Organizations deploy the best enterprise search engines and yet struggle to find the right help content at the right time. There are two possible reasons why that happens:
- Businesses treat enterprise search as a ‘fire and forget’ project.
- Content findability is dubious due to poor metadata, inconsistent tagging, lack of content correction, and so on.
An efficacious content lifecycle management strategy can help you keep a check on both these issues. How? It keeps the content quality in check, which further helps train the enterprise search engine to evade poor content findability.
Let’s walk through the biggest challenges hindering your content lifecycle management and how an AI-driven enterprise search solution can come in handy to quash them.
Three Biggest Roadblocks in Enterprise Content Lifecycle Management
- Scattered Information
Enterprise knowledge is scattered across multiple channels like documentation portals, blogs, CRM, bug-tracking solutions, emails, etc. That makes it a herculean task to track the content quality. Imagine you upgraded your product and simultaneously revised the documentation with the additional features. But what about the blog post that was written a year ago?
2.Inconsistent Taxonomy
Content is created by and passed through multiple teams and every team uses its own jargon to define a feature or process. For example, the engineering team may call the process of classification ontology whereas the marketing team might term it taxonomy. A traditional enterprise search solution is bound to have a hard time connecting the dots, thus impeding the content findability.
3.Flawed Interdepartmental Handoffs
Different teams use different versions of documents on different collaboration mediums like email or chat. In the absence of content lifecycle management, multiple documents get created that confuse users with conflicting information. Similarly, if there is no formal process to review taxonomy and metadata, it ravages the enterprise search experience.
Best Practices for Efficient Content Lifecycle Management
1.Content Strategy & Workflow
A strategic and effective workflow that's properly documented is most important when managing organizational content. Start with creating a content strategy and then align it with your business goal. For instance, if a B2B SaaS company is aiming to release new product features, then chalk-out areas to publish content.
It could be KB articles, technical documentation, marketing collateral, sales enablement content, etc. Define a formal process and adhere to it. That said, don't forget to develop and document this process so that it's easier for new members to get started quickly without hampering the quality of work.
2.Content Standards Consistency
Metadata is data about data. Inconsistent or incorrect metadata is more detrimental than having no metadata at all.
It’s paramount to classify content to make it easier for an enterprise search engine to crawl it. That makes it crucial to educate different teams regarding the significance of metadata and how to write it so that you can declutter enterprise data. Calling out details like customer name, year, project ID, etc., helps in easy filtering and information retrieval.
3.Content Storage
As mentioned earlier, the absence of a proper naming convention while creating and storing documents hinders search. That is why it is imperative to define the do’s and don’ts and task someone with the responsibility to ensure that they are followed. Documenting these rules and making them easily accessible to the team can save the effort of new joiners.
4.Content Updation
Product evolution is indispensable, and updating documents as and when your product and service evolve is critical to circumvent poor findability. AI-powered enterprise search solutions flag outdated content so that experts can update it on priority. They also provide dashboards that keep tabs on content performance so you can course-correct your strategy and bridge content gaps.
Want to Learn More About Content Findability?
Here’s an on-demand webinar where industry stalwarts discussed key challenges and best practices for improving content findability and self-service success.
Enterprise search services solutions can help you streamline your internal document retrieval process, or make an e-commerce website easier to use.
Our open source and licensed enterprise search solutions include: MySQL Server, Solr, Lucene, MyISAMand Endeca.
