[January 21, 2015]

Effective Enterprise Content Management Hinges on Listening to Employees and Anticipating Their Needs

Nearly half - 43 percent - of professionals say their firms are minimally or not at all effective at managing enterprise content. However, organizations can turn this tide by embracing new forms of socially generated content, improving their update and archival processes, and delivering targeted content directly to employees' mobile devices.

These and many other insights are detailed in a research report and upcoming webinar from APQC, the nonprofit leader in benchmarking and best practices research. Connecting People to Content, produced with support from research champion St. Charles Consulting Group, details 20 best practices associated with enterprise content management and sharing.

"Firms always gravitate toward the slickest new technology for enterprise content management-and of course tools are important," said Lauren Trees, Knowledge Management research program manager for APQC. "But we found that a targeted strategy that creates ongoing accountability for content creation and upkeep is a bigger determiner of success. Effective content teams are attuned to the needs of content stakeholders and end users inside their organizations. They understand their audiences and provide tools ad processes that align with how people want to contribute, access, share, and reuse organizational knowledge."

"Stakeholders are pleading for real-time, on-demand access to the content that is 'right' for them in order to do their work effectively. While technology is an enabler, the bulk of best-practice attributes focus on people- and process-related tactics to engage employees, solicit content, and link people to available resources," said Phil Davis, managing partner with St. Charles Consulting Group. "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." The firm distilled the research findings into a five-level maturity model for connecting people to content.

The report includes findings from detailed APQC site visits with five organizations boasting highly effective content management processes: EY, MetLife, MWH Global, Nalco, and Wipro. These organizations:

• Design content for an increasingly young, impatient, mobile, and collaborative work force. This involves moving beyond documents to embrace video, wikis, and social conversation threads.
• Aggressively eliminate stale, unused content to reduce clutter and save storage space, often auto-archiving items unless authors opt to keep them.
• Engage end users in building taxonomies and metadata so classification schemes reflect how the people looking for and retrieving content actually think about that content.
• Place content directly in employees' path as they do their work, including through mobile access points and dedicated applications.

Visit APQC's website to access the full research report and study overview. The research team will conduct an overview webinar on January 22, 2015 at 10:30 AM Central time.

ABOUT APQC

APQC is a member-based nonprofit and one of the leading proponents of knowledge management, benchmarking and best practice business research. Working with more than 750 organizations worldwide in all industries, APQC focuses on providing organizations with the information they need to work smarter, faster, and with confidence. Visit www.apqc.org, call +1.713.681.4020, or follow @APQC and learn how you can Make Best Practices Your Practices®.

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