Updating knowledge management strategies with digital solutions is crucial for enhancing company efficiency and transforming knowledge operations. Although 76% of company executives agree that information is their organization’s most important asset, enterprise knowledge remains fragmented and scattered across multiple systems and repositories. The truth is, knowledge teams face mounting pressure to meet challenging demands, keep pace with product evolutions, and harmonize content across silos.
This article discusses the content delivery challenges that knowledge teams encounter and explores Enterprise Knowledge Platforms (EKPs) as a potential solution, detailing how they work, the problems they solve, and the advantages they provide.
How do Knowledge Teams
Manage Documentation?
In a traditional approach to technical documentation, knowledge teams gather product and business information—usually provided by product teams—from systems like a Product Information Management (PIM) or Product Life Management (PLM). They then create the content in a Word document, save it as a PDF, and store it in platforms like Confluence or SharePoint for easy access. For companies using a Component Content Management System or a headless CMS, teams can publish content manually or automate it through scripts and APIs, making it available across multiple frontends. Some platforms, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Learning Management Systems (LMS), may demand specific content formats, introducing additional complexity. In fact, the original format often fails to align with the required front-end, requiring existing content to be rewritten or reformatted. Consequently, documentation teams need specialized APIs to ensure that content is delivered to the appropriate platforms in the correct format.
As businesses expand and new products are released or updated, knowledge teams must also revise or create new documentation. When the pace of content creation and updates accelerates, publishing can quickly become a bottleneck, making it challenging to maintain accuracy and keep content current. Ensuring that documentation is up-to-date is essential to prevent user confusion or product downtime, highlighting the importance of efficient publishing workflows as a core element of enterprise knowledge management.
Innovative tools are emerging to streamline the delivery of production-quality content. Before considering the value of this new category of solutions, we must look at the content delivery challenges documentation teams face to understand their needs.
What Problems do Knowledge Teams Face?
Companies are currently adopting new user-facing tools, including documentation portals, help desks, PIM solutions, LMS, Field Service Management (FSM) systems, community sites, and forums. Each of these tools serves a specific purpose and introduces a new touchpoint that necessitates access to knowledge content. Integrating product information — such as technical documentation, parts details, 3D graphics, and marketing datasheets —into these new tools complicates the responsibilities of documentation teams. Excess tools and endpoints result in more content silos, reduce the usability of existing content, and lead to inconsistent content experiences.
The Example of Field Technicians and
Technical Documentation
Field technicians often need to access installation and maintenance guides. FSM platforms, optimized mainly for task scheduling, generally provide only a limited knowledge base. For full technical documentation, technicians continue to rely on printed manuals, downloadable PDFs, or external document repositories. However, this typical experience fails to address the difficulties technicians commonly face: poor findability of information, inaccessible offline content, and non-responsive content on mobile devices.
The Example of Customers and Product Documentation
The average customer expects to be able to search and find accurate information about the products they use. Going further, 79% of customers expect consistent interactions across user channels, naming disconnected experiences as their #1 frustration. With scattered information, users experience product downtime and a loss of productivity. This underscores the importance of knowledge management and the need to invest in solutions that consolidate information in a central location while ensuring accessibility through preferred channels, thereby avoiding the negative impact of silos.
What Problems do Content Silos Create?
For knowledge teams, the increase in content-consuming applications creates new repositories of information, requiring additional efforts to effectively interconnect and cross-feed content.
Companies face exponentially increasing complexity as they adopt new content sources and digital touchpoints. It’s crucial for knowledge teams to manage this tangled web of documentation and applications. Otherwise content silos will lead to inconsistent experiences for users.
If users receive disparate information for the same search queries across different applications, it will create distrust with the company and increase support costs. Beyond information consistency, knowledge teams must also consider how to harmonize formats, ensure security, maintain compliance, and offer traceability when connecting information to its various endpoints.
The Issue with Generative AI and Fragmented Knowledge
The rapid emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) also redefines this landscape by creating new requirements for effective content management. When companies operate with fragmented knowledge environments where their product content is scattered across multiple systems, formats, and repositories, AI algorithms struggle to access and leverage that information effectively. This becomes a significant problem if AI developers want to deploy a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model or AI-powered chatbot. Disparate sources can cause inconsistencies in the data, complicating the ability of RAG models to create reliable and accurate content. By involving documentation writers and knowledge teams, organizations can ensure that AI initiatives rely on valid and up-to-date content, reducing the risk of generating misleading or incorrect information.
