At RFPIO, one of the first questions potential customers ask is whether our platform is scalable. The answer is an unequivocal “yes,” but we can ask the same about most other organizational content management systems.
Is your content management system scalable? Do you know how much content you have? How much of it is redundant? How much of it is outdated? How much of it is trivial? Do you have systems in place for new content?
According to Deloitte, 75% of organizations recognize the importance of creating and preserving knowledge, but only 9% of companies are ready to make that commitment. There are a few reasons for this, but 4 of the top 6 reasons cited are easily overcome by creating top-down buy-in through adhering to content management best practices.
- 55% report organizational silos
- 37% specify a lack of incentives
- 35% say there’s a lack of organizational mandate
- 35% point to shifting roles
Perhaps yours is one of the 75% of companies that appreciates the need for a compliant, organized, accurate, and up-to-date knowledge library. However, with most obstacles coming from within, leadership might see sprucing up your knowledge base as too high a hill to climb, at least right now.
You aren’t alone. In this blog, we’ll discuss achieving organizational, and most importantly, subject matter expert buy-in.
The importance of information governance
Information governance, as defined by Gartner, is the “specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to ensure appropriate behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archiving, and deletion of information.”
Your company’s information management system is everything—and I mean that literally. A well-developed and maintained content management system prioritizes and categorizes all the key documents and pieces of information your company has collected since its founding.
It also includes retiring information that is inaccurate, no longer relevant, redundant, and past a document’s “shred by” date.
Information may be called upon to facilitate major decisions, create proposals, close sales, reassure customers, prove regulatory compliance, help resolve legal matters, etc.
It’s not just decision makers who benefit from a content management system, so do employees. A disorganized system brings about higher labor costs, reduced productivity, and lower morale.
- Employees value information that is easily accessible
- Most employees perceive the information in their company’s knowledge base as average or below
- Over 70% of companies believe that effective knowledge management will increase productivity by at least 20%
- People spend more than half their days on “busy work,” which includes searching for information
- 42% of company knowledge lies with individuals, and when they’re unavailable, coworkers lose 42% in productivity
- Enterprise businesses lose $47 million per year in productivity due to poor knowledge sharing
- 81% of employees feel frustrated when relevant information for their jobs is withheld
- SMEs are extraordinarily busy and, like everyone, resent when they think you’re wasting their time
Benefits of good information governance include:
- Informed decision making – Decision-makers need accurate and current information
- Breaking down silos – Good governance helps break down information silos by democratizing knowledge
- Regulatory risk management – Document lifecycle management helps ensure regulatory compliance
- Legal risk management – Proper digitization and tagging simplify the legal discovery process.
Proving value to leadership beyond just cost
When you initially implement a content management system, the time savings will be impressive—often 40% or more in the first year. But once you begin to reach peak efficiency, demonstrable time savings drops.
That’s when you need to think strategically to show lasting value in your content management platform. Your goal is to prove that value to leadership and keep your content in gold-standard shape.
Unfortunately, many content management strategies don’t provide the types of reporting that include the metrics decision-makers expect, which may include the number of Q&A pairs, those that are regularly used, those that are never used, the amount of redundant information, and how much time is spent searching for information, etc.
Done right, regular content auditing and reporting will provide the data leadership demands as well as help improve morale and boost productivity.
Who are your key decision-makers?
Every organization is different. You may need to get buy-in from one or more members of your C-suite. You may also need to engage sales, sales enablement, and of course, your SMEs (subject matter experts).
Working with your content teams
Subject matter experts are not octopuses—or is that octopi? At most, they have two arms, and if you tug too hard at one, it will never grow back. All of this is my roundabout way of saying, “respect your SMEs!” and do as much of the heavy lifting as you can.
Monetize the value of time spent and time saved
SMEs are typically either consultants or high-ranking members of your organization. Either way, their time is worth a considerable amount of money.
If you can demonstrate to leadership that you’ve reduced the number of Q&A pairs SMEs need to review, you will have shown significant cost savings.
Typically, reviewing a piece of existing content will take about 3-5 minutes. Removing 10 unused Q&A pairs could save your SME as much as 50 minutes. That’s time that could be spent with prospects, doing demos, or performing other tasks.
How to make friends with your SMEs
SMEs may not be official content team members, but they are vital participants in the content creation process.
SMEs are almost, by definition, some of the busiest people in most companies. Odds are, they’ve already invested a considerable amount and expertise in your Content Library. They may have answered many questions multiple times, so you might understand their frustration with the process.
