vast majority of their frustrations are around the relevancy of content, outdated information, and poor search results.

Now, imagine for a moment that, instead of the corporate intranet, these comments and stories were being said about another employee. If an employee had a history of providing inaccurate information, was behind the times and slow in their responses, and didn’t collaborate well with other employees it’s highly likely that they wouldn’t survive their next performance review. Yet organizations continue to ignore the fact that a tool that is key to their business success is unable to provide employees what they need. In fact, many companies invest more money in licensing fees and servers for their Intranet than any single employee in their company. Yet, the investment in keeping the content fresh and relevant is minimal. When you present your Intranet in this light, it seems like a logical deduction that an annual review of the performance of your Intranet is worthwhile.

The conversation continues to get more interesting as the focus shifts toward what the employees would like from their Intranet:

Me: First, are you interested in having a functional Intranet? If so, why?

Response #1: Definitely! It would make my job a lot easier if I could find updates to our products and pricing easily.

Response #2: Not really, we purchased a different tool for our group to store information because the Intranet is is bad.

Response #3: I would use the Intranet if I knew the search worked. Right now, it’s just too hard to navigate around a hope that I find what I’m looking for.

Response #4: I think a good Intranet would really help the company do business. It just needs to be a lot easier to use. No one asks the employees how they want it to work, they just give us a tool and say “Figure it out”.

Response #5: They should probably just start over and build something like Facebook. I’m already friends with most of my co-workers, anyway, so it would be easier if we could just make a private place on Facebook where we could share company information.

From these responses, it clear that the desire for an intranet exists in some format. Even responses #2 and #5 indicate that there is a need for a tool, they just opted to use something else or want a different tool since the organizational intranet wasn’t meeting their needs.

Steps To Develop Organizational Trust In Your Intranets

1) Ask Your Employees For Input

Most employees that I talk to feel like they have no ownership or input to the Intranet. They view it as a tool that is given to them by the organization and its structure and content are set in stone. They are, however, interested in making it a better tool and have plenty of input on how to improve it. Some of the input is good, some of it is wishful thinking, and some of it is so focused on their specific job that it may not be useful to others. Little changes to navigation and content, based on their feedback, does increase positive sentiment and gives employees a sense that they had an impact on organizational change.

2) Give Employees The Chance To Shape Content

Because content woes are top of the list when it comes to frustration with their intranet, many employees would welcome the opportunity to contribute content or, at the minimum, provide feedback on the value of the content. Although most aren’t interested in writing blogs, they would like to be able to suggest content or changes to ensure that information is accurate. To accommodate this, feedback forms, commenting systems, and content rating tools can help employees flag or suggest content. By providing these tool to employees, organizations remove the excuse that “content isn’t useful” and put the onus on the employee to shape the quality of the content.

3) Conduct Scheduled Content Audits

Empowering your employees to help shape the quality of the content doesn’t mean that employees responsible for maintaining the Intranet can sit back and relax. Consistent auditing of search logs to find failed searches (those with zero results returned) can help determine a need for creating or re-purposing content. In addition, face-to-face conversations with your employees to ask what they would find valuable can result in a gold mine of  content requests. Obviously, the need to evaluate future functionality is a key responsibility, ensuring that employees are armed with tools and features that will help them in their daily activities.

4) Optimize Your Pages To Work With Your Search Engine

Although it’s tempting to blame the technology behind poor or failed search results, it’s usually not the intranet search engine that’s causing failed searches. Instead, it’s likely poor search optimization or old content that results in failed searches and employee frustration. Taking some time to understand the fundamentals of search engine optimization and tuning your pages to meet the search patterns of your employees can make a huge difference, without having to rip out and replace your search engine.

Just like any employee in your organization, neglect of your Intranet will result in poor performance and dissatisfaction. If you’re really interested in improving your business processes, doing more with less, and helping your employees do their job try investing a little more time and energy into ensuring that your content is good and is able to be found.

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Sean R. Nicholson

Continuing with my posts on great Twitter resources, this is a followup to my 99 Great Internal Comms Resources,  99 Great Intranet Resources and 99 Great ECM Resources posts. Below is a link to my list of 99+ great SharePoint Resources on Twitter. If you’re looking for the folks who tweet about SharePoint as an Intranet platform, ECM solution, and a collaboration tool…these are your folks! Pay careful attention and you may see folks who are also providing links to some valuable SharePoint alternatives, as well.

