The Challenge
The learning team for an international retailer struggled to find and discover the knowledge resources that supported their work and their online learning solutions. The retailer’s learning team used an abundance of manual templates and processes, along with multiple unaligned and disparate learning management systems (Moodle, Learning Locker, Strivr), search engines (Solr, Elasticsearch, MS Cortex), and content management systems (Adobe Experience Manager, SharePoint Online) to manage their learning content. With no standardized taxonomy or consistently defined metadata, little to no formalized content governance, minimal integrations, and ineffective search, the organization needed to enhance their understanding of the learning content they possessed as well as any gaps in training material to optimize content delivery and consumption experiences for their end users.
The Solution
EK facilitated a series of workshops, interviews, and focus groups with subject matter experts, content creators, and technical partners to define the current and target state of the retailer’s Content Management maturity using EK’s proprietary 50-factor Content Management Benchmark. EK then partnered with the learning team to define a fully customized, iterative, task-based content management strategy, implementation roadmap, and KM Platform design to help the learning team improve their Content Management maturity over a multi-year period using a phased approach. The KM Platform design featured recommendations to leverage new and existing technologies, including a metadata management hub, taxonomy management system, knowledge graph, and search engine. These technical recommendations have resulted in the creation of a digital library that is currently helping the retailer to more effectively and efficiently manage the sheer scale of content in their learning ecosystem, increase the organization’s speed in creating learning content, and decrease the time it takes associates to find and discover lessons.
The EK Difference
EK leveraged its unique, 50-factor benchmark to develop a comprehensive analysis of the retailer’s Content Management maturity and define a future state for the retailer to work towards. EK also utilized its thorough understanding of the client’s culture and processes to produce a Content Management Strategy and Roadmap for implementation using an iterative, Agile approach, and leveraged in-house technical expertise to recommend a unique set of technological solutions aimed at alleviating the inefficiencies the client was experiencing.
The EK team was uniquely positioned to deliver expertise in learning solutions because of our extensive experience delivering KM training sessions, workshops, and materials to a variety of clients as well as our in-house team of instructional designers and learning technology experts. We have conducted dozens of similar efforts with organizations like this one, and the EK team was equipped to deliver both hands-on training and in-depth technical support. This enabled us to holistically understand this organization’s needs and develop a strategy to help the learning team find the learning content and training materials they needed to support the organization’s employees. The EK team also demonstrated effective knowledge transfer techniques that the learning team could then utilize within their own training efforts.
EK is also skilled in bridging the gaps between strategy, design, and implementation, as this effort fused personal interaction with stakeholders to develop a content management strategy with targeted, technical recommendations to plan and implement a KM Platform design. Rather than evaluating just the current state of the organization and developing a strategy to address current challenges, the EK team worked with stakeholders to determine the organization’s long-term goals and recommended various technologies that would help the organization update and maintain its learning content in the future.
The Results
The retailer and EK’s long-standing partnership allowed them to successfully design, develop, and deploy three major releases for the digital library into the retailer’s production environment, resulting in increased time savings and reduced costs related to developing learning content, as well as a workforce with the necessary skills and expertise to do their jobs effectively and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. The retailer was able to gain an improved visibility into each associate’s capabilities and an enhanced ability to identify gaps in their learning content, resulting in more targeted learning experiences to upskill employees and guide their professional development. Additionally, the renewed consistency, reuse, and findability of learning materials allowed the retailer to mitigate any repercussions associated with on-site store safety, diversity and inclusion, and employee and customer health and wellbeing.