As enterprises become more data driven, knowledge management has become a competitive differentiator. Some firms have even created knowledge management groups including a Chief Knowledge Officer role. As knowledge is often distilled into PowerPoint presentations, a clear slide management solution is required to maximize the value of product summaries, financial analysis, workflow outlines or even templates and graphics. As you think through your slide management solution, here’s a set of 5 best practices you should consider:
- Easy access to slides is imperative – If retrieving slides takes too many clicks or too long your team just won’t do it. As a result, they’ll be recreating slides, using old slides, and losing productivity. Consider a solution that integrates with PowerPoint so users don’t have to open an Internet browser just to find slides.
- Manage slide updates – Over time slides evolve as the messaging becomes more refined or data is updated. As a result, users need access to the latest material without having to manually search and retrieve each slide. Effective slide management solutions need to be able to automatically find and retrieve slide updates. Ideally, it should warn users if they’ve made local edits to the original slide allowing them to transfer the edits to updated slide if needed.
- Control who exactly has access to each slide – While companies are typically focused on protecting their content from outside threats, they should equally consider who within the company needs access. Otherwise, even harmless mistakes can lead to inaccurate knowledge sharing or content loss. Your slide management solution should allow you to set detailed access rights allowing some users full access, some just download access, and others with no access at all.
- Metadata helps but your search engine needs to be powerful – While it is important to try and accurately catalog all your slides this is not always feasible. As deadlines hit, users will inevitably not add strong metadata. As such, your slide management solution needs a powerful search engine capable of full-text search and incorporating different elements including the slide title and author.
- Continuously measure usage – What slides are used by your teams most often? Which users are actively using the slide library solution? Tracking usage helps identify opportunities for optimizing content and helps find users that are likely not using compliant slides. It also helps justify they ROI of the slide library solution itself.
