Get the most out of your Digital Landfill Part 2 of a Series

In part 1 of the series we highlighted some of the steps that can help you obtain maximum value from your content. In this issue, we will further explore some of the solutions that will allow you to overcome the business challenges associated with the digital landfill.

1) Make Sure Your Content isn’t Duplicated

While reducing the noise on your content store is hugely beneficial you need to go one step further; you must ensure that there are no duplication issues. A Swiss Bank client once told me that attaching a PowerPoint presentation of 1Mb to an email within that bank increases corporate storage requirements by at least 1 GB and produces on average ten versions of the file. In one search, a single document could exist in 100 different places. That single fact alone highlights how difficult it is to sort out the knowledge from the noise. By de-duplicating your content, you’ll already be streamlining the process. Anecdotally this can reduce the file count by between 50% and 80% – significant in anybody’s language.

2) Find the Holes within Your Knowledge

Look for existing entities in your classification that do not exist within your metadata – the information you have about your content. Holes provide you with the ability to clean information, ensure metadata management is considered by content creators; and if it’s not to get those content creators in line, by setting out content complaince guidelines. That way you’ll be able to ensure content is relevant, findable and clean.

3) Share Knowledge

Content Management Systems work optimally when the content that they are custodians of is focused, relevant and classified and as a result this content compliance issues should be addressed. You need to assess how your content is being consumed and with this information drive your choice of platform as required. When undertaking a data migration strategy, for example emails, a real opportunity exists to be selective about where you store content. One customer was migrating 120,000 user email accounts from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange. When discussing the migration, it was identified that 70% of the storage requirement was generated by attachments. Moving all of the attachments to SharePoint instantly enabled ‘share-ability’ and de-duplication. You don’t need to follow the obvious route when sharing knowledge, rather choose a platform based upon what your business requires.

4) Maintaining Your Knowledge Assets

It is essential to keep on top of your knowledge. If you allow your content to become chaotic, it’s not easy to repair; if you manage it on a weekly basis, maintenance is much easier. Once your content is at a point of usefulness, where it is relevant and findable, keep it there. If you don’t’ look at it for a year, you’ll then see some major gaps in the metadata, incorrect naming conventions, incorrect storage locations etc. If you invest in a pragmatic care and maintenance program, then spotting minor deviations from the documented standard will be easy to monitor, highlight and resolve, allowing you to continually obtain maximum value from your digital landfill.