My university studies focused strongly on Business Intelligence. After graduating, I worked at several Fortune 500 companies in the area of content management. I could never understand why these huge companies spend so much money on Business Intelligence (think of the Data Warehouses, OLAP tools and executive dashboards etc.), but don´t spend a dime on gaining intelligence on one of the biggest assets in the company – their knowledge inventory.

Fortune 500 companies invest millions of dollars every year to produce up-to-date material for marketing, sales and employee training. Shockingly, less than half of the produced material is used at all:

“[...] IDC research has found that over 40% of all marketing assets are not in use today, with some sales organizations reporting that as much as 90% of the assets created by their marketing peers are never used by sales teams. This includes assets that have been developed for sales, channels, prospects, and current customers. [...]” (IDCs sales enablement framework, 2009)

IDC’s numbers show how big the need for Content Intelligence really is. In the coming weeks, we’ll have a series of posts on this topic to further elaborate on the pain points as well as possible solutions for enterprises. To kick things off, I’ll describe three reasons why Enterprises need Content Intelligence.

1) Excel-based inventory management is error-prone, cumbersome and expensive

The image below (1) shows two real-life examples we found at Fortune 500 clients. Content managers kept enormous Excel spreadsheets in order to monitor the inventory of marketing assets. You can imagine the time they had to spend spend updating these sheets, the likelihood of human error, and the resulting frustration. Excel is without a doubt a very powerful tool, but it was not designed for this task and hence does a very poor job of it. It quickly becomes painfully difficult to maintain these big sets of multi-faceted data (especially for non-experts) or even simply to access it – try to quickly get a certain piece of information out of the spreadsheet below!

The visualization (2) gives an indication of how complex the world of a content professional (Content Manager, Marketing, etc.) in today’s business world is. All the labels on this chart represents nodes and leafs of an average B2B company portfolio (>500 nodes). There are numerous documents and other digital assets for all the single leafs and nodes on this chart. However, the portfolio is only one dimension – we have to consider at least two more dimensions:

• the geography (Regions, Sub-Regions and Countries) and

• the Resource type dimension (there can be hundreds of different types of resources in one company: e.g. Case Study, Success Story, Sales Presentation, Brochure, FAQ,…)

If you visualize these three basic dimensions as a 3-dimensional information space, you get much closer to the reality of B2B content management. In fact, enterprise companies often have many more dimensions (Sales Cycle Steps, Verticals/Industries, etc.). The Excel nightmare in figure (1) is the result of an inevitable reality: more dimensions –> more complex information space –> bigger spreadsheets!

The challenge we address, then, is to provide content professionals with the overview and transparency they need to keep the companies knowledge inventory optimal, in terms of both quantity and quality. If you try to achieve this goal by using spreadsheets you will end with monster-files as shown above (1). Our solution is called Content Landscape. Content Landscape is a feature rich yet easy-to-use Content Intelligence application which allows for searching and browsing of your inventory in one interactive view. Based on a faceted browsing approach you can drill down from tens of thousands of documents to your one relevant document with two or three mouse clicks. Moreover, the content dashboard and dynamic tables provide content professionals with all necessary information to make the right decisions.

2) Quantity & Gaps – Enterprises need to understand what´s there and what´s missing

Here are some examples of common questions content professionals (Marketing) need answers for:

1. Do we have Case Studies for all our offerings? Where do we have gaps?
2. Do we have enough regional specific content? Which region has the most Success Stories? Where do we have to produce additional Success Stories?
3. How much country specific resources do we have for EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa)?
4. Which resources type is the one with the lowest availability? etc. etc.

“The top reason that assets are not used or that they are under-used, is that end-users are unable to access or locate these assets. Based upon anecdotal feedback from recent survey participants, the key root causes include: “too much material,” old content and assets, and poor processes and technologies.” (IDCs sales enablement framework, 2009)

Content Landscape lets you break down your inventory by age and by step in its lifecycle (e.g. lifecycle step ‘end of life’ means content is hidden for sales users until it has been updated by marketing).

By classifying a company’s content according to its portfolio of products, services, and solutions, cross-mapped to geographic/language regions, Content Landscape offers a simple and clear visual overview of where the gaps with no available content are – as opposed to the inscrutable endless rows of an Excel spreadsheet.

3) Quality and activity – Enterprises need to understand the quality of their knowledge inventory and how it´s being used

“The lack of relevance of content and assets is also cited as a reason for lack of asset utilization.” (IDCs sales enablement framework, 2009)

The described life cycle for content makes sure that no outdated content is accessible. The real innovation is tying content to use, just like Ken Knickerbocker from CRMparadigmshift.com/blog/ demands in his post ‘Can sales give as good as it gets?’:

“Product marketing teams need to know how their product is fairing and what sales material is driving sales conversations forward.”

The usage behavior of the crowd (views/downloads) and social features like rating and commenting clearly indicate which types of content work and which don´t. Since they’re visible to everyone, these indicators enable a culture of creating content that drives business results (as opposed to the up to 90% of marketing content that ends up not being used) and could be taken into account for…

“…reward points that accrue to employees when they contribute” as suggested in ‘Top Intranets Embrace Mobile Accessibility and Social Networking’.

By allowing ratings and comments on each asset, marketing and communications teams are also getting instant feedback from the field. Insights a marketing department would never receive using the traditional uni-directional communication flow from marketing down to sales can now be gathered [see (4)]. For example, colleagues in sales can leave comments to indicate which asset worked for them related to a certain customer need or industry.

Conclusion
The sheer quantity of content generated and maintained by a modern Fortune 500 company renders 20th-century solutions and approaches grossly inadequate. Whether it’s massive spreadsheets or a multitude of data silos, an enterprise’s content is hard to even find, let alone assess or maintain. And yet marketing is pushed more than ever before to get more bang for the buck, despite having little or no feedback about what’s working and what’s not.

To put it simply, content management is no longer enough; it must be complemented by content intelligence. To work effectively, content professionals desperately need smarter tools to find, track, visualize, and assess content, such as Content Landscape. What content do we have? What’s being used, and what’s not? Where do we have gaps? How old is this content? Who is responsible for it? A company that can answer these questions will see its content intelligence investment repaid many times over, both in the efficiency of its marketing dollars and the effectiveness of its sales force. It´s time to get serious about Content Intelligence.

We will post more about this topic in the next weeks. What are your thoughts?

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See also:Content Landscape
Knowledge Management