A financial services powerhouse’s knowledge management platform pays dividends
Savvy enterprises understand the importance of building and deploying a knowledge management platform for market and competitive intelligence. They also know that’s only half the battle; driving adoption and growing the user base is the ongoing challenge and the key to maximizing value of the platform and all the research content it contains.
One blue-chip financial services and investment firm described its process and goals for what they call their “wisdom library” at the 2022 Northern Light Client Summit.
According to the portal manager, a platform that began serving two divisions of the company several years ago has rapidly expanded to all business lines, becoming a single resource to house and share documents across the enterprise. All groups see the same main page when they open the portal, but it’s easy for an individual user to quickly find the type of content they’re seeking – main options include curated dashboards, research and insights, articles from thought leaders, news sources, and enterprise research subscriptions – and drill down into it.
“The portal has taken a lot of disparate information and knowledge that existed in many silos all over the company, and made it a whole lot easier to find,” the firm’s internal communications specialist said.
The portal initially was piloted with the firm’s research and strategy teams that produce much of the content that employees throughout the organization need to see; their team members became the early adopters of the portal. But it soon became apparent that there were many applications beyond those groups.
The portal management team quickly realized that the key to broadening awareness and use of the portal across the enterprise was visibility – so they put links to the portal on the company’s intranet home page, as well as on divisional and team level websites and the corporate training portal. And they also highlighted it in corporate orientation for new employees.
“Every time we published an article about the portal on the intranet there was a big spike in usage,” one manager said. “And over time we started to notice they weren’t just coming in and out once, they were becoming regular visitors – sticky users, so to speak – returning more and more.”
Overall, portal usage at the company has grown exponentially over four years, and 2022 puts an exclamation point on that trend – through nine months of this year, usage surpassed all of last year, including a 65% increase in repeat users since September 2021.
Executive sponsorship also has been a key to promoting the portal across the company, as has an ongoing assessment of content consumption. The organization assumes content that get used has value, and content that doesn’t get used is not delivering value and can be swapped out.
In the words of the head of global marketing at the firm, “The portal has become an indispensable resource not just for marketing, but our entire organization. It brings our proprietary research and secondary research together with timely competitive insights, relevant industry news and thought leadership pieces. Taken together, our marketers have access to the data and information they need to inform better strategies and influence business decisions.”