The challenges in enhancing enterprise knowledge are partly due to the phenomenal growth rate in the volume of content. Consequently, users complain that enterprise search produces irrelevant results, content managers are overwhelmed, and executives are increasingly aware of the opportunity cost of the knowledge hidden in unstructured data. In short, users are spending too much time seeking documents.
The digital workplace concept promises users the capability to view content relevant to execute their work tasks. Yet, many enterprises struggle to deliver on this promise, primarily, because of the lack of fine-grained tagging of enterprise content. Fine-grained tagging is required to deliver exactly what each user needs, and to make the output more usable and navigable. Without accurate tagging of content, search engines struggle to return meaningful results, partly because there is so much ambiguity in how things are referred. Once content is tagged accurately, findability improves because of features like tag-based relevance tuning and taxonomy-based search suggestions. However, it also creates big opportunities for improving the usability of knowledge.
Tagging helps in improving the findability and usability of knowledge in several ways. For one, it helps in developing topic knowledge pages populated dynamically based on taxonomy terms. For example, SharePoint’s managed navigation and term-driven pages functionality makes this relatively easy to set up, once you have the taxonomy and tagging backbone in place. There is still usability thinking to be done to ensure content is presented to the users in a more readable and useful manner. However, once the basic template is in place, the sites for any chosen topic can be rolled out quickly.
Furthermore, there are several options, with a broader or narrower focus. In terms of breadth, well-developed taxonomies with many synonyms and cross-topic relationships can help users discover critical related content, which may not have even occurred to them. In terms of narrower focus, it calls for chunking up content into more focused blocks that answer specific types of questions. Dividing an operating procedure document into separately tagged sections focused on the major steps is an apt example for how to chunk content. However, this calls for a more structured content authoring process, and probably an investment of effort in preparing legacy content. However, the effort and investment could help users discover relevant content directly.
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