Summary – Content Chaos and How to Contain It

Every organization experiences Content Chaos in some form, to some degree, over the course of a year. The question is how well they deal with it, either preventatively or when it arises.

Content is wrong, unclear, or hard to find. It didn’t start out that way – most manuals are correct when you’ve finished them – but Chaos takes over and accuracy erodes.

How To Know If Your Content Is Chaotic

McKinsey estimates – in a so oft-quoted statistic it’s almost lore – that employees spend 9-10 hours every week searching for information they need to do their jobs. Worse is that the harder the information is to find, the less likely they are to trust it.

• Email has become your intranet (“Can you send me that form?”)
• Teams less likely to ‘self-service’ and instead rely on teammates to help
• Intranet Search doesn’t reliably provide the right answer the first time
• Multiple versions of the same document available on intranet
• Obviously-old information available on intranet (eg: created in 2016 by someone no longer at the company)
• Cutting-and-pasting is common

Without knowing the ‘why’, you will never really be able to solve the problems (in fact, you might make them worse).

Three Main Causes of Chaos

Content Chaos has its origins in one of three areas:

1. Complementary content – documents that are supposed to work together get out of sync (Ops Manual and Training Guide, for example)
2. Duplicate content – repeating information for new audiences (state-specific versions, or posting Version 2 without removing Version 1)
3. Volume of content – mature organizations have a lot to say, and sometimes it can become difficult to know exactly which document has the right answers

Chaos from complementary items happens when you update the content in one document, but not in the others.

Chaos from Complementary Content:

• “Email Intranet” – Instead of self-serving, users email the topic owner asking for the most up to date version
• “Word of Mouth Search” – When a group of users consults each other about where to find information, instead of self-serving from the intranet
• Confusion, inconsistency with process, procedure, or policy
• If this is consumer information (on a website), customers will call or email for assistance
• If this is internal information, managers and subject matter experts will spend more time answering questions

Duplicate content is the source of about half of all content chaos, and content gets duplicated for a lot of different reasons.

Chaos from Duplicate Content:

• Again, informal and inefficient alternatives spring up: emailing documents instead of using intranet, groups sharing word of mouth self-help instead of an authoritative source
• Intranet search needs to be more nuanced to distinguish between audience and intent
• Users save PDFs to hard-drives, leading to outdated information being used on regular basis

Most intranets are like a garage or an attic: new items go in, but old items rarely get retired (or they do, but no one can find the new version).

Chaos due to Volume:

• The search function is no longer helpful – you receive hundreds of results (usually by keyword, not by topic – which is a different problem), unable to distinguish the differences between versions
• Directory structure is too deep – how many “clicks” did it take you to get to the right “folder”?
• Realistically, when users can’t find information, organizations will re-create it. This makes even more duplicate content, adding to the volume of content, making finding information more difficult…
• Which leads to creating more content

Every document needs a purpose. Each one needs a place.

Skills to Manage

Companies rarely set out to prevent content chaos. Most don’t realize that it’s an issue until they see if first-hand, and even then it can be hard to know why they can’t find the information they need. 

Truth is, good writers are important for a document, but many documents working together – or competing for space – require a broader skillset (and many writers have these skills, hard-earned over time). Simply publishing to PDF, posting to a common directory, only add to the challenges over time. 

Every document needs a purpose. Each one needs a place. And engineering documents to work together, re-using information, preventing duplication requires forethought, process, and discipline.

For more information about how Chaos is created – and how to manage it to create order – read the full article: Content Chaos and How to Contain It.

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