(2015) apqc - connecting people to content report

©2014 APQC ALL KNOB

CONNECTING PEOPLE TO CONTENT

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

B EST PRACT ICES REPORT

Create, Surface, and Share Knowledge for a Smarter Organization

©2015 APQC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman at Google, has pointed out that, if all human communication were recorded from the dawn of time to the start of this millennium, it would take about five billion gigabytes of storage space to hold it all. Today, he observes, we create that much data every two days.

Such a quantum shift in the speed of technology change has made it increasingly complex for business organizations to deliver the information and knowledge content that is needed by their various stakeholder groups. These groups are pleading for real-time, on-demand access to the content that is “right” for them in order to do their work effectively. Unfortunately, many companies are failing to meet the urgent informational needs of their stakeholders and are finding that the situation is worsening as time passes.

There are leaders among us, and St. Charles Consulting Group is honored to partner with APQC in learning from these leaders and championing the very timely Best Practices Study: Connecting People to Content.

In partnership with APQC and in active collaboration with a number of APQC members, St. Charles set out to ask and answer these two key questions:

1. How are the best companies managing their data-information-knowledge assets and related processes that result in the desired delivery of needed information?

2. What can other organizations learn from the best in order to enhance their content connection environment and improve their operating results?

The pages of this report contain valuable, actionable answers to these questions. You will find that the report is written succinctly, with rich observations and deliberate recommendations. To start with, for a high-level view, we encourage you to begin by reviewing the Maturity Model for Connecting People to Content (Figure 2, page 6). Hopefully you can quickly gauge where your organization stands on the content connection continuum and what opportunities for improvement might be available for exploration in this study.

At St. Charles, our business is to help clients implement systems, processes, programs, and tools that allow their people to connect to the content they need, when and where they need it. We would be happy to serve as a thought partner as you consider what it will take for your organization to move to the next level. Regardless of where you are along the content management path, our talented professionals are seasoned guides available to accelerate your progress.

Best regards,

Phil Davis

Managing Partner

St. Charles Consulting Group

IF “CONTENT” IS KING, THEN “CONNECTION TO CONTENT” IS LIKE KNOWING THE EMPEROR...

2 ©2015 APQC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PROJECT PERSONNEL AND COPYRIGHT PROJECT TEAM Lauren Trees, research program manager, APQC

Elizabeth Kaigh, research specialist, APQC

Mercy Harper, research specialist, APQC

Subject Matter Expertise Darcy Lemons, senior consultant, APQC

Editor Paige Leavitt

Lauren Trees

ABOUT APQC APQC is a member-based nonprofit and one of the leading proponents of benchmarking and best practice busi-ness research. Working with more than 500 organizations worldwide in all industries, APQC focuses on providing organizations with the information they need to work smarter, faster, and with confidence. Every day we uncover the processes and practices that push organizations from good to great. Visit us at www.apqc.org and learn how you can make best practices your practices.

Copyright

©2015 APQC, 123 North Post Oak Lane, Third Floor, Houston, Texas 77024-7797 USA. This report cannot be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, faxing, recording, or information storage and retrieval. Additional copies of the report may be purchased from APQC by calling 800-776-9676 (U.S.) or +1-713-681-4020 or online at www.apqc.org. Quantity discounts are available.

ISBN: 978-1-60197-212-5

Membership Information

For information about how to become a member of APQC and to receive publications and other benefits, call 800-776-9676 or +1-713-681-4020 or visit our web site at www.apqc.org.

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of publishing this report is to provide insight into the processes and practices associated with certain issues. It should be used as an educational learning tool and is not a “recipe” or step-by-step procedure to be copied or duplicated in any way. This report may not represent current organizational processes, policies, or practices because changes may have occurred since the completion of this study.


SPONSOR ORGANIZATIONS Bristol-Myers Squibb

Cenovus Energy

Chevron Corp.

ConocoPhillips

ExxonMobil Corp.

Eli Lilly

NextEra Energy Inc.

Protiviti

Sealed Air Corp.

Schlumberger

RESEARCH CHAMPION

PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS

BEST-PRACTICE ORGANIZATIONS AT&T *

EY

MetLife

MWH Global Inc.

Nalco, an Ecolab Company

Wipro Ltd.

*Participated as a data-only partner and did not host a site visit.


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In many ways, the field of enterprise content management faces more daunting challenges than ever before. Along with the proliferation of traditional document types, employees are increasingly generating new forms of content, from wiki articles and social media conversation threads to graphics-rich presentations and YouTube-style videos.