Sean’s list of 99+ Great SharePoint resources on Twitter

Know someone that I missed from the list? Definitely let me know. Shameless self-promotion is also allowed if you think you should be included, just make sure your tweets back up your request.

You can check out the list below, and feel free to leave a comment if there’s anyone else I should add.

Sean R. Nicholson

As a follow up to my 99 Great Intranet Resources post, I have also created a list of 99 great Enterprise Content Management Resources on Twitter. If you’re looking for the folks who know, speak, live, learn, and love ECM, these are your folks! Know someone that I missed from the list? Definitely let me know. Shameless self-promotion is also allowed if you think you should be included, just make sure your tweets back up your request.

You can check out the list below, and feel free to leave a comment if there’s anyone else I should add.

Sean’s ECM Twitter List

Sean R. Nicholson

Over the last few years, the social media boom has forced Intranet portal vendors to rethink some of their licensing models and expand their feature functionality. “Traditional” intranet portals that are simply presentations layers with a back-end content management system just don’t cut it anymore. Instead, organizations want their employees to generate peer-to-peer content using 2.0 functionality like blogs, wikis, and tagging instead of relying on one-way messages from the top.

The collaborative efforts of the open source community have also delivered new products into the marketplace, driving the cost of software down and injecting healthy competition into the portal industry.  On top of new features and pricing models, new hosting options such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud hosting provide organizations additional options to consider when building or upgrading their portal. All of this spells opportunity for Intranet pros looking to make changes.

In future articles, we’ll take a look at some of the specific software vendors and new platforms that are reshaping portal price tags, but before we jump into the specific products, let’s take a look at a recent, real-world example of how much the climate has changed and how big the impact can be to a company.

In 2006, I was involved in an Intranet project for a Fortune 500 telecommunications company with an employee base of around 25,000. After identifying the requirements for the portal, the search for a suitable software package led the project team to three real contenders: BEA Systems’ Aqualogic portal (now Oracle WebCenter), Sun Microsystems’ SunOne portal (now defunct), and the Vignette Intranet portal (now part of OpenText).  All three offered a customizable presentation portal, content management system, search, forums and emerging blog/wiki functionality. However, each solution also required significant server hardware to be purchased and resources to be devoted to the maintenance of the hardware and the application.  After the final solution was selected and the appropriate hardware was purchased, the pricetag for the selected software and hardware tallied up to more than $2 million. Take note that the selected solution was the least expensive of the three.

Now, flash forward to 2009. I recently had lunch with the current manager of that specific Intranet solution and he and I were discussing the changes to the industry and the merits of both open source and hosted (SaaS) solutions. Knowing the price tag of the original solution and the annual software maintenance fees (20% of initial software costs), it took some simple math to come to the conclusion that he could take the annual maintenance of about $225,000 and easily replace the existing system for a hosted solution costing about $75,000 annually.

With the less expensive solution, he would get:

1. A 37% reduction in software costs ($200,000 dropped to $75,000) in year one.
2. A 93% reduction in annual software maintenance costs ($200,000 dropped to $15,000) in the following years.
3. A reduction in hardware costs, allowing $200,000 in hardware to be re-purposed in the enterprise or decommissioned.
4. No employee headcount required to maintain hardware, so reduced costs in employee overhead.
5. The SaaS vendor would now be accountable for a 99% server uptime (No more outage calls at 3am when the servers stop responding or a load balancer fails).
6. Continued evolution of the product since the annual maintenance buys him product upgrades from the vendor.
7. New Web 2.0 functionality offered by SaaS vendors that isn’t offered by the current vendor.

So basically, this Intranet Manager gets more functionality for his users, a stable platform that allows him and his team to sleep at night, and a significant reduction in annual software costs that makes him a corporate hero with the Accountant and Execs!

A second option that we discussed was looking at a lower cost software vendor or an open source solution. In these situations, he would still reduce his annual software licensing costs significantly, but would still require the hardware and headcount to maintain it. The ROI, however, is still positive in year one due to the huge reduction in software maintenance fees.

