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Retailers of all shapes and sizes have to occasionally take stock of their inventory in order to maximize business potential. They do it to check what stock is on hand; the quantities available for immediate sale; what stock is currently on order, or needs to be ordered, from suppliers; and ultimately, what's selling and what's not. The last thing retailers want is to have too much of something that's not selling and not enough of something that is.

Organizations need to take stock of their content inventory for the same reasons. They shouldn't have employees spending valuable time and effort gathering and developing content that's not being used. Business and user needs change over time, so do organizational structures. Content audits are needed to evaluate not only the state and performance of a corporate intranet, but an organization's information assets in general.

Content Lifecycle

Intranet content, like the system that holds it, has a lifecycle. While the content itself may not change throughout its lifecycle, its value certainly does. Like many things of value, intranet content depreciates over time. Content that's added today won't have the same impact and worth a month down the road.

To keep content relevant for as long as possible, it's important to understand the five stages of the content lifecycle:

1. Gathering and Conception: External information is collected from various third-party sources and filtered by each intranet section owner. Internal content is developed in-house by experts in their respective fields.

2. Storage and Organization: Content is processed, classified, and stored on an intranet.

3. Dissemination: Content is published on an intranet for users to access and/or delivered directly through e-mail and RSS newsfeeds.

4. Usage: The active use of content by turning it into knowledge and used in the decision-making process.

5. Disposal or Updating: Old content is either archived, destroyed, or updated with newer information.

I won't get into content lifespan too much here, since it was already covered in my article Content Life: The Art of Archiving, but I think it's worthwhile mentioning stage five as it relates to an intranet content audit initiative. What's done with content during the final stage of the lifecycle must be decided by those holding ownership of the information. Content is either updated with newer information (thereby extending its lifecycle and making it relevant again) or its journey ends there and is put out to pasture.

Old content that has clearly outlived its life shouldn't be kept on an intranet simply for the sake of proving it was there. Unless there are legal or regulatory reasons to keep this content active, it should be disposed of securely or archived — kept separate from more relevant content. Content owners who haven't taken the time to consider stage five enough will find out during the auditing process how much extraneous information can really accumulate in an intranet over the years.

The Purpose of Conducting an Audit

An information audit is not so much about the state of a system as it is about the content contained within it, those that have yet to be discovered, and the process by which it's all managed. Intranets grow and become more content heavy, ownership moves from one department to another, and business processes as well as their user base will change throughout content's lifecycle. Over time, content that goes unchecked can be lost, forgotten, or even become a burden on the system. It can be relegated to the darkest recesses of the system never to be seen again. Some valuable organizational content might never even make it onto the system.

An occasional intranet content audit is required to maintain the overall health of a system and to review an organization's knowledge assets. It's used to accomplish many goals:

• Review the status and usage of intranet content and how well it meets users' needs. Are some content sections too heavy; are some too light? This will allow intranet owners to distinguish what content is being used the most and what isn't being used at all (or used only lightly).

• Help intranet owners reassess the organization's content needs. Do current content management initiatives still reflect business practices?

• Find content deficiencies. Are some content needs not being met?

• Identify overworked content managers and reallocate resources if necessary.

• Identify old, duplicate, and irrelevant content — content that can be cluttering up an intranet and drawing attention away from more important information.

• Help intranet owners decide whether to renew subscriptions to external content provider services. There's no sense renewing content that no one is using.

• Help intranet owners uncover an organization's wealth of dark data.

• Provide intranet owners with an opportunity to review current content taxonomies and whether they still reflects business and user requirements.

• Allow intranet owners to organize and categorize unstructured content such as information gleaned from e-mails, wikis, blogs.

• A content audit can also be a good time to review access control for sensitive information.