Many organisations find it difficult to see 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
It is vital that all information is easy to find by people who need to use it for their work. The amount of extra effort required by a content owner to publish findable content is minimal. However, the impact can be dramatic for the people who need to use it. It is important your intranet search engine can give content the right priority so people can find it using logical words or phrases.
In my experience intranet search engines have received an undeserved press by people using them to find or rather not able to find the content they need. People’s expectations have risen with their internet experience with little consideration of how Google achieves this. There is a phrase I have heard many times to explain this problem of “garbage in – garbage out” which I can understand.
Benefits
Knowing that you are helping people find the right information across your intranet gives three main benefits:
- People using your intranet will save time by finding the information more easily. Having a publishing standard on findability that encourages content owners to use all available tools to help people reinforces this.
- For you it is also important you can reinforce the right behaviour with content editors by having mandatory fields for metadata. This supports your guidance that sets out why it is worthwhile adding metadata and the content to your A-Z.
- Your organisation can be confident of improving productivity with a good search engine and its scope means there is all published content is searchable and indexed.
Are there other benefits you have found? Please let me know.
In my next post I will cover secure and private content.