Obviously, the ROI for this organization is magnified by the size and extensive software/hardware requirements of the company. However, it’s likely that any Intranet portal built on the traditional perpetual software licenses/standalone hardware model could benefit from a review of the existing system and an analysis of potential replacement technologies. So, before you cut that next software maintenance check, take a few moments to think about how much you’re paying and where you might get some additional bang for your buck.

Check out part II of this series where we’ll take a look at some of the existing replacement platforms that could positively impact your Intranet bottom line.

Sean R. Nicholson

Having been in the field of information management for quite a while now, I have developed a few credos that seem to prove more and more useful as the volumes of organizational information continues to grow. I used to drive one of my previous team absolutely crazy with this one:

“The only thing worse than no information is BAD information”

Think about it. When you have no information, you seek out answers, solutions, and advice. When you have bad information,  it’s likely that you don’t know it’s bad, so you react to the information. Only after you have used the information and determined that it was incorrect do you (after a few choice words) continue your search for good information.

Take an example of a call center representative who answers the phone and provides the customer on the other end with what they think to be the most current product prices from a document they printed yesterday. Little do they know that a new copy of the rate sheet was published a couple hours ago with significant rate changes that is now impacting their potential sale.

Did they have information? Yes! Was it good information? No!

The reality is that organizations are generating more and more information on an hourly basis. Take a moment and think about all the documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, voice mails, and sticky notes you generated on a daily basis just 3 years ago. Now, add modern day blogs, tweets, text messages, forum posts, comments, status updates, videos, podcasts, and wiki posts to your list and what do you get? More information? Definitely! But the larger problem is the fact that the information is now spread out in more places, making it harder for other employees and customers to find it.

In the past customers could simply call a 1-800 line for support and get one-stop service. In the modern day of social media, though, they can call the 800 number, tweet their problems, look for solutions in a knowledge base, email, complain in an online forum, post a video on YouTube of your product malfunctioning, or blog about it. Compound the problem with the fact that your employees are having a difficult time finding the most current methods to resolve the customer issues and you have quite an information disaster in the making. In fact, it’s a situation that could have a negative impact on both customer and employee satisfaction.

For some, the temptation might be to throw their hands up in the air and surrender to the fact that there are just too many channels out there. If you’re curious as to how confusing it really is, just take a look at all the new channels being created in the social media space alone via the Social Media Prism! Now think about what your employee-to-employee and employee-to-customer communication channels are going to look like in 5 years. Believe me…I understand the desire to just crawl back in bed and ignore social media. The reality is, however, that few business ever succeed by ignoring change. Instead, you’re going to need to stop dismissing social media (both internal and external) as a fad and start working on how to resolve the issue.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic product that I can sell for $19.99 to serve as the magic bullet. This one’s going to require smart people in your organization rolling up their sleeves and building a solid information management architecture. No, it’s not easy, but it’s going to be a requirement for businesses to survive in the future! A good place to being would be by looking at the following criteria:

1. How do your employees work? Are they being asked to store information in multiple locations (e.g. My Documents, file shares, document repositories, WIKIs, etc…)?
2. Do your employees know where to go for the single source of truth? (hint, hint…it should be your Intranet)
3. Where are you storing your information? In legacy applications that aren’t searchable? In repositories that require no periodic content review?
4. Does your organization offer a single search interface that allows employees to search information in multiple repositories?
5. Is your information governance killing your employees ability to share information (e.g. no blogs, wikis, microblogs, etc…)?
6. How are your customers interact with your organization? Are they seeking answers from multiple sources (e.g. Phone, website, Twitter, etc..)
7. Do your customers know where to go for a single source of the truth (hint, hint…it should be your Web site)
8. Do you have the infrastructure in place to respond to new types of interactions? Do you have corporate accounts for sites like Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does someone monitor searches on your company and products?
9. Are you making it as easy as possible for your customers to get help and resolve issues?
10. Are YOU embracing internal and external information tools that will allow your employees to share information more easily and provide customers with more ways to serve themselves or seek assistance?

If you haven’t started a review of your current information architecture, it’s time to start and because I find the Social Media Prism to be so useful in explaining the external growth challenge that faces organizations, I have also put together an internal information stratification diagram that hopefully will help IT, Intranet, and ECM professionals demonstrate the internal complexities that exist inside the firewall.  Click on the image below for a larger view or feel free to print out a PDF version.

