The problem many organisations find difficult is seeing the benefits from publishing standards. I remove the barriers to show the benefits from each publishing standard in my next few posts. Publishing standards aim to:
- Improve the overall user experience
- Make people using your intranet more satisfied with it
- Improve people’s productivity
- Benefit your organisation
- Improve people’s quality of work
People must be confident they are using the most up to date information. They need to clearly see a review date to be assured it is not out of date. Content must be reviewed regularly to comply with your organisation’s Information Retention Policy. As a minimum this will normally be at least once every 12 months by the owner or editor for accredited content and probably less for some content such as news articles. Owners should remove content that is no longer needed and out of date or update it so it remains relevant.
To actively manage and update your intranet content I find that having a ‘last updated date’ showing for each page of content can give people added reassurance that it is.
Benefits
Knowing that content available on your intranet that you use is up to date has three main benefits.
- People using your intranet they have confidence in the content available. They can rely on it being up to date and it encourages them to use your intranet more frequently and more extensively with each visit.
- You can be reassured it complies with the Information Retention Policy and will be reviewed regularly. Your publishing templates ensure the review dates have to be completed correctly before content can be published.
- Your organisation can be confident from a risk management perspective that only content that is up to date, managed and updated is available. Out of date content is removed and either deleted or archived depending on its status.
Are there other benefits you have found? Please let me know.
In my next post I will cover content needing to be secure.
Hi Mark, regularly checking up-to-date content and removing outdated content will also have benefits for speed of search and performance of the platform in general. It will also leave you with more storage space and reduces backed-up content.
You can find more in a blog I wrote earlier – it is a topic dear to my heart! http://wp.me/p1s5qM-8T
I see I am preaching to the converted with you. Great blog post you linked to too. Thanks Ellen