Knowledge is power, sharing knowledge is powerful

Organisations often do not grasp how much information is among them. Within an organisation lies a huge potential of information and knowledge. The problem is that most of this information and knowledge is locked away in the brains of the employees. Or when recorded, these documents are hardly ever accessible. Information tends to be scattered, not up to date and not uniform throughout the organisation. Due to the lacking of logical association, information is hard to present to- or found by the target group.

How can content management, and more specific Smartsite, play a role in improving the accessibility of information within an organisation?

The five key ingredients of knowledge management are facilitated by Smartsite. These key ingredients are; collecting knowledge, storage of knowledge, cataloguing knowledge, publish knowledge and working together based on that knowledge.

Collecting knowledge

The process of collecting knowledge often takes place outside of Smartsite. Smartsite does offer the authoring tools to gather the collected information and process it within the system. It also facilitates the extracting of (on) structured information or knowledge from any random source.

Storing knowledge

Smartsite has a number of user-friendly and identifiable tools to store content (text, images, multimedia files, documents, etc.) in a structured matter. All this content is stored in a content/ knowledge repository. This process is supported by version management, including auditrail, version comparison, task- and workflow management.

Cataloguing knowledge

Smartsite holds standard functionalities that either automatically or manually labels the content with metadata (keywords). These keywords can then be managed in a standard thesaurus. In the thesaurus it is possible to establish relationships between keywords. These relationships are based on equivalence, hierarchy and association. Smartsite also enables self developed relationships to be implemented and used to organize knowledge. Lastly, Smartsite is capable to import and use existing taxonomies based on XML.

If you prefer to have Smartsite automatically assign metadata the additional module Content Intelligence is recommended. This module supports de editor by assigning metadata bases on the content of the information.

Publish knowlegde

The catalogued and organized content can now be published via a multitude of complementary navigations structures. For example; personalized, per category or based on assigned keywords. This can happen over a variety of channels; internet, extranet and intranet to name a few. Also, the knowledge can of course be published through a focused search assignment. Smartsite offers two additional modules to complement the search functions on a website, Smartsite Search and Smartsite Aggregated Search.

Collaborate on knowledge development

Collaboration, forming working groups, plays an ever bigger part in the development of knowledge. Smartsite facilitates this trend by offering the Collaboration Suite. This module provides a work group with their own workspace, where they can share and discuss their findings. These work groups can be publicly accessible but also restricted.

5 Top tips

1. Determine your definition on knowledge management;
2. Determine your ROI objective;
3. Choose a CMS that has proven itself in knowledge management;
4. Think big, start small (Emphasize on short projects that will deliver fast benefits);
5. Evaluate on a regular basis and define the next short projects.