The volume of content presents logistical concerns in terms of storage capacity, but it also poses larger questions. For example, what types of content are easiest for employees to use and learn from? What are the best tools to help people find what they need among a broad range of sources? How can people differentiate authoritative content from unverified ideas and suggestions published by colleagues? And how can organizations maximize the value of their content by delivering targeted recommendations directly to employees in the context of their work?

Seeking answers to these questions, APQC surveyed 500 professionals about all aspects of their organizations’ content management programs in early 2014. One of the survey questions focused on the big picture: How effective are enterprise content management systems in terms of surfacing relevant content and enabling employees to find and access what they need?

We didn’t expect people to tell us that their organizations’ content management practices were perfect, but we were surprised by the dismal picture painted by the responses. Less than one in four participants rated their organizations’ content management as effective, whereas 43 percent said their firms were minimally or not at all effective at managing enterprise content.

The results were even more illuminating when we asked respondents why their organizations were less than effective at content management. Relatively few—approximately one in five—cited poor technology as the root cause. Instead, the vast majority said their biggest challenges centered on change management and organizational structure and accountability (Figure 1). In short, employees weren’t following the processes in place to manage content, or the organizations had not defined sufficient ownership models for the tools and approaches.

After reviewing these results, APQC launched its second comprehensive Best Practices Study on content management in May 2014, the results of which are encapsulated in this report. The research aimed to investigate how organizations:

adapt to new forms of content and technologies for delivering information;

leverage metadata and search capabilities to surface relevant content on demand;

integrate content into processes and applications so that it is immediately available in the flow of work;

engage communities of practice and social networks to source, circulate, and provide continuous feedback on content; and

manage the end-to-end content life cycle in order to minimize redundancy and ensure employees can trust the available resources.

Over the course of this study, APQC and the sponsor organizations examined content management practices at five best-practice organizations (also referred to as partners throughout this report). The


study team identified many positive attributes of the best-practice programs, but one unifying characteristic is how attuned the content teams are to the needs of content stakeholders and end users inside their organizations.

The partners thoroughly understand their target audiences for content, and the result is that their tools and processes align with how people want to contribute, access, share, and reuse organizational knowledge.

The Research Champion for this study, St. Charles Consulting Group, distilled this and other related concepts into a five-level maturity model (Figure 2) describing how organizations connect people to content.

The model includes technology as an enabler, but the bulk of the attributes focus on people- and process-related tactics to engage employees, solicit content,

and link people to available resources. As an organization hones its strategy and processes in alignment with suppliers and consumers of content, it is able to connect supply to demand, enabling meaningful connections and generating business value.

Challenges Preventing Organizations from Achieving Effective Content Management

Figure 1

The vast majority of organizations say their content management

challenges center on change management, organizational

structure, and accountability.


Maturity Model for Connecting People to Content

Figure 2

© St. Charles Consulting Group, 2015

We suspect that few organizations will ever reach the pinnacle of maturity on St. Charles Consulting Group’s model, which denotes a fully integrated content environment capable of anticipating content consumers’ needs, focusing content suppliers on those needs, and seamlessly delivering content via unified processes and optimized technology. However, our hope is that the findings described in this report will help readers advance their content management programs toward more aligned strategies, systematic processes, and user-oriented technologies for content contribution, classification, distribution, and sharing.


As part of this research, the study team identified 20 best practices associated with enterprise content management and sharing. These 20 best practices, categorized by theme, are listed below.

DEVELOPING A STRATEGY TO CONNECT PEOPLE TO CONTENT 1. Position content as a strategic asset, and tie its creation and use to business goals. The best-practice partners

make explicit connections between how employees interact with content and the overall performance of the business.

2. Clearly distribute accountability between those who own content-related processes and systems and those who own the actual content. The partners have massively different approaches to staffing and resourcing their content management programs, but they are unified in defining explicit roles and responsibilities for both content teams and suppliers and consumers of content out in the business.

3. Design the content strategy around stakeholder needs. The partners clearly define the internal and external audiences for content and then base decisions about content management processes, tools, and improvements around the needs of those audiences.

CREATING CONTENT PEOPLE WANT 4. Align the type and format of available content to the intended audience. The partners design content to

meet the preferences of an increasingly young, impatient, mobile, and collaborative work force.

5. Create specific roles or processes to identify content gaps. Based on the content needs and demographics of their work forces, the partners rely on subject matter experts or defined processes to surface gaps in existing content.

