This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 12:56 pm by Dawn and is filed under XML and learning standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The people who work for your organization know things that are important to the smooth working of your organization. That’s why they’re working there in the first place.
If you’ve found yourself here, you’re probably concerned with getting what they know, what you want them to be able to share with their colleagues, written and stored for easier access throughout the enterprise. Knowledge, as they say, is one of the few commodities that increases when shared.
Of course, you’ve also got to make sure that their time is spent wisely. Some organizations decide that accepting subject matter expert-generated training content in a Microsoft Word document is therefore the easiest thing to do. While the learning curve seems attractively low, there are hidden costs to the easy road.
Having Standards
It isn’t just your subject matter experts’ initial time you have to manage, important as that is. It’s the material they generate to share with the training department and the rest of company through other channels.
How much work will it take to put that content into a usable format? How much time would it take up for your SMEs to not only write, but possibly rewrite material that was requested of them without clear guidelines?
When planning a knowledge capture strategy, saving the most time across the enterprise requires spending time up front to define agreed upon standards and formats to be used by everyone. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself having good people use good tools to create content that’s barely usable.
The Dread Something
The easiest way to ask for content, and the easiest way to hand it in, is to ask someone to ‘write something’ in Microsoft Word.
Something? Very few people enjoy being asked to write something any more than they like being asked to speak in public. Questions of style, length, audience, depth and tone hang menacingly over the head of a person who’s been asked to write something. That’s very different from asking for, say, two to three paragraphs, along with one figure and a question, describing a particular administrative task for use by the internal help desk in supporting the sales staff’s customer relationship management system.
‘Something’ is an open-ended slog. Something specific, well, that doesn’t sound too bad.
And what about when your training staff get hold of that something, which was so easy to ask for and required nothing more in technical terms than opening up a Word document? They may well have to reformat and nearly rewrite the entire thing to make it usable for training and other internal distribution channels; through no fault of the subject matter expert who did, after all, exactly what they were asked to do.
Do the training staff and instructional designers have that kind of time? Probably not.
Word Processing
When you take the time to define requests you make meeting your organization’s knowledge capture goals much easier. In technical terms, that means setting up templates for everything that a subject matter expert or instructional designer comes up with.
Defining structure and format requests in advance means that everyone can stay focused on content ever after.
You can do that in Word, it does have template features that can allow you to automate part of the process. You can even match those templates up with a content management system intake, though it often requires several separate templates. Though at that point, you’ve so narrowly prescribed user behavior that training or additional instruction is still required.
There are companies whose technical or personnel situations still make Word an appropriate option for content submission. But in general, to get the most out of it, many of the ease of use benefits offered by Word disappear anyway.
More of a nightmare, large companies can have as many as 11 different content management systems that templates need to be created for. The more unique work needs to be done for each, the greater the overall costs to the company.
Ideal
While it does take time to set up standards and templates, it pays dividends in the long run. Especially if you do have to coordinate multiple content management systems where content such as call center documentation might already be stored in easily repurposed XML formats.
If there are compliance regulations governing your internal content, such as in the pharmaceutical industry, an XML-based template system allows you to keep one copy of a document that can be published from a central database to multiple distribution channels.
Cutting corners while staying compliant? It’s possible.
No one wants to fall into the easy trap of throwing money into technology, only to be faced later with the hard task of re-engineering unproductive habits that have grandfathered themselves into the way people use that technology. No one wants to waste what could end up being hundreds of hours worth of content creation time focusing on structural and format questions that could have been decided in one go, early on.
So if you want your money’s worth, standards and procedures need to be in place before anyone gets to play with the shiny, new content management system. Even the best technology can’t solve problems without you.
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