As always….this is a work in progress and all input, comments, feedback are welcome!

Internal Information Stratification Wheel

Sean R. Nicholson

Imagine, for a moment, that you have accepted a new position as a corporate executive tasked with figuring our how to make your company work better, faster, cheaper.

Along with the details of your position, you have been informed that you have access to a wealth of competitive intelligence, product experience, and innovative thinking at your fingertips. Sounds like a recipe for success, right?But what if you had no means of capturing, storing, and retrieving that information? Bad situation.

It’s likely, however, that it would be easy to justify an investment in a tool that would allow you to leverage the information. But what many execs don’t realize is that they actually have the potential for this exact type of information at their disposal…if they were to invest in a social Intranet platform.

Classic Talent Management Systems vs. Social Intranet

For years, Intranet and HR professionals have been working to implement successful “Talent Management systems” with very little measurable success. The difficulty with legacy Talent Management systems is they required manual updates of employee history, competencies, training, and certifications and they rarely provide the employee with an opportunity to share their experience.

One of the  biggest shortcomings of these systems was the method used to capture and maintain the information. The process of updating employee records usually occurred (if at all) once a year during the employee annual review process. Managers would discuss employee competencies at the review and either update the system themselves or ask the employee to provide the updates. Unfortunately, a once-a-year update doesn’t provide the timely information required to operate a business and since the system was rarely referenced to identify subject matter experts, employees had no motivation to keep them up to date. As a result, these Talent Management systems quickly became outdated and useless and future investment in these types of tools were difficult to justify.

As Social Intranets are becoming more commonplace, however, a unique phenomena is occurring. Employees are sharing their previous experiences, subject knowledge, and expertise with fellow employees, management, and executives each day, providing a huge resource for internal knowledge that changes by the day, hour, and minute.

The Engagement Experience

To see how Social Intranets can play the valuable role of a Talent Management system, imagine a situation where a Sally Sales, a Sales Executive, creates a post on the Intranet forum asking:

Sally Sales: I am traveling to SmithCo Enterprises tomorrow to show them a demo of the latest version of our ERP  software. Does anyone have information about their culture, personnel, etc…that they can share?

Sam Support, a customer support rep – a role that isn’t traditionally engaged by Sales for input – posts back stating:

Sam Support: FYI, I used to work at SmithCo and you need to be aware that they are wary of “vaporware”. Be prepared to show the software in action and provide them with references of other customers who are using the latest version.  Also, I worked as a contractor with the team that implemented their existing BigCO ERP system and they have some serious limitations that need to be addressed relating to the accurate matching of POs, receipts, and invoices. If you can show how well we address that requirement, it will go a long way.

Able Accountant, an invoicing specialist chimes in with another post stating:

Able Accountant: I have used both our new version and the BigCO system they are using and the difference is night and day. Our automatic invoicing abilities are significantly better than BigCO and our implementation timeline averages 12 months, where BigCO’s implementation at my previous company took 36 months and was almost $1M over budget.

…and the conversation goes on.

While this type of dialog obviously helps the Sales Exec know how to refine their sales pitch, approach their prospect, and hopefully win the deal, there is a secondary benefit that is occurring behind the scenes. Employees are identifying what they know, where they have worked, what skills they hold, and whether they can be leveraged as subject matter experts on a specific product or topic.

As a result, the next time any Sales Executive is selling to SmithCo or any company where BigCo is implemented, a simple search of the Intranet for the terms “SmithCo” or “BigCo” will identify Sally Sales, Sam Support, and Able Accountant as resources that have information and experiences with the BigCo product. This is the exact result that Talent Management systems have sought to accomplish for years.

Through this one interaction, employees have reported to the company that they have valuable competitive information and the fact that they respond to posts like these frequently keeps their information up-to-date. While neither Sam or Able were hired into a position specific to tackling BigCo as a competitor, the fact that they both have and shared previous work experience potentially helped the company make a sale.

As the newest executive looking to improve processes and drive revenue through employee productivity, you now have a gold mine waiting to be tapped.

Sean R. Nicholson

Building a great Intranet environment is often about balance. Balancing acts like those between openness and security,  corporate needs and individual desires, and the balance between content and culture often make for long meetings and tough decisions. Internal communicators and Intranet managers often have to determine how much to share and the right format in which to share it.

