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Originally published July 13, 2022

Stan Garfield
7 min readJul 14, 2022

This is the 81st article in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Seth Earley is the CEO and Founder of Earley Information Science, a professional services firm with methodologies designed to address product data, content assets, customer data, and corporate knowledge bases. His firm’s information architecture expertise helps clients to efficiently organize, access, and utilize their data.

Seth specializes in artificial intelligence, information architecture, knowledge management, customer experience, and user experience. His current work covers cognitive computing, knowledge engineering, data management systems, taxonomy, ontology, and metadata governance strategies. Seth is listed as Number 27 in Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on Artificial Intelligence 2022.

I first met Seth at the APQC KM Conference in 2005 and we have been friends ever since. He invited me to be a guest on one of his Jumpstart calls, and he has been an active member of the SIKM Leaders Community since 2006. We have seen each other at numerous KMWorld Conferences, and he has attended SIKM dinners there whenever he is available.

Background

Seth is the editor of the Journal of Applied Marketing Analytics. He was the former editor of IT Professional Magazine from the IEEE, where he wrote a regular column on data analytics and information access issues and trends. He was the founder of TaxoCoP, a community of practice for taxonomy, and is co-owner of the Taxonomy and Ontology Community of Practice LinkedIn Group. Seth lives in Carlisle, Massachusetts.

Profiles

  1. Personal
  2. Earley Information Science

Content

  1. Knowledge Management
  2. White Papers

Posts

  1. New Age of Knowledge Management
  2. Knowledge Management’s Rebirth as Knowledge Engineering for Artificial Intelligence
  3. A New Approach to Data, Content and Knowledge Management — Do it Right
  4. Back to Basics: Getting to the Next Level in Knowledge Management
  1. The Fractal Nature of Knowledge
  2. Knowledge management — is the hype over?

Articles

  1. Getting started with cognitive computing
  2. Intelligent Search — Making the Most of Metadata
  1. Is Your Data Infrastructure Ready for AI? with Josh Bernoff
  2. How Companies Are Benefiting from “Lite” Artificial Intelligence
  1. Knowledge Management Has Moved On, So Should We
  2. Raise the Bar on Customer Experience with Maturity Models
  1. ROI of Digital Transformation: Balancing Long-Term Vision and Short-term Impact
  1. How to Improve Pandemic-Rushed Digital Investments
  2. 5 Misconceptions About Data and AI Projects

Building an Effective Content Management Strategy

Strategy is a broad and all-encompassing term. In simple terms, it is a plan used to attain a goal. What are we trying to accomplish? What are the possible courses of action? How can we get there most efficiently and effectively?

What are the steps and components to a content strategy?

In order to answer these questions, we need to start with the goal. What are we trying to accomplish with our content management system? Building any application is about creating capabilities. If our intranet or portal or CMS is too broadly defined, without specific capabilities in mind, then you are not providing a specific business benefit that will drive usage and justify costs. For instance, saying your intranet is to provide “better access to information” is vague and does not allow for any clear direction or capability. On the other hand, “providing medical billing processors access to company guidelines cross referenced with Medicare rules” is highly specific and focuses on a job task that can be measured and directly supported.

In the case of the latter, it is much easier to build a plan for creating such a system. We can map knowledge flows and interactions, determine bottlenecks, understand sources and uses, define users and use cases, and analyze content for inclusion in the system.

We need to start out by defining capabilities. You may think this is too cumbersome and time consuming. “I have a huge audience and thousands of users with different needs and goals, and dozens of processes. I just need something that will support the largest number of users without defining each job or capability”. In that case, you will need to still think about capabilities — but perhaps from a broader perspective. Rather than looking at an individual role or job category, you can begin at the organizational strategy level. When considering capabilities we can start at the bottom — what does a defined user need to execute his or her job task? This means understanding a user’s perspective on a day-to-day task-oriented basis. This can be tedious and requires a set of questions designed to elicit the truth from users about what they actually do versus what they think they do or say they do. This is the issue of work process versus work practice. Users tend to tell you what the process should be rather than what it actually is. It takes a little more digging to get the real scoop.

Or we can start at the top. What is the organization trying to accomplish and how does this filter down to business imperatives, business unit initiatives, business processes and finally the content sources that support these processes?

Articles by Others

Communities

Presentations

Conferences

KMWorld

  1. W19: Findability in SharePoint 2010
  2. A304: Search, Taxonomies, & Leveraging SharePoint
  1. W8: Creating Effective CM & Search Strategies
  2. W19: Taxonomy & Search: Using Taxonomies to Improve Search
  3. C106: Content Management Deployment & Governance
  • 2006
  1. C204: Using ONA as a Tool in Content Management
  2. C205: Top Tips for Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Search & Discovery

  1. B104: Search as a Platform
  2. B201: What Is Semantic Search?

Taxonomy Bootcamp

  1. Taxonomies in SharePoint
  2. Enterprise Taxonomies
  3. Visualizing Ontologies and Metadata
  1. Building a Taxonomy: The Process
  2. Enabling Your Taxonomy: Integration & Implementation
  3. On the Horizon: Strategies and Tools for Tomorrow and Beyond (Panel)

Data Summit Conference

Podcasts

Videos

Books

Knowledge Management
Thought Leaders
Artificial Intelligence
Taxonomy
Information Architecture

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Stan Garfield
Stan Garfield

Written by Stan Garfield

2.3K Followers
52 Following

Knowledge Management Author and Speaker, Founder of SIKM Leaders Community, Community Evangelist, Knowledge Manager https://sites.google.com/site/stangarfield/

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