Defining Knowledge Workers’ Creation, Description, and Storage (CDS) Practices as Impact on Enterprise Content Management Strategy

As part of the effort to digitally transform, organizations are seeking more and better solutionsto longstanding enterprise content management challenges. Such solutions rarely investigatethe relationship between knowledge workers’ daily work to capture information and theperceived or actual value of that information to the enterprise per established contentmanagement strategy. The study described in this paper seeks to identify gaps in contentmanagement practices versus policy by modeling the conventions by which one organization'sknowledge workers typically generate, store, and later recover their daily work products. Thirty-fiveinterviews with knowledge workers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were conducted onthis subject. The results of these interviews provide an insight as to how knowledge workersinteract with enterprise content in their dual roles as both the primary creators and primaryconsumers of enterprise content. This paper, which outlines various permutations of the digitalobject creation, description, and storage (CDS) model, provides basic strategies for bringing thevalue perceptions of knowledge workers into alignment with institutional directives related toimproving content findability and reuse in the enterprise.