Take, for instance, the topic of how much strategic corporate information should be shared internally with employees, and at what time.  Some organizations are willing to post strategic information like corporate earnings and key performance indicators on their Intranet in real time or prior to formal announcements. Others are concerned about employees sharing strategic information outside the firewall where it could impact stock prices or competitive behavior. Usually, the key cultural component as to whether this information is shared with employees is one of trust.  It boils down to whether the organizational leaders trust that employees understand the critical nature of the information being shared.

In situations where a strong bond of trust has been formed between the executive layer and the employees, leaders see the sharing of this information as critical to the success and growth of the company since it tells employees where they are doing well and points out where they can focus their energies to improve. These organizations often use the Intranet to openly share corporate goals and strategies, as well as the performance metrics to measure success. Along with the communication comes a consistent message of the importance of using the information internally and only sharing when and to whom it is appropriate.

At companies where that bond of trust has not been formed or has been previously violated, executives often feel that employees simply don’t understand that sharing earnings or performance information prior to formal announcements can have an adverse impact on the operation of the organization?In these cases, Intranets are often void of critical performance measures and are used, instead,  as communication vehicles for corporate events, product announcements, and HR information. Each of these are important functions, but of little value to the employee in determining whether their day-to-day activities are helping the organization advance its corporate goals and strategies.

In organizations where executives prefer to guard the information and release it to employees at the same time they announce to the public, employees often feel as though they aren’t “in the loop” and, at times, learn about important corporate strategies online, from local news sources, or colleagues at other companies. Hearing corporate performance news and announcements from third parties, rather than hearing the news directly from their executives, often propagates a feeling of mistrust between executives and the employees.

Realistically, it would be naive to state that the best practice is to always share strategic information with employees via the Intranet. The reality is that in large organizations or those with little governance, it just may not be reasonable to assume that providing real-time feedback on performance indicators is possible without having the information leak. Even in small organizations, disgruntled employees or accidental disclosure may result in the information leaking.

Therefore, the best practice for when to share key performance metrics will have to be based on the balance of trust within the organization and the employees’ understanding of when/where/to whom it is appropriate to share. As a result, Intranet professionals will have to work to educate employees as to the importance of keeping the information secure and disclosing only when their organizational culture dictates.

Thoughts, comments, or experiences? I always welcome feedback via comments!

Sean R. Nicholson

When it comes to managing Intranets, governance is one of those topics that tends to divide folks into some pretty extreme camps. One side contends that users should be able to govern themselves freely and, when left alone, content driven by the users will be rich and meaningful. The folks on the other side of the fence believe that content should be generated by one or more specific departments (usually Corporate Communications or HR) for consumption by the end-users.  Their position is often based on the argument that end-users would pose a risk to the organization by sharing incorrect, privileged, or inappropriate content if the wild west of end-user content were allowed. The reality is that these two camps each have their valid points, but the best practice is to land somewhere in the middle by allowing individual contribution, but providing some oversight.

While it’s always good to have one or two Intranet experts who understand the technical architecture of your portal and Intranet applications, it’s also valuable to seek input from not-so-technical Intranet power users from across your org. One tried and true method is to form an Intranet Governance Council that consists of the primary power user from each of the departments in your organization. By ensuring that each department is represented, you’ll hear about issues and concerns from throughout the entire organization and these representatives can solicit feedback from their end-users as well as help you spread of the word about upcoming changes or the addition of features/functionality.  When forming your Intranet council, it’s best to keep it to a small group, usually one or two representatives from each department and make sure to schedule a recurring meeting to get together and review your content management strategy and hash through any issues that might arise.

At the start, it might feel like there are too many cooks in the kitchen and some departments might attempt to set the expectation that their department should have more influence over the direction of the functionality or content. If this occurs, remind each representative that all departments have an equal share in the success or failure of the Intranet and working together is the key to success.  Sometimes this great quote from Henry Ford can help set the tone — “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”

Sean R. Nicholson

In the second article in this series, we’ll focus on understanding Content Management and how it differs from Document Management and Knowledge Management. If you recall from the first article in the series, Document Management is all about how we create, manage, route, retain, and destroy the container that we refer to as a document. Content Management, on the other hand, focuses primarily on the information stored inside that container and how you can effectively add/edit/delete the information in the document.

