Today’s digital workplace is a beautiful and terrible thing. Technology helps us get more done, more quickly, than ever before, but it comes with its own challenges, from security to sprawl. In fact, the average business today uses over 300 applications, and employees shift between those applications every two to three minutes. This scenario impacts everything from IT’s overall strategy to each individual’s productivity.

One key unintended consequence of the digital workplace is the loss of corporate memory – a challenge we at Aurea are working hard to help companies solve with Jive’s interactive intranet. With so many applications and so much content in so many places, company culture gets diluted and eventually lost. Culture is often a fuzzy topic but the ramifications of the loss of corporate memory are serious and tangible: companies spend an average of $430,000 per departing employee due to corporate memory loss in addition to standard replacement costs.

What’s the solution? Create a digital workplace strategy optimized to foster corporate memory. I lay out the blueprint for this strategy in my recent article on CMSWire, How to Build a Blueprint for Your Corporate Memory.

You can read all the details there, but in a nutshell, it involves 5 main steps:

Categorize your organization’s content.
Create a data pipeline.
Build an organizational knowledge graph.
Add content with semantic search.
Go next-gen with AI and machine learning.

None of these are simple, but we believe they’re critical for any company that cares about corporate memory, and we hope to facilitate each step through Jive product innovation over the coming months and years. Done right, the digital workplace can transform an organization in countless ways. It gives us technology tools, but also enables us to connect with each other in new and meaningful ways – and that’s where the real value comes in.

Tej Redkar
Chief Product Officer