MANAGING THE END-TO-END LIFE CYCLE 6. Establish distinct channels for vetted and unvetted content. The partners ensure that employees can

distinguish authoritative content they can trust from informal community- and user-generated content, which helps people decide how to use the various resources.

7. For content contributions, balance metadata requirements with the need for a streamlined user experience. The partners recognize that content needs to be tagged so that it can be found, but—where possible—they streamline the process by leveraging auto-populated or standard metadata.

8. Maintain strong accountability for content review cycles, and don’t hesitate to dispense with materials of questionable value. The partners prevent outdated content from cluttering up repositories through a combination of mechanisms, including assigning clear ownership for content and repositories, establishing fixed review cycles, and disposing of content that has not been updated or used in a given timeframe.

9. Use technology migrations as an opportunity to clear out outdated content. Although it is often possible to port huge volumes of content to new or updated systems, many partners take a more thoughtful approach, asking teams and departments to review their content and migrate only the newest and best materials.

THE BEST PRACTICES


ENSURING CONTENT IS FINDABLE AND ACCESSIBLE IN THE FLOW OF WORK 10.Create taxonomies and organizing frameworks that reflect how users think about content. User engagement

helps build employee buy-in for taxonomies, and it ensures that taxonomic terms and relationships represent the way information is actually used throughout the organization.

11.Use scope, metadata, and manual curation to ensure that search functions return the most relevant results. On average, the partners do not have significantly better search technology than sponsors; however, they meet the searching needs of their internal consumers through sound decision making and effective process management.

12.Monitor analytics to enhance search results and content recommendations. The partners track what employees search for and how they interact with content to optimize search and push content directly to employees.

13.Integrate content into business applications and processes. The partners make content easily accessible by building it directly into process documentation, project sites, and software applications and creating links and customized alerts.

14.Provide mobile apps to connect people to content through smartphones and tablets. Four of five partners have dedicated enterprise mobile applications and work to ensure that content is accessible, readable, and secure on mobile devices.

INTEGRATING CONTENT AND SOCIAL CHANNELS 15.Use communities and social networks to surface needs, incubate content, and make recommendations.

When employee needs bubble up on social channels, the partners prioritize the creation (or clarification) of content to meet those needs.

16.Combine people and content search in a seamless environment. Employees inevitably encounter problems that content alone cannot solve, at which point they need to reach out to experts. The partners make finding relevant expertise easy by combining content search with expertise location.

MANAGING CHANGE AND EVALUATING SUCCESS 17.Train employees to be better searchers and consumers of content. The partners recognize that searching an

enterprise system is different than using a consumer search engine and requires a unique skillset.

18.Measure engagement with content and the user experience. The partners track the health of their content management approaches by measuring how many people are using them and how satisfied they are with what is available.

19.Use metrics as conversation openers. The partners leverage data as a clear, visual way of guiding conversations with senior leaders, content owners, and communities.

20.Find a way to measure—or at least demonstrate—the value provided by content. Some partners calculate the value or ROI from content management in order to show business impact.


Below are brief overviews of the five best-practice organizations that participated in this study.

EY EY is a global audit, tax, transaction, and advisory services firm. The firm competes in a market where insights are the product, so content is a key business differentiator. EY’s content management strategy focuses on bringing relevant, impactful, and meaningful content to EY’s people for them to be successful and directly to the market to support exceptional client service. The content management team uses a disciplined approach to continually engage with business stakeholders across EY’s multiple service lines to see how they are doing, learn whether any priorities have changed, and mine intellectual capital.

EY is currently in the process of moving to Microsoft SharePoint as the mainstay of its content sharing capability. The firm looks at the migration as an opportunity to optimize its content by establishing a formal content management life cycle, maximizing findability through a single metadata structure for internal and external content, and using metrics and status reporting to ensure that the content strategy remains on target.

METLIFE MetLife is a global provider of life insurance, annuities, employee benefits, and assets management. This study looks at content management practices in the customer service, operations, and group underwriting organizations within its group, voluntary, and worksite benefits line of business. MetLife aligns content with strategy by embedding KM and content solutions in strategic initiatives at the enterprise, line of business, and business-unit levels. KM is a key element of initiatives and projects, just like training and change management, said Director of Knowledge Management Robert Burns.

