The Silent Productivity Killer

There’s a silent killer in our midst. Yes, I’m talking about the fastest-growing challenge to our livelihoods and to our companies’ fortunes in the market. Who is this killer? His name is Content Mismanagement.

You see—the content that we need to do our jobs is often impossible to find. Even when we find it, we’re not sure if it’s still valid. And by the way, why are we spending so much time searching? Shouldn’t content be finding us when we need it, not the other way around?

Before you accuse me of being hyperbolic, please allow me to present an argument for why this is the most critical challenge facing individuals and companies today.

Given that we live in the Knowledge Economy, most workers today are knowledge workers. We work at desks, not on farms or at construction sites or in factories. We create value for our employers when we translate “what we know” into “what the company needs to do to win.” This is how we move the world forward.

Content Mismanagement is putting all the above at risk. At Guru, where we help empower modern knowledge workers with the knowledge they need to do their jobs, we have seen Content Mismanagement wreak havoc at organizations. In fact, it is our mission to rid every organization in the world of Content Mismanagement and his network of fellow villains, including Knowledge Mismanagement and Document Mismanagement.

#1: The “New Browser Tab”

Remember when we believed that “the cloud” would solve all our problems? Well, as it turns out, it’s created dozens of new ones. Namely, each new tab on our web browsers that now takes us to a different “app” portal, where, you guessed it, our friend Content Mismanagement has placed tiny snippets of siloed content. If you took all the content across dozens of cloud applications, you *might* have a consolidated content store at your organization. Unfortunately, most knowledge workers don’t have the time nor the patience to conduct such an exhaustive search.

#2: The “Used to be Right, Now It’s Wrong”

You start your Content Verification and Refresh project every year with the innocent hope of a Cleveland sports fan believing that this finally will be the year where your dreams come true. And every year, like clockwork, Content Mismanagement uses his mysterious powers to ensure that your colleagues keep creating new content at a rapid clip while they ignore old content that needs a refresh. Of course, every time someone goes to a repository and finds a wrong answer, they lose trust and stop looking there in the future, a vicious cycle that ends in disaster, just like every season as a Cleveland sports fan.