Keep in mind that while some folks use the term “document” generically to refer to Microsoft Word documents (primarily because they use the .doc extension), a document can also be an PDF file, an HTML file, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet…really any kind of container that holds content.

Distinguishing Between Pure Content Management And Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Note: Before we dig into the details of Content Management, we need to establish that the focus of this article is to define and discuss pure Content Management separately from Enterprise Content Management. ECM blurs the lines between Document Management, Content Management, and Knowledge Management which, when brought into the conversation,  makes it difficult to discuss each of the separate components on their own merits. So, for the duration of this article, take a step back and let’s just focus on the Content Management component, apart from ECM. In the final article in the series, I’ll bring it all back together to discuss ECM.

So What Is Content Management?

In it’s simplest term, content management is simply editing a document to add, replace, remove, or modify the content. When you open a new Microsoft Word document on your desktop and type a few lines of text, you are engaging in content management using MS Word as the content management tool. You then save the document and store it on your computer, network location, or document management system. Through this process, you have engaged in both document management (the creation and saving of the document) and content management (the adding of information inside the container). Simple, right?

Content Management becomes much more challenging for organizations when you ask many people to collaborate at the same time on the same document. Issues arise such as the following:

• How do you keep one person from overwriting the content that another has added?
• How do you keep people from corrupting documents by editing them at the same time?
• How can you control the quality of the content to ensure proper spelling and grammar?
• How do you audit when someone last edited the content?

The existence of these, and many other issues has driven the creation of tools that allow organizations to collaborate around content, aka Content Management Systems. By introducing functionality such as user accounts, authentication, check in/check out, change tracking, and rich text editors (aka “WYSIWYG”), Content Management systems have addressed many of the concerns created by mass collaboration by limiting what individual contributors are allowed to do with the content and tracking when content is being edited. By leveraging this added functionality, organizations can minimize some of the risks of mass-collaboration and can maximize of the benefits that content management tools offer.

Different Kinds Of Content Require Different Editing Tools

In their early days of distributed content management, CMS tools focused primarily on editing Web pages. These Web Content Management systems allowed non-technical users to create, edit, and publish content to corporate Web sites and Intranet portals without having to know HTML, JavaScript or any other coding languages. As a result, organizations were able to empower their business users to take ownership of the content in their Web site and Intranet portals without having to engage IT for each and every change. In addition, the use of user accounts allowed organizations to control which roles were allowed to create content, edit it, and approve for publication.

Because of the proliferation of these tools and the rapid organizational adoption of them, the term Content Management System became synonymous with Web Content Management System. But as organizations saw the value of these systems and a variety of different types of content were introduced into the enterprise, new content management tools were needed.

For instance, digital assets such as images, videos, Flash movies, and audio files presented new challenges. To maintain the quality and appropriate use of these corporate assets, Digital Asset Management Systems were created to all organizations to manage the assets in a similar fashion to managing documents, while allowing some content management functionality through plugins with popular editing software like PhotoShop and Flash.

Document Management and Content Management Come Together Through Business Process Management

As the ability to edit different types of content has grown, organizations have recognized that the content management and document management can be intertwined to improve on business processes. Business Process Management tools provide organizations with graphical workflow solutions that allow for the creation and routing of documents from one user to another. upon arrival in their workflow queue, users can edit or review the content using a content management tool and then finalize the document or route the document to another user or queue for further processing.

Business units like Accounts Payable, Human Resources, Contract Management, and Decision Support have optimized document and content management by applying automated business rules that allow the document to be management in a specific manner based on the content.For instance, in situations where an invoice has a low total amount (say under $500), an organization can auto-approve the payment of the invoice without a high level of risk. In situations where total invoice amount exceeds a threshold, the workflow can route the document appropriately for a content review to ensure proper auditing.

Bringing Content And Documents To The Users Through Knowledge Management

The process of creating documents and managing their content continues to become more difficult as the volume of information in the organization grows. Effective organizational content and document management strategies are going to have to find ways to get the right information to the right user. To do this, business process tools and content management systems are going to need to leverage knowledge management principles to evaluate content and route content appropriately.

In the next article in the series, we’ll take a look at how Knowledge Management principles can be used to ensure that content is being effectively reviewed and used in the organization.