Content Management Seminar

Aug 05. Almost 20 iKMS members attended the 2-day Content Management Seminar 2005 held in August. Judging from the feedback forms, the Seminar was well received mainly due to good sharing by the invited subject matter experts who insightfully taught us on taxonomy, intranet design and management, inverted pyramids style of writing, digital rights management, search considerations and enterprise document management. These topics are all important building blocks in any content management framework.

The 2-day immersive seminar provided a stress-free and moderately-paced experience driving home the key message how a structured content management framework helps large corporations better govern, structure and manage knowledge through content management best practices. Among the audience were academics, practitioners, vendors, civil service officers and KM solution providers.

Robin Chee from DSTA elaborated on how an Intranet can significantly reduce information overload yet create a vibrant ecosystem on an enterprise wide platform engaging all levels of staff. Speaking from his vast project experience on Intranet designs and management, he explained the importance of a multi-disciplinary team’s roles and responsibilities, how Internet expectations influences Intranet requirements, and to pay attention to usability, user experience and user satisfaction. Such cardinal ingredients help to build a technologically-scalable and highly-available Intranet.
If an Intranet is the Face of content, then Taxonomy must be its nervous system. Taxonomy is defined as the science of classification and reaching into her years of rich library management experience, Goh Su Nee from NTU Library delved into the subtle differences between ontologies, taxonomies, classification, thesauri and authority records and how these tools help structure and aid navigation within an organization.

Using examples from the Library of Congress, Su Nee explored authority records through group break-out activities. Authority records provide preferred and non-preferred terms giving users choices at selecting and determining labels. Selected labels in turn deliver intuitive browsable hierarchies and taxonomies leading users to relevant resources within a given context. Upon a user-entered query, Search engine crawling action seeks full text labels and meta-tags generating hits, or more intelligent engines making recommendations based on taxonomical science.

What do you do when there is too much Information and you don’t know where it is located? Search for it! Jan Thomas from Verity spoke on the need for an Enterprise search where in present time and age, merger and acquisitions can double a company’s data instantly. Presenting a scenario today’s knowledge workers focus on analysis and less information retrieval, he highlighted how intelligent Search engines now come with bundled features consisting of clustering, sorting, extraction, synonyms, flexible ranking. These features reward users with richer features by making intelligent presentations and recommendations based on taxonomy and thesauri. Search engines can also prevent work duplication across a cross border organization.
What do you do when there is too much Information and you don’t know where it is located? Search for it! Jan Thomas from Verity spoke on the need for an Enterprise search where in present time and age, merger and acquisitions can double a company’s data instantly. Presenting a scenario today’s knowledge workers focus on analysis and less information retrieval, he highlighted how intelligent Search engines now come with bundled features consisting of clustering, sorting, extraction, synonyms, flexible ranking. These features reward users with richer features by making intelligent presentations and recommendations based on taxonomy and thesauri. Search engines can also prevent work duplication across a cross border organization.

The Digital Rights Management (DRM) product demonstration introduced a technology solution that prevents an organization from digital leakage of e-mails and its documents. Note worthily, emails and documents erroneously sent to unintended parties will not be able to be opened and the embargoed contents safely protected from unauthorized eyes.

Participants were quick to query how easily a DRM can solution be adopted within their organization, where Geoffrey representing Authentica showcased minor changes like tweaking permission settings where all it required from the sender, a central source, to revoke access rights to any/all recipients irregardless of their geographical location and document storage media (i.e. thumb drive).

Striking a balance, Siew Ning took the class through the softer aspects of CM by introducing an Inverted Pyramid Style of Writing. Derived from the world of journalism, this style is widely used for writing articles for both Internet and Intranet websites. Using actual examples from newspapers, he began by first highlighting the key differences between the Pyramid and Inverted Pyramid styles. Other than crafting good headlines, he also covered how to write the Lead, Tie-In, Primary Details, and Secondary Details. It was well received.

A foundational Content Management building block is the Enterprise Content Management System where all contents, inclusive of documents and attachments, are stored in designated folders categorized within a formal filing structure. Ng Kok Chuan from DSTA shared implementation steps, principal design considerations, key lessons learnt, cultural change management initiatives encouraging adoption and challenges faced with recommendations on how to overcome them.