The customer service, operations, and group underwriting part of the business uses OpenText’s Livelink as its document management system. For knowledge exchange, it uses intranet sites along with Microsoft SharePoint. The organization has a central KM team that is responsible for delivering the right content to the right people at the right time. The KM team works with other roles (including knowledge champions, knowledge coordinators, and knowledge owners) to manage content. The KM team tracks a range of indicators to assess its content management efforts, including project value, efficiency gains, and quality. MetLife also has a closed loop process whereby metrics, value, and feedback results are analyzed and used as inputs to strategic and tactical planning. Specific improvements are created in partnership with the various business roles and the KM team.

MWH GLOBAL INC. MWH Global is an engineering and consulting firm focused on wet infrastructure, including water treatment, supply, and power. MWH’s content management approach aims to deliver information and expertise to employees “in the flow and on the go.” To accomplish this, the KM team tries to streamline the knowledge sharing experience for employees, make it meaningful by putting the right information in the right place at the right time, and help employees engage in dynamic exchanges via social tools.

THE BEST-PRACTICE ORGANIZATIONS


Most of MWH’s staff members are people with scientific, engineering, design, or technical backgrounds. The type of work that MWH does and the skillsets of its work force determine the types of knowledge content that the organization needs to manage: namely, technical templates, project templates, forms, and checklists for consulting engagements. Because its people rely on vetted, authoritative content, MWH deploys a multi-tiered approach to content management—collaborative content in its Yammer communities and project team sites is loosely governed, but content in its technical library and department portals is tightly controlled.

NALCO, AN ECOLAB COMPANY Nalco, an Ecolab Company, specializes in water, energy, and air applications for light and heavy industry. Nalco’s business strategy involves acquiring knowledge, educating engineers and salespeople about that knowledge, and then applying the knowledge to client engagements. The organization’s content management strategy emphasizes making technical information and expertise available to field personnel when and where they need it. Most of Nalco’s knowledge environment—including a library comprised of expert-authored content, communities of practice, and expertise location profiles—is built on Microsoft SharePoint.

Nalco has a decentralized approach to knowledge and content management, in which a small core KM team supports a distributed network of content authors and owners throughout the business. The KM team owns the processes and approaches for content, but the business owns the actual content and is accountable for identifying gaps, authoring documents, and adding metadata and keywords to ensure users can retrieve appropriate resources. The KM team acts as a consultant by sharing usage data and search logs to help the business identify content needs and manage existing resources.

WIPRO LTD. Wipro is a global IT services, consulting, and outsourcing organization. The firm views content and knowledge management as key to its business strategy for delivering integrated and innovative solutions to customers and for growing and retaining its global work force. Wipro has a central KM team that includes dedicated members for content management. The team is responsible for managing Wipro’s content repositories; turning employee-generated content into reusable knowledge; and interfacing with teams, business units, industry verticals, and accounts to drive knowledge and content initiatives.

Wipro’s key content management technology is Microsoft SharePoint, and customized SharePoint collaboration features are in use across the organization. The organization leverages Yammer as its main collaboration platform, as well as several standalone .net solutions for different aspects of content and knowledge management. Wipro’s KM team uses analytics to measure the health of its content management initiatives and to push relevant content directly to employees. Major initiatives—including gamification and mobile access to content—focus on engaging Wipro’s large Millennial work force and providing learning and reuse opportunities for employees of all ages.


Connecting people to content ... It sounds so simple, yet as knowledge management professionals we all know how critical it is, particularly given the accelerated technology evolution that both drives and defines our business world. It is in fact largely because of technological change that the challenge for companies to connect people to content is as significant as it is. Content is being generated quickly, by many different resources, and via so many different channels that content management strategies are choking on the current volume of data and urgent demands for information and knowledge within the enterprise.

Fortunately, APQC identified some leading corporations that are setting the bar for Connecting People To Content. This research report details some of the key success factors that are integral to their success equipping stakeholders with the knowledge necessary to truly make a difference. Together, their best practices provide a strategic framework that others can leverage in order to bring significant improvements to their own organizations.

ST. CHARLES AS RESEARCH SPONSOR From its founding in 2002, St. Charles Consulting Group has partnered with clients to develop content management approaches that position their leaders and knowledge workers to answer such questions as: What information is available? ... Where can I find support? ... Has this been done before? ... How do I execute my job better?

Even before the formation of St. Charles Consulting Group, one of its founding partners, Robert Hiebeler,

helped APQC sponsor the first Knowledge Management Conference (in 1995) that allowed thought leaders from around the world to collaborate on best practices to address these and related questions.

