Services, clients and partners

Effective management of content and information is at the heart of modern business. Your ability to know what you know, to find, re-use and re-purpose information are important keys to success.

Helping our clients to achieve all of this is at the heart of our work.

Effective information management is the exception, not the rule

Despite its importance, effective information management is a long way from everyday experience in many organisations.

• Content is hard to find, despite (or maybe because of undue) reliance on search engines.
• Quality of content discovery is poor, because we don't have precise classification of content. We don't know what we know.
• Content is infeasibly expensive to re-use, because our content structures are usually monolithic.
• Monolithic architectures don't allow us to design content as granular re-usable components.

It's all compounded by the tendency of content management systems (CMSes) to store content in proprietary databases, with the result that when (not if) the organisation moves to a new CMS, the content can't easily move with it and any classification that may have been done is lost. The organisation has to contend with regular manual information migrations, which are expensive and fraught with the risk of information loss.

It's not all bad news

The good news is that many organisations are beginning to address these problems:

• Designing better ways to structure content at appropriate levels of granularity to facilitate re-use.
• Building taxonomy systems to unambiguously classify content.
• Using semantic technologies to build knowledge networks and link information to information everywhere in the organisation.

Semantic technologies, by adding meaning to the relationships between information objects, bring increased precision in content design and classification, greater confidence in the quality of our information, expanded opportunities to re-use content and superior insights into our own knowledge - a true knowledge network.

This is what we do

If your business is on this journey, we can help. We offer a range of consultancy packages tailored to your requirements. In particular, our STAR programme offers a combination of knowledge transfer, taxonomy design/creation and content architecture development.