Documentation and training used to go hand-in-hand. The team that did the training most likely wrote a hefty portion of the associated documentation. Or, at least, the teams partnered to develop and deliver learning content and support resources.
Today, our teams—and content—have become siloed. Many of our organizations are using one system for learning content, another for documentation, and, in some cases, another for marketing materials. Might there be a benefit to bridging these content silos?
I recently came across the term, “knowledge orchestration,” in an article about single sourcing—bringing content into one platform. According to the folks at Zoomin Software (https://www.zoominsoftware.com/): “Knowledge orchestration is the process of ingesting content from a variety of source formats and authoring tools, unifying that content through a shared taxonomy and metadata, and intelligently delivering that content wherever customers are searching for answers.”
“MAGIC IN THE MIDDLE”
To better understand what it means to intelligently deliver content, I reached out to Megan Gilhooly, VP of Customer Experience at Zoomin. She explained that the Zoomin platform takes content in from multiple locations—such as training support materials, documentation, or marketing—and pushes it out in a unified manner. Zoomin is the “magic in the middle” that pulls content together from disparate places, and provides a unified user experience on the other end.
Zoomin is not an authoring tool. It’s not a content/ learning management system (LMS). It pulls together what we have in our authoring tools and content/LMSs and provides consistent output across the board.
The power of this “magic in the middle” comes from the metadata behind all of this content. In order to orchestrate, we need a classification system—a taxonomy. This taxonomy is the power behind searching. How we tag our resources, and the hierarchies we create, shapes our learners’ interactions with content.
Through the deep integration of analytics, products like Zoomin can recommend relevant content to our learners in their moments of learning need. And we can easily identify which content types are (or are not) meeting those moments of need. This can help us create personalized, adaptive learning experiences and search results.
Consider how much time we spend exploring adaptive learning technologies. What if, instead, we explored our learning tech and content development strategies from a knowledge orchestration perspective?
