Editorial
As easy as it is to get excited about new shiny objects, we shouldn't lose sight of the fundamental services we’re providing our users — be they employees or customers.
So while AI — or more specifically, large language models — is likely to be particularly disruptive, whenever exploring a new technology for a digital presence, we should consider two questions:
- Do we have the content users need?
- Can we be effective using the new technology?
Do We Have the Content Users Need?
A digital presence is meant to meet user needs by providing them with the content they need. So taking a new approach to modeling content, we need to consider whether we even have the content the user wants at all.
Whether you are investigating the most recent trend (like large language models) or researching something more basic (like whether subject matter experts should be publishing directly to the digital presence), you should ground your investigation in whether or not you have that content. You may also realize that your content is targeted specifically at experts who should be writing and publishing this content directly. Conversely, you may decide your target audience is non-technical, which means content must go through professional communicators in the publishing process.
On the AI front, you may decide that the highest quality thought leadership content is the only thing that users need from you, in which case you should not use AI to generate the text (although perhaps it could be productively used in research or generating images).
Note: if there are important areas where you don’t have the content users need, developing that content should be the priority, regardless of whether the new technology will help.
Related Article: Who Should Contribute to Your Intranet?
Can We Effectively Use the New Technology?
Sometimes the goal of introducing new technology isn’t to address unmet business needs, but to be more effective or efficient (for example, continuing to create content that users want, but in a more efficient manner). Regardless of whether you are looking at improving content to better address users’ needs or solely trying to be more efficient, you must ensure you are being more effective.
It may be tempting to only look at how long it takes to accomplish a task in the near-term (such as how long it takes to write and publish a press release). But we need to take a systematic approach, where we think both broadly and in the long-term.
Think Broadly
Unless we are confident out of the gate about a new technology, start by testing technology on a small scale. Any such experiments require a plan for how to handle the results, either by: 1) rolling back the change if we find the technology was less effective than expected, or 2) expanding it broadly if it does work (also see: You can’t add your way to innovation).
The end goal should be to apply the new technology as broadly as possible, for two reasons:
- Higher bang for the buck (more sites or pages positively affected = more impact overall).
- More likely to help any specific user (the content that a user actually needs is likely to have been improved or created in the first place).
Think Long-Term
After our experiments around rolling out the tech are done, we also want to continue to experiment and optimize over time.
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We need to optimize (rather than just adding more cruft to a system) even when we are not introducing new technology, yet too often it goes overlooked. For instance, one downside of some content design, design systems and componentization rollouts is they can make it more difficult to make meaningful optimizations over time. Case in point: testing may reveal the author(s) should be shown before the title in a technical documentation page, yet pushing out existing technical documentation landing pages can get difficult if that decision was left to the specific content designer at content creation time. Also see: Platinum Use Case.
This is related to the need to think broadly. If we only narrowly roll out new technologies then that also means that optimization over time is harder to justify.
As with the introduction of new processes, people and integrations, we should always ground on organizational alignment (and in particular having the content that users need) when considering new technologies. We must also ensure we can be effective in using the new technology.
Related Article: Your Process Pain Points Are Crying Out for Attention
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