Maintaining a single-source-of-truth intranet with content review lifecycles

Is your intranet a trusted hub?

Is your intranet a trusted hub? It’s a question that every enterprise should ask themselves, because knowledge is power, and maintaining your competitive edge means protecting the expertise within your enterprise.

With communications hubs, collaboration tools, and searchable access to your entire digital workplace, employee experience platforms make knowledge sharing a seamless and productive process, but how can you and your users be certain whether that information is accurate and up to date?

Research suggests that one of the top reason intranets fail is due to stale outdated content, otherwise known as the ‘dumping ground effect’.

Content governance has always been a thorn in the side of internal communicators, draining on time and resources that could be better spent on engaging your people. Until now, that meant trawling through your CMS and reviewing, updating, and republishing content one by one, and then repeating that process frequently. If your intranet has thousands of pieces of content, you’re looking at hundreds of hours of maintenance.

With Unily’s newest feature, content review lifecycles, those hours once wasted toiling away in the back end can be put back to better use. Streamlined processes, shared accountability, and content review scores make it quicker and simpler than ever to maintain the accuracy and relevancy of content so that your platform remains a trusted single source of truth.

From content graveyard to trusted hub

Since it arrived in the ‘90s, intranet software has struggled to break free from its early reputation; antiquated, static, a content graveyard. Cheryl McKinnon, Principal Analyst at Forrester touched on this in our latest webinar, which you can watch on-demand for free.

The danger of this is that every time an employee turns to your platform for information, user trust is at stake. You wouldn’t turn to medical textbooks from the 1950s for guidance on the COVID-19 pandemic, so why would your people trust your platform if it’s given them outdated and inaccurate information in the past? This can lead to rapid disengagement and make adoption with your intranet and any future tools a far greater challenge.

For many enterprises, the problem persists to this day. Ensuring all your content, which can range from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of items, is consistently updated and maintained is an enormous feat of governance, and with little in the way of tools to help, is seemingly unavoidable.

Introducing content review lifecycles

Content review lifecycles arm your administrators and communicators with tools to better manage content over time, as it transitions from brand new and relevant to old, obsolete, and potentially inaccurate.

Simply configure your review cycle across your chosen content trees, such as specific repositories or entire sites, to control how often content needs to be reviewed to remain accurate and how far in advance you notify content owners of approaching review deadlines. When it comes time to submit a review, content owners can add review notes to help coordinate changes to content over time and provide audit logs and updates for administrators.

Once deadlines are set, content owners will receive push notifications reminding them of impending and overdue review deadlines. You can also configure your lifecycles to automatically unpublish any content that passes its deadline without being reviewed so that no stone is left unturned.

Review scores: Governance, but simple

Content governance can be daunting at the best of times, as tracking the progress of reviewing every piece of content on your platform is a difficult thing to visualize. With Unily’s review scores, you can check the status of content accuracy at a glance.

Unily has developed our review scores to help you take the temperature of your platform in seconds, giving you an easy-to-understand measure of how up-to-date your content and stored knowledge is. This feature is a part of our increasing efforts to instantly deliver actionable insights within our platform that go beyond numbers.

Review scores explain in no uncertain terms whether content across different parts of the tree are well maintained, and give you the tools to measure the accuracy, relevancy, and, ultimately, how trustworthy your intranet really is.

Is content maintenance becoming a full-time job?

Maintaining governance across your platform is a constant process that can very quickly become a large drain on your time and resources. Speak to a Unily expert today to learn how a modern employee experience platform can deliver return on investment for your business.