In 2014, some 20 years after the first Knowledge Management Conference, APQC presented us with the opportunity to collaborate as the Research Champion for this study. We jumped at the opportunity to take our understanding of the “Connecting People to Content” imperative to a new level.

KEY RESEARCH INSIGHTS DISTURB THE STATUS QUO During the study, we were fortunate to gain insights from five partner organizations and then to collaborate with APQC and other study participants to formulate the 20 best practices for connecting people to content.

Based on insights from the KM advisors at EY, MetLife, MWH Global, Nalco, and Wipro we not only validated some of our client experiences, but also gained many new methods and creative approaches that the partners are taking to enterprise content management.

For readers of this report, these new insights should serve as “disturbances,” in a positive way, that encourage knowledge workers to refresh their thinking using an objective assessment of how well business objectives for connecting people and content are being achieved.

CONNECTION INSIGHT PUT THIS RESEARCH TO WORK ... YOUR WORK

St. Charles Consulting Group, Research Champion


WHERE DO YOU STAND? One resounding observation from the study is that organizations need to clearly align their content management strategies to support their strategic goals and operational initiatives. In order to avoid serious misalignment we recommend that you start by benchmarking your current state by using a combination of the Maturity Model that we created for Connecting People To Content (see page 6) and the disruptive insights you can glean from reviewing the 20 best practices delineated in this report.

SO WHAT? NOW WHAT? More specifically, to use these findings effectively, we recommend that you start with a clear position statement outlining what critical content needs to be surfaced and indicating which stakeholder groups need to be connected to the various categories and components of content. From the articulation of this desired state compared to the benchmark of the current state, it is generally a straightforward process

to identify those best practice areas that are (or should be) the priorities for making changes.

Some questions for consideration include:

1. Where in your business is it most important toprovide content to employees at their point-of-need (e.g., critical customer-facing processes,employee learning and development, supply chainexecution, internal execution processes, financialprocesses, environmental and safety)?

2. For each important process area, where do youstand currently in the Maturity Model in relation tothe five key characteristics and maturity levels?How well do you surface the right content to yourpeople?

3. Using the 20 best practices as assessmentquestions, which insights disturb you enough totake action?

4. What are the most significant gaps between yourcurrent and desired state?

TAKE ACTION Once you have identified the major gaps, you now have the ability to articulate the corrective actions necessary to close these gaps. At St. Charles we have facilitated deliberate and systematic workshops around this process with our clients by taking the articulated gaps and helping design a practical approach to developing new processes, tools, and technologies that help them deliver on their desired state.

In addition to our Maturity Model, St. Charles Consulting has also developed a complementary Diagnostic Survey. The survey helps your team and stakeholders discover insights about “where you stand” and identify some potential gaps to bridge when moving toward these 20 best practices. If you are interested in taking this survey, or just need some help getting started, please don't hesitate to contact us for support.

As noted in previous APQC research, effectively

connecting people to content requires knowledge to be placed in the pathway of

work so that employees ‘trip over it ’—in short, so that it ’s almost impossible to ignore

its value.

—Bob Hiebeler, St. Charles Consulting Group


ABOUT ST. CHARLES CONSULTING GROUP The St. Charles Consulting Group was founded in 2002 in St. Charles, Illinois (a western suburb of Chicago) by two former partners of Arthur Andersen—one from its renowned Center for Learning & Personal Growth, based in St. Charles, and the other from Andersen’s global knowledge management practice, based in Chicago.

First with our founder’s participation with APQC’s creation of the Process Classification FrameworkSM (PCF) in 1992, and later with our development of Process Visibility™, a foundation for user-oriented information design, we have focused on allowing knowledge to be organized and later delivered in the context of what the worker was doing. St.

Charles Consulting Group has helped organizations around the world in varying industries to connect their people, processes and technology in support of their objectives to prepare their people for their tomorrow.

We currently operate out of four locations—St. Charles, Dallas, Phoenix, and Madison—serving a client base that is broad and diverse. At present, we actively support dozens of clients with learning, talent, knowledge management, and process initiatives with many of our clients in the Fortune 1,000 space with significant global operations.

This excerpt from the APQC: Connecting People To Content study report was provided to you by the St. Charles Consul ng Group. Please contact a representa ve to request a complete copy of the report and discuss how we can support your Knowledge Management ini a ves.

Shawn [email protected]+1.602.284.3855www.stccg.com

St. Charles Consul ng Group enhances our clients’ ability to achieve their strategic people ini a ves by suppor ng your business environment's rapidly changing requirements.

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