Digital White Papers

64 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT From Content Aggregation to Content Intelligence Look to see which underlying search engine the vendor is using. Is it a proprietary search engine or an industry leader like IBM Watson? The more robust the search engine, the beer the results you can deliver to your end users, and the easier it will be for your end users to find content on their own through the platform. Make sure that your search engine provides robust filtering capabilities so that you can narrow and sort search results. S O U R C E M A N A G E M E N T The adage "garbage in, garbage out" applies to CI platforms, too. It is critical to your success to evaluate the source management tool that enables information professionals to manage all of the organization's content sources (free, premium and firm proprietary). Be aware that some vendors may charge you to add premium content. Check for the ability to connect to your firm's automated human resources (HR) system or Active Directory (AD) feeds so that you can programmatically assign sources to certain individuals, teams or the entire firm. Can you control the relevancy of sources by pushing articles from certain sources higher up in the search results or by excluding certain groups? A critical feature of any source management tool is the ability to obtain detailed metrics by content title, user and distribution list. Having granular metrics enables the information professional to negotiate licensing agreements that are aligned with actual usage and to understand what content your users find valuable. User metrics are invaluable in moving further along the CI spectrum as they allow you to use hard data to evaluate and understand user needs. C O N T E N T D E L I V E R Y The CI platform must have the ability to integrate content seamlessly via RSS, XML, APIs, PDF, URLs, emails, Twier feeds and website scraping into one platform. Integration helps engage and reach your users on your firm's intranet, extranet and mobile apps with focused content and important information relating to specific practices, industries and clients. Be mindful that your use of these formats should conform with the license agreements you negotiate with your premium content vendors. There is a growing trend among marketing professionals to use CI platforms to distribute internal firm newsleers within the content aggregation tool and to ingest external client advice memos from other firms to monitor competitors. While lawyers tend to live in email, pushing content via email is not enough. Leverage your return on investment on your content budget by streaming content into your SharePoint intranet, particularly on client team, practice group and industry pages that lawyers visit frequently. Remember that one approach does not necessarily satisfy all users. Keep in mind that different lawyers approach work differently and ensure that your tool can work in ways the lawyers want to work. C U R A T I O N A N D P U B L I S H I N G As lawyers continue to get buried in an avalanche of content, information professionals have come to their rescue by providing curated newsleers for practice areas, market teams, management and industry groups. As more informational professionals are embedded into legal and marketing teams, they are becoming keenly User metrics are invaluable in moving further along the CI spectrum as they allow you to use hard data to evaluate and understand user needs.

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