Feature
Every department or function in a company creates content, but what happens after it's created isn't always clear. In the vast majority of cases, it is based on our functional biases — and remains locked there, even when it could be used by other people in the organization to help make their job easier.
It’s rare that an organization will view their content holistically. Organizations will at times conduct overall content assessments when developing centralized knowledge bases — or set up wikis and intranets — but these tend to be populated on an ad-hoc basis with subject matter experts adding content they need without really analyzing how it interacts with, or depends on, content developed elsewhere.
This sort of ad-hoc content development can result in content gaps or the persistence of outdated content. For content to be really useful across an organization, it needs to be stored, managed, and flow across an enterprise ecosystem. That doesn’t necessarily mean everything should be on a single platform like SharePoint, though. It means we need to understand how our internal content is connected.
Employees in various areas of their organization produce content. Even if it may feel like it at times, we don’t work in a vacuum — which means our content shouldn’t exist in one either. We need to think about the creative process as part of an enterprise wide interconnected system: a content ecosystem that will help us understand how our content comes together.
How to Develop a Content Ecosystem
A content ecosystem is not something that just appears overnight; it takes work and investment to build one effectively. Developing a culture of asking content-related questions — and thinking about how each thing we produce as part of a larger content-driven infrastructure — are two of the foundational steps in creating a content ecosystem.
Despite its complications, the construction process is surprisingly easy. Below are some tips to help you get started.
Ask Questions
The best way to start to build a content ecosystem is to consider where you sit in it — think about the content that you produce. It’s very rare that we create content from scratch, so we invariably need information from other operational areas. You may want to ask the following questions:
- Where do you get that information from?
- Which parts of the organization create content that you use?
- Who else in your organization develops content that informs yours?
- Who produces content that you use in your day-to-day job? Does anyone else within the organization need or use the content you produce?
Once you figure that out, go ask them what other content they produce and where they get their information from. Backtrack as far as you can. Then, switch focus and think about what happens to the content that you produce.
- What happens to it?
- Who are your internal customers?
- What do they do with your content?
- Do they use content from other parts of the organization?
Follow the content through to the point of distribution. See how it is published and distributed.
Realizing that your content is just part of an overall system is key — it will make mapping things out easy.
Related Article: The Risks and Consequences of Information Mismanagement
Map It Out
Get a white board, a flip chart or a mind-mapping application to start capturing all the connections you discovered by asking questions. Add notes about the following:
- The different channels where the content is used.
- The different types of content.
- The technology used to produce it.
- Workflow and processes it interacts with.
- Any standards and policies that apply.
- The people who create, review, approve, review and use it.
Laying out a diagram of where your content fits with others can help identify where you may have gaps. It can also help in understanding what content resides in what business systems and how you can get access to it.
Simplify Finding Things
When I was working with a company in the construction industry, there was an internal joke about “when is a shovel not a shovel?” The answer was: “it depended on who you were talking to.” To the engineer, it was a “leveraged-lift-device.” To the marketing folks, it was “the dirt-remover-3000.” Support workers called it “Part Number 3578,” and finance folks thought of it as “SKU# 9572.” But to the customers, it was just a simple shovel.
In any industry, different functional areas may call the same thing by different names, but knowing what something is called can significantly reduce that lost time. Departments have a habit of developing their own internal jargon or naming conventions, so develop an enterprise-level taxonomy. Yes, it takes work, but it's an investment that pays off with improved internal communications and greater efficiency when searching for the content you need, when you need it.
Related Article: You've Got a Taxonomy: But Can You Find What You're Looking For?
Make Sharing Information Easier
I’m sure you use technology to pass information between systems, so start to think of your content as ‘data with context.’ Examine how easy it is to move or access your content from one system to another.
Is your content locked into the tools used to create it, or can it be broken down into structured components that can be reused or shared? One of the easiest ways to discover the answer to this is to follow a piece of content from idea to delivery.
Track Information Across the Enterprise
Select a piece of information from a content set — preferably something that needs to be calculated or derived from other sources — and backtrack. This shows you how many different places it is used across the organization as well as and where each use of the information is sourced from. Is the information correct each time someone retypes it? Are there places it should be used, but isn’t?
In my personal experience, I witnessed a company recreate one critical piece of content 32 times! That is a definite waste of time and resources. It also opened up a potential liability risk.
While the recreated content was correct in most cases, there were a handful of instances where a mistake had been made and included in documentation that was issued outside the company. I have heard from other consultants instances of finding content duplicated as many as 40 or 50 times.
Doing a gap analysis will illustrate the need for a content ecosystem where information can be searched for, accessed and used across functional boundaries. Additionally, a degree of governance must be put in place. This can be around agreeing on conventions for naming things, files or storage, putting retirement dates on content to avoid obsolescence, and perhaps most importantly, assigning content ownership.
Conference
Sep
16
HR Tech Conference Las Vegas 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
When someone has responsibility for content they will start to want to know what its purpose is, and where it fits in with work that others are doing. This helps complete the circle by building content-driven connections across functional boundaries.
At the end of the day, the benefit of spending the time asking questions around how your content is developed and shared around the enterprise is that it builds a culture of knowledge sharing. And that’s something everyone benefits from — employees and customers alike.