Keep your SMEs engaged by:
- Forming a partnership – Assure your SMEs that once the Content Library is clean, duplicate efforts will be unnecessary.
- Involving management to drive SME participation – You’ve proven value to decision-makers. Let them use their influence to encourage SME participation.
- Soliciting feedback from the SMEs and incorporating it into your process – They will likely have insight into content management and development.
- Respecting their efforts by spreading content reviews over time – As I like to joke, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Not that we’d advocate actually eating an elephant, but the point is, break the project up into smaller, easier-to-manage pieces.
Your SMEs have ownership over all of their content. Respect their time, but also respect the thought and effort they’ve given each answer. Show them that you value the integrity of their content while taking on as much of the work as possible.
You will be working long-term with your SMEs, so build a rapport by showing that you have a plan. Let them know that you’ll do as much of the project as possible before calling for their assistance.
If you can show that you have carried the baton as far as you can, they’ll realize that you respect them and that their time matters to you.
Communicate with leadership
You’ll want to keep leadership informed regarding both your proposal team and SMEs so they know what you’re doing and what the SMEs are doing, how much work there is, and when you expect it to be complete. When the work is complete, show leadership who was invaluable to the process.
The best way to do this is to identify the leaders and then ask your leadership to coordinate a meeting for all those leaders. Create a PowerPoint deck to show that you are invested, prepared, and ready to partner.
The deck should show that you are ready to own the process, communicate with all parties as often as needed, and you will be a partner with the SMEs. Show how it will not be incumbent on the SMEs to complete the review.
Earn and maintain leadership buy-in with regular reporting. Early on, you might issue weekly reports. Once you get going, you can move to monthly reports.
The goal is to show the impact you’re having, the amount of updated content, the SMEs who are involved and have done good work for you, and time saved.
Get user buy-in: Understand how different people use the Content Library
Content management is not a one-size-fits-all approach. User input is critical for managing a Content Library. Adjust your approach depending on the type of person who owns the content.
Content hoarders
Like those who don’t regularly clean out their email, content hoarders won’t generally archive their content.
If the hoarders are rolling along just fine because they’re familiar with all their content, that’s great, but perhaps not for others who need it.
You should build a strategy for hoarders and get creative using their own tags, star ratings, or keywords instead of archiving their specific content. Then, gently guide them toward warehousing content.
This incremental approach will encourage content hoarders to trust that you aren’t out to get rid of all their content while preventing negative feedback from other users.
People who know the answers
Some authors are so familiar with the content that they might know the answers cold, or at least to the point where they can simply check the boxes on an RFx, add any comments, and go on from there.
The problem for other users is that the authors aren’t using content in one of the identified ways to capture content usage. They aren’t applying or copy/pasting the answer as they would with RFPIO.
Authors are probably highlighting what they need, copying it, and plopping that right into the answer field if they’re using it at all.
The best approach to get them on board is to ask them to strategically go through the content and review and mark their best content.
With RFPIO, they can use a star rating system, where the author can mark only their frequently-used content with 5 stars. The rest of their content should have no rating, at least for now.
People reluctant to change
Generally, people who are reluctant to change have all their Q&A pairs conveniently stored on a spreadsheet. Show those who are change-averse that a content management system will save them time and keep them from having to repeat themselves.
It will take them a little time to get used to the system, and they’ll need to see trust from others. One way to do that is to team them up with someone already using the system successfully.
RFPIO helps you identify those who are reluctant through usage reporting. For example, those who spend very little time in the system might be reluctant. This could also be true of people who spend more time in the system than their productivity indicates. In both cases, additional training sessions could help.
Another way to identify reluctant users, or perhaps just those who need additional training, is to survey them. I suggest using a Likert scale, where for each statement, such as, “Using RFPIO is simple,” there are 6 possible responses, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”
If a few people choose answers in the bottom 3, individual training might be in order. If more than a few are uncomfortable using the system, it’s time for general training sessions. I recommend about 6-8 questions per survey. You can issue further surveys on a quarterly basis or what works best for you.
The knowledge management platform that instills trust
RFPIO is the industry-leading response and content management platform. decision-makers undoubtedly know about the cost and time-saving benefits of RFPIO’s proposal response features. Even the most reluctant users will recognize the benefits and soon become expert content librarians.
And what about RFPIO’s role in information governance, turning your knowledge library into a sales enablement tool and a true repository of company knowledge instead of simply a response management tool?
Schedule a free demo to see how RFPIO can help turn your knowledge library into a business asset, remove some of the burden from SMEs’ shoulders, and provide leadership with the reporting and results they need.
