Just came across an interesting piece on KMWorld about how important setting up a logical and consistent information architecture is to your organization’s success with SharePoint. There are some great points in this article — and I agree wholeheartedly with the authors’ recommendations.

Having seen a few content management implementations myself (not to mention having talked to many people who have been involved in CM implementations), one of the biggest mistakes that organizations seem to make is not actually talking to anyone who is going to be using the system.

Knowledge management and IT folks sometimes think they understand a system better than the users possibly could; and in most cases, they’re right. But understanding the way a system works and understanding how the content should be organized are two different things.

Continue reading »

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the first steps that one should take when looking to implement a content management system. Stephanie left a comment that got me thinking: what do you do when you already have a content management system that’s been implemented and you have to go back and enhance that existing system?

First off, I’d like to say that it’s easy to start playing the blame game when things don’t go as well as one had hoped. This is even easier when you weren’t the one who put the offending system in place — “if only they had done things such and such a way”…

This type of thinking does little to address current problems, and can actually run the risk of alienating you from those who put the system in place and have valuable knowledge about how it works. You’re going to need their help, so don’t get off on the wrong foot by trying to blame them for the current state of the system.

Continue reading »

The tendency when dealing with many knowledge management issues is often to jump right into the solution phase, when really it makes more sense to determine the strengths and weaknesses of what you’re currently doing, and how your current practices could be improved.

Similarly, most knowledge management can be broken down into several sub-issues. Depending on the specific problem at hand, most issues can be broken down into the following sub-issues:

1. People: Who needs access to what? Does everybody have the same needs? Are there sub-groups that are readily identifiable within your primary group (this usually works only if you have a large enough primary group)?
2. Processes: How is information/knowledge going to be transmitted/shared between people and groups? What oversight is going to be in place to make sure that processes get followed?
3. Technology: What is the best technology platform to enable our people? What technology do we currently have that we don’t need any more? How are people going to learn how to use new technology tools?

Continue reading »

Chances are, if you’ve ever worked anywhere, you’ve stored something on a network drive. Before the days of portals and dedicated content management systems, the network drive may have been your only option for storage, besides keeping things on your own desktop computer.

As these dedicated content management systems have taken root within most organizations, the question is often asked: what do we do with all that stuff we have sitting on the network drives?

Different organizations have went to different lengths to organize the content on network drives. But really, there’s only one way you can go about organizing that content, and that’s by creating a hierarchical folder structure.

Often, that folder hierarchy is based on the departmental hierarchy — which creates a sort of folder taxonomy via which content is organized. Yet occasionally, people get the urge to start mixing in other facets of the documents into the organizational hierarchy; and this is where things start to get messy.

Continue reading »

Here’s a short piece about the practice of adding “best bets” to enterprise search (“best bets” are essentially ponters introduced at the top of search results that direct users to documents that should have the highest ranking).

This article is based mainly on Dennis Deacon’s comment about setting up “best bets” in enterprise search on his own blog, where he points out that instituting “best bets” is often a workaround that’s undertaken after paying thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of dollars to implement enterprise search.

The first article also points out that adding “best bets” into any search application is a always going to be a manual hack, that is essentially a workaround for fixing what’s wrong with your enterprise search installation.

But what exactly is the real reason for having to institute these “best bets” in the first place? The answer is actually quite simple: poor metadata.

Continue reading »

Why do you read your favourite newspaper? What about your favourite magazine? You’d probably answer that it’s because they print content that you find interesting. Seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

But, if you think about it, you also read your favourite newspaper and magazine because of the content they don’t publish. Lots of the time, whether it’s in knowledge management or content management, we think about getting users more content — the old “if they only had the right information at the right time, things would be better” approach.

I don’t know about you, but I have more content to deal with every day than I can possibly handle. Feed updates, emails, voicemails, podcasts, blog posts, the list goes on and on (and I’m sure you can think of many, many more). I would say that around 90% of the content I get in a day remains unread (and the most often unread items are usually automatic notifications, system-generated emails, mass emails, etc.). And I’m not even taking spam into consideration.

Continue reading »