Positioning Content for Compliance
By Dawn Poulos

In the current economy, many organizations are looking for cost-effective measures to improve their market standing and gain a competitive edge. In other words: Spending fewer dollars but getting better results. The solution for moving your company forward may be closer—and easier–than you think. But there’s a catch: managing compliance effectively.

There are more than 8,000 state and federal regulations in the United States, and growing your business on a global level invites more organizational and international requirements. Yet companies that effectively and efficiently comply with these regulations position themselves to move ahead of their competitors. Compliance necessitates the organization of information. Therefore, structuring content—learning and otherwise—for repurposing, reusing, and enterprise sharing can lead to the discovery of new product designs, innovative ideas, and improved employee performance.

Legend

In 1997, the U.S. Department of Defense established the Advanced Distributive Learning (ADL) initiative. This initiative led to the development three generations of SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model). The most recent standard, SCORM 2004, designates certified enterprises to use XML markup languages to modulate the information for individualized training, reuse and sharing across multiple platforms. Industry certification standards such as SCORM, the international de facto standard for learning, obviously do not guarantee that all your company regulations are in compliance. However, it can establish helpful guidelines to point your business in the right direction, but before starting your quest towards compliance through content, there are several critical aspects about content management to consider.

Where to start?

Executive ownership: Before taking any decisive steps to begin managing your company’s content, CEO of TP3 Group John Catlin recommends starting with knowing who is in charge of your organization’s information. Contrary to what one might think, “It is probably not the chief information officer. Executive ownership of information is something that needs to be addressed and addressed very seriously in a lot of organizations,” says Catlin. In a recent informal poll by research group IDC, statistics revealed that as many as 10 percent of the corporate participants did not know to whom the organization would turn in order to begin the process of consolidating and managing organizational content.

Considerations: To make the management of your company’s content a solid and cost-effective decision, consider the following issues:

·         the types of information

·         the reuse or repurposing of information

·         the recipients

·         future-proofing of information.

Catlin states, “Unless you structure information from the outset, it is impossible to successfully meet your end-goal of delivering reusable content to the individuals who need that information when they need it.”

Type-sorting content: Most organizations have thousands of pages of compliance materials, protocol, procedures, and processes. Furthermore, organizational content has grown from simple procedural documents and data collection to digital media files, websites, and audio-video content. Yet Catlin points out, “Only one to two percent of that information is procedural information that will help employees do their jobs better.” Maximizing employee output is directly correlated to maximizing customer satisfaction. TP3 Group has seen tremendous improvement in company performance from companies that extract critical information that can be easily integrated into employee workflow. This executive decision staves off the need for a company to invest in managing all of its information at once, particularly during an economic downturn.

Alan Glen, manager of ground training at Cathay Airlines, agrees that prioritizing content management enhances employee workflow and skill levels, but he raises the awareness that there are generational needs for how to manage content: “Generation Y just expects information to be at their fingertips.” In essence, companies can no longer assume that this generation will sift through volumes and volumes of policies, processes, and procedures to learn how to improve their performance. They know that version control and language adaptation technologies are available. As a result of their increased knowledge about content storage, design, and delivery, this generation has placed the onus on the organization to provide and develop individualized content on demand—making reusability of information a high priority.

Reusable content: Once a company has identified its most valuable information, the organization can then determine what amount of that content is reusable. It is reusable content that lends itself well to coding in XML formats. The CEO of the learning content management solutions company Xyleme, Mark Hellinger, emphasizes the need to carefully consider which content within your organization will be reused and who it will target, specifically for issues of consistency over location: “Often organizations make the mistake of comingling content. The key is to make sure that content is sorted and collected in a way that is searchable and ultimately available to harvest when it is needed. This means that you can find what already exists and repurpose it rather than recreating it over and over again.”

A further utility of managing content with XML technologies is the ability of an organization to address language and learning style differences while maintaining consistency across location. If content is delivered to employees via e-learning or other digital files such as a PowerPoint presentation, XML allows for the separation of the literary content, which can then be translated into another language if necessary. Translation costs can significantly impact an organization’s budget if entire modules of information must be recreated each time they are translated.

Know your audience:  XLM sequencing can be tailored specifically to the individual needs of the user, but consideration of who will receive content must be done from the outset of an organization’s information structuring initiative.  The “who” in content management speaks to distribution needs, skill levels, and language differences; all of which correlate to employee performance. “Making sure that information gets to the right people at the right time is about identified interests groups,” says Jay Shaw, CEO and Co-founder of Net Dimensions, a learning and knowledge management company.

For example, if an engineer is in need of content and is located at a distant site, the crucial information can be delivered via a mobile device without hindering performance. For skill levels, XML technologies allow critical performance documents to be modified to meet the needs of learners. At Cathay Airlines, the information that is integrated into an employee’s workflow must be in English irrespective of its global destination.  Glen adds, “There is a big movement in the industry to supply information in simplified English.” Likewise, the effectiveness of knowing what information will be managed, how it will be reused, and who it will reach drove the translation costs of a recent Xyleme customer down by 50 percent. Thus, prioritizing the management of content that will maximize the performance of your employees across location can result in immediate cost-cutting benefits while securing the long-term reusability of content.

Where to end?

Future-proofing content: Over the last 30 years, organizations have been using the same sorting and typing methodologies; however, the means for delivering that information has changed drastically. So, when taking steps to structure your organization’s information, remember that processes are processes and procedures are procedures. Structuring the information that is critical to the employee performance and consistency that your company wants to achieve will facilitate an easier transformation of reusable content as technologies change and advance. Finally, not only is structuring information good for maximizing employee performance and customer outcomes, Shaw notes that often “the greatest ROI of implementing a content management system is compliance.”