Companies need a solution to tackle this major challenge, yet managers typically feel powerless in the face of content silos. 72% of these leaders reported that they don’t currently have plans to consolidate silos into a single, centralized knowledge hub despite this being the foundation to improving the customer and employee experiences. Enter the solution: Enterprise Knowledge Platforms.
What is an Enterprise Knowledge Platform?
An Enterprise Knowledge Platform is more than simply a tool for extracting and uploading content from sources to applications. It collects product knowledge in various formats from every source, then combines and harmonizes it in a central knowledge repository. EKPs first consolidate the content and then connect it to all delivery points—whether it’s a knowledge base, CRM, website, or AI applications like chatbots. This enables companies to provide a seamless content experience to users on their preferred devices and across various touchpoints.
An EKP is also defined by its inherent content security, compliance, traceability, accessibility, and entitlements. This ensures the protection of confidential information throughout the knowledge management and delivery processes.
EKPs serve as a necessary intermediary that simplifies the flow of information to front-line applications without creating complex silos. They offer useful features such as one-click publishing, ready-to-use integrations with your existing tools, and AI-powered search capabilities for users.
Once companies recognize this need, they can integrate an Enterprise Knowledge Platform — also known as a Content Delivery Platform (CDP) — into their solution portfolio.
Challenges an Enterprise Knowledge Platform Tackles
Implementing an EKP into a company’s solutions architecture allows them to tackle several problems at once.
- Managing complex knowledge bases: An EKP provides a centralized knowledge hub for assets that would otherwise be stored across multiple systems. This alleviates information access challenges.
- Having a multitude of publishing formats: Technical documentation teams and other content producers should be able to write in their preferred tools. EKPs enable you to keep using the tools you’re used to, ensuring that your writing processes remain unchanged.
- Updating content frequently across silos: The rapid pace of new product launches and updates is increasing, making it challenging for product knowledge teams to stay on top of documenting new features. EKPs support knowledge workers through continuous omnichannel content delivery.
- Meeting customer expectations for personalization: Users expect information to be consistently personalized and contextually relevant to their needs. An EKP provides content tailored not only to user profiles, preferences, and behavior patterns but also to the specific context they are in or intent underlying their inquiries.
- Integrating Generative AI tools: GenAI largely depends on quality content to feed its algorithm. By leveraging an EKP’s centralized knowledge repository, GenAI tools generate relevant, product-specific information for users while also considering security protocols and entitlements.
- Tracking advanced content metrics: An EKP allows businesses to analyze powerful, actionable content insights to optimize authoring and the user experience.
- Ensuring content security: EKPs integrate compliance and governance measures in their design, ensuring a continuously secure experience.
Benefits of an Enterprise Knowledge Platform
74% of companies report that implementing knowledge management best practices contributes to a 10-40% increase in employee productivity. And that’s not all! There are multiple business benefits that coincide with the introduction of a Knowledge Platform.
- Empowered users: EKPs provide users with the content they need across all touchpoints. This helps users autonomously find solutions to their problems, boosting self-reliance and self-service. As a result, this lowers support costs, boosts product adoption, and enhances customer satisfaction.
- Augmented support agents: Creating a content repository that seamlessly integrates into your customer support tools ensures your support agents have access to an up-to-date source of truth. Therefore, EKPs help them reduce ticket handling times, increase the accuracy of responses, and improve the onboarding of new agents.
- Supported field technicians: An EKP provides technicians with access to operational instructions in responsive formats for any device. This makes it easy to access the precise documentation for the installation they are currently repairing or maintaining, on-site, in a readable and actionable format. As a result, technicians reduce truck rolls and increase first time fix rates.
Conclusion: Facing a Critical Decision Point
Enterprise Knowledge Platforms are emerging as a new category of knowledge management innovations. With the rapid expansion of new user touchpoints, managing content distribution challenges has never been more urgent. Many large corporations have already adopted an EKP and vouch for the value these platforms create. In the coming years, Enterprise Knowledge Platforms will surely become an essential component for businesses.
Fluid Topics is a leading AI-powered Enterprise Knowledge Platform. Discover how our EKP helps businesses overcome content silo challenges, offers users a consistent content delivery experience, and builds a secure enterprise knowledge repository.
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