Professional development and certification teams are always on the lookout for ways to enhance learner experiences, streamline content management, and drive member engagement. One powerful tool that HC is leveraging to enhance our association partners’ experience is Knowledge Management. But what exactly is Knowledge Management and how can it transform your Association’s content strategy and member experience?
Understanding Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management is the ability to collect, categorize, store, and oversee ever-changing data and turn it into actionable insights. Essentially Knowledge Management is understanding what content you have (topics in learning materials, test items, blog articles, certifications, micro credentials, standards, etc.) and putting it to work in partnership with learner performance results.
Over the next series of articles, we’ll outline our three pillars of Knowledge Management: Taxonomy Management, Learning Objects Management, and Knowledge Graphing.
Let’s start with Taxonomy Management which is an essential bedrock.
Understanding Taxonomy
Fundamentally, a taxonomy is a hierarchical system for organizing and categorizing information. Think of it as a sophisticated filing system for your Association’s knowledge base. It serves as a controlled vocabulary, creating a universal language that connects previously disparate elements such as topics, test items, learning resources, and more.
By implementing a well-structured taxonomy, you’re creating the foundation for categorized data that speaks the same language across all platforms and touchpoints. While taxonomy isn’t glamorous, it does set the stage for significant improvements in content management, data management, and analysis.
Revolutionizing Content Management
Anyone who has been involved in the development of content and training programs knows that it can be a long and arduous process. Perhaps even more difficult is managing and utilizing that content over time. Taxonomies are critical to efficiency.
- Organized Content: A taxonomy’s structure of categories and subcategories makes it easier and faster for content developers to find, use, and update relevant learning materials across products. Craig Long’s article, The Power of Content Singularity offers great information on this topic.
- Scalability: As your Association’s content library grows, a robust taxonomy ensures scalability without compromising usability. This involves mapping and tagging content within your environment and approved external sources, allowing your system to adapt and continue providing accurate recommendations without extensive manual intervention.
Managing and Analyzing Data Sources
A robust taxonomy is also particularly valuable when Associations are trying to manage and glean knowledge and insights from multiple data sources.
- Optimized Reporting and Visualization: Taxonomies facilitate the creation of customized product usage reports tailored to specific member segments or content categories, helping Associations understand and communicate complex data trends in a clear, intuitive manner, empowering stakeholders to make data-informed decisions.
- Data Standardization: Taxonomies create structured hierarchies that simplify data collection, aggregation, and analysis, leading to more accurate insights and enabling broader productization of your Association’s body of knowledge beyond a single course or certification.
- Improved Data Analysis: Taxonomies can help associations identify trends and data correlations to help understand and predict member behavior, preferences, and learning patterns, informing strategic decisions and product enhancements.
- Industry Alignment: By mapping taxonomies to external data sources such as industry standards and job boards, Associations can tap into broader industry resources and connect members to relevant job market opportunities.
How Do You Create a Useful Taxonomy?
A robust and sustainable taxonomy can pave the path to product and process improvements. But where do you start? Here are a few questions you’ll need to consider:
- What are the goals for your taxonomy?
- What sources you will use in creating your taxonomy?
- How will you generate and curate your taxonomy? (Hint: You may even want to create multiple taxonomies based on how granular you’d like to segment your controlled vocabularies.)
- How will you distribute and apply your taxonomy (e.g. tagging your content with taxonomy concepts)?
- What’s your plan for taxonomy governance and lifecycle management?
Remember, taxonomy is only one part of the picture. Associations need a way to tie taxonomy to content. In our next article within this series, we’ll discuss learning object management and how HC aggregates and unifies content into normalized references that can be tagged for analysis. Read part 2 now.
If you don’t have the expertise on staff but are ready to create a Knowledge Management plan, or if you’re curious if this might be beneficial to your association, HC can help. Reach out to us at [email protected] to get started.
