The Biggest Roadblocks to Efficient Content Distribution–And How to Solve Them

“Where can I find that HR document again?” We’ve all been on the receiving end of one of those emails from a fellow employee, and immediately start ticking off all of the possible places in our company infrastructure.

In most workplaces, documents and content are scattered everywhere. New employees require dozens of documents in your onboarding portal. Other documents are stored in various Sharepoint instances. Learning materials may be locked up behind a LMS, where employees are unlikely to remember a website URL or account password that they set up six months ago. Even worse, some documents can only be found by digging through historic email chains.

All of this to say, if it’s too hard to find, your employees may just skip important content altogether.

The 3 Biggest Roadblocks to Efficient Content Distribution

Of course, this flurry of content is not something that you created willingly, and it’s not just a matter of employee diligence. For the majority of companies, this is an aftereffect of using standard proprietary formats. In order to get the right content in the right hands, there are three major roadblocks that standard proprietary formats present:

1. Many copies live in many places
As soon as you convert your training materials into an exportable file (e.g. PPT, PDF), it becomes “frozen” in time. Over the coming weeks it is forwarded around to dozens of people, downloaded to dozens of employee local hard drives, and uploaded in six different intranet portals. While exportable files have their advantage, it leads to a fragmented access strategy that causes more overhead in the long-run.

2. Updating your content is practically impossible
A fast-moving work environment demands constant content updates. Not to mention, we have all been part of a legal fire-drill where a particularly bad error slips through the review process and requires a near-instant fix. Getting it updated in your intranet portals is hard enough — getting it in the IT team’s queue can take months!

But beyond that: how you do make sure that your content, which now lives everywhere, gets updated? When an employee opens a six-month-old PDF from their desktop, is your best option to “hope” that they will think to go dig up a website with the most correct version? If a sales employee is on the road with their iPad, how likely would they be to log into your company’s intranet?

3. You can’t tell who is using your content
In a world where content lives in files scattered everywhere, it is almost impossible to determine what value your employees receive from the content produced. Are they using it at all? How often? Are some sections used more than others? All of these are a blackbox for content production teams, even though the data could be invaluable to the content development process.

The Modern Solution

For a long time, these problems were inevitable to content distribution, but with the rise of cloud-based learning technologies, companies now have the ability to solve for all three. Inkling Axis for Web and Mobile offers a seamless learning experience across all devices, while also keeping you in control of where content appears and when employees receive updates. Unlike  the typical “frozen-in-time” file, Inkling content is always up-to-date.

Inkling Axis for Web:
The Inkling Axis for Web reader can easily be embedded in any intranet portal or Sharepoint site that your employees already use, so there’s no need to point them to a new website. Instead of relying on IT to push out a content update, do it yourself using the “Publish” function in Inkling Habitat. You’ll stop badgering employees with emails about the latest content because you know that they’ll see it on their next intranet visit.

Inkling Axis for Mobile: 
Inkling Axis for Mobile provides your company with a branded app where employees can access and download learning content in a single tap. Just like on the web, employees are automatically notified of content updates.

And the best part about both? Your learning team receives analytics about employees’ content usage–whether on web or mobile–directly in Inkling Habitat.

The bottom line:

For efficient content distribution, it’s time to step away from proprietary formats and outdated systems. Seek out a centralized system that puts you in control of content creation and distribution, and allows for easy updates. Then, you can curate and consolidate your employee training and onboarding information to ensure that your employees not only learn it the first time, but also know exactly where to find it for reference later.

To learn more about Inkling Axis for Web and Mobile, contact our sales team for a free demo.