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Breaking Free from Content Chaos: A Roadmap to Success With or Without AI

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The learning industry is abuzz with the exciting possibilities brought by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Despite the advancements in AI, many organizations still face challenges sustaining a scalable content management strategy that ensures consistency and timeliness of their content.

As new innovations emerge on the horizon and organizations begin to think about how to incorporate AI into their technology ecosystem, they must build a modern content management strategy that can easily support a wide range of experiences and be tailored to the needs of all learners and content usage scenarios. Creating the right learning ecosystem is crucial in implementing the automation of content personalization — making it easy to produce, manage, and distribute content, when, where, and how the content needs to be consumed. 

What Does it Mean to Personalize Content?

Content personalization is a crucial aspect of tailoring content to specific audiences. Its purpose is to ensure that the appropriate content is readily accessible at the right time, in the relevant language, and in a user-friendly format. By customizing content, organizations can effectively engage their target audience and deliver a more relevant and personalized learning experience. Whether it’s through language localization or targeted delivery, content personalization plays a pivotal role in ensuring that individuals receive the information they need in a way that suits their unique requirements. 

Personalized content can take a variety of forms:

For example, Bank ABC is looking to expand into Latin America and wants to personalize training content for new mortgage loan consultants. Personalization may include offering the content in Spanish. Through extensive research, the learning development team realized that the content workbooks that had been used for years in the U.S. branches would be better consumed in video format instead.

Further research may have revealed that mortgage loan consultants are now in need of a refresher course on data security issues six months into their new position to ensure that customer information remains private. These are all personalization scenarios that can be adapted to any industry.

Content Personalization Challenges

Many organizations may understand that personalization of content is necessary, but are experiencin some real challenges when it comes to making it happen. They want to update their content management strategy and technology ecosystem, however, there are several structural issues that make them hesitant to get the process started. Here are a few that may be at the top of your list.

  • There's just too much content to updated
The process of personalizing content doesn’t have to be complicated. When organizations think of modernizing their content management system, they may think of having to hire a team that can handle the development of thousands of versions of the same content in different formats to be used across various channels. Content development teams are left asking questions like:
 
  • How will we manage to find the content needed for a specific learning scenario?
  • How do we decide which content is most relevant for a specific learner’s needs?
  • How will we store and manage all this new content?
 
These are all relevant questions. This is where organizations need to start to rethink their content management strategy. The methods by which they are used to produce, manage, and distribute learning content must be revamped if they are going to be able to stay relevant.
  • The process of updating individual pieces of content is just too complicated

Highly regulated industries like Healthcare and Insurance struggle with having to ensure that every single piece of content produced that reflects current industry standards. There are often old versions of one piece of content floating around the organization that can be found in old files on an individual’s computer. One missed email update can lead to the sharing of information that is no longer valid leading to unnecessary audits, fines, and non-compliance penalties. Organizations need one global streamlined system to ensure that all content is automatically updated with little effort.

  • The current LMS in use has limited capacity to meet organizational needs
Even if organizations possess the capability to create and update content independently, they often face limitations with their current Learning Management Systems (LMS). These limitations prevent them from delivering content in a timely and tailored manner, hindering the creation of truly personalized content.
 
One of the main challenges is the lack of flexibility in delivering content when, where, and how it is needed. Many traditional LMS platforms have rigid structures and lack the necessary features to deliver content in different formats or languages. Learners have unique preferences, and accommodating these preferences adds value to their learning experience.
 
Creating a content management strategy that is truly personalized requires a technology ecosystem that is adaptable and agile. Many organizations tax their LMSs to be the main solution to their content management problems. While an LMS has a viable place in the learning industry, its purpose is to track and report the completion of educational courses and training programs, and the missing piece of true content personalization and scalability comes when the LMS is not the center of the equation.
How easy is it to scale a content personalization strategy?
Scaling a content personalization strategy can be challenging as an organization grows and expands its reach. A well-rounded content personalization strategy that works for a small organization may not be sufficient when the organization becomes larger or expands into new regions or markets.
 
Developing content for new audiences can be a complex, time-consuming process. The organization must consider the unique needs, preferences, and cultural nuances of each audience it wants to reach. Furthermore, as the organization introduces new products or services, its content strategy must adapt to these changes.
In order for a content strategy to be sustainable, it must be developed with the following concepts in mind:
  1. Content must be developed to be reused in different scenarios.
  2. Content strategy must remain flexible.
  3. Content must be delivered in a format that is ideal for the learner.
 
Personalization of content to individual audiences can be based on dozens or even hundreds of factors. It all starts with the development of core content, then adding on customized parts that suit the learning scenario.
Content strategy is most efficient when it can be automated. However, organizations must have the tools needed to create and reuse content efficiently. Traditional content development tools lock the content into a specific configuration and format. This means that if you want to reuse or repurpose the content for different scenarios or in different formats, you are faced with the tedious task of copying and pasting and essentially rebuilding the entire content piece.

This lack of flexibility can be time-consuming and inefficient, especially when dealing with a large amount of content or when frequent updates and adaptations are required. It becomes challenging to maintain consistency across various versions of the content and can lead to inconsistencies or errors if changes are not applied consistently.

A modern content development solution allows organizations to create content in small chunks in a flexible XML format that gets turned into responsive templates. Once the content is created, it can be formatted to be delivered in any number of configurations. Rather than being locked into traditional tools like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, it can be transformed into something as simple as a PDF to more tech-based delivery micro-formats, such as a web portal that uses embedded search widgets and AI chatbots.

Once in the right format, AI-powered recommendation engines can then suggest relevant content to users based on their past behavior, preferences, and similarities with other users. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, AI can continuously improve personalized recommendations, increasing user engagement and satisfaction.

How easy is it to scale a content personalization strategy?

Whether you are contemplating the use and impact of AI in your current content strategy now or in the future, in order to make the dream of scalable and personalized content management come to fruition, organizations must have the right ecosystem to carry out the strategy. A Component Content Management System (CCMS), is a solution that segments content into self-contained “building blocks” that are shared and reused across multiple channels. These channels can include internal communications, training and development resources, customer education, technical documentation of new products, and more.

A CCMS immediately improves content management ROI across the entire organization by centralizing the content production and reuse process, making it more efficient, improving agility, and delivering a superior user experience. 

Want to make your content is AI ready? Learn more about personalization and delivering content in the flow of work at scale. Check out our product tour with Training Industry, “From Zero to Hero: Content in the Flow of Work” that’s now on-demand. Watch the recording below!

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