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From Chaos to Clarity: The Power of Single Sourcing in L&D
One of the most time-consuming parts of the learning and development professional’s week is creating and managing learning content.
This encompasses all sorts of activities, from liaising with SMEs and leaders across the business pulling together content, to working together reviewing and editing assets, to rolling content out across multiple learning platforms. So much learning content in every organization quickly becomes overwhelming for everyone - it’s a content tsunami.
This is usually a manual process, requiring a lot of back-and-forth and lengthy collaborations between and across teams. Of course, this isn’t sustainable, as it wastes time on unnecessarily lengthy processes and takes the learning and development team away from more important tasks.
That’s why there’s an urgent need for L&D to continue to innovate and take control with the right tools and processes.
Why content centralization is critical
If you’re expecting your people to know exactly where every piece of learning content is that they might need, you’ll feel a lot less excited to create more of that content when you learn much of it is often never found at the time of need.
Centralizing your resources will streamline the entire content management process for your admins and employees alike, saving time, reducing frustration, and boosting operational efficiency across your teams.
For admins, it means having one place to manage all content - think of it as your “content control room.” Once you centralize that control, you can then distribute it to every destination from one place, instead of wasting time manually uploading assets or learning objects one system at a time.
Related Resources
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A one-stop content repository
Some organizations split the creation of learning materials and resources across multiple platforms. This could mean an authoring tool for eLearning courses, a software simulation tool for training, a shared workspace to manage your assets… the list goes on. While it may be possible to manage all of these tools when your organization is smaller, as you grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage and update your learning content efficiently.
A one-stop content repository (in this case, a learning content management system, or LCMS) is a central hub designed to simplify access to, and management of, essential materials, saving your team from wasting time navigating a labyrinth of files and folders spread across systems and projects. Having a centralized tool for all content creation enables you to make quick updates and republish courseware according to “single sourcing” best practices, making your life infinitely easier.
Switching to single sourcing
Single sourcing is the practice of creating content once and reusing it in various places with minimal effort. With the right LCMS, you can use the common content as a baseline, and customize the rest for each intended audience, all within a single course. Single sourcing means increased efficiency, consistency, and scalability across all learning content management processes.
But it’s not just about managing where your learning content goes. Single sourcing also enables you to save significant time across the entire content creation and management cycle, from production to review to QA to content auditing and updating. It means you can manage every step of the content process in one platform, and report on the usage of each asset to ensure full visibility of your resources and compliance needs.
Why an LCMS?
An LCMS is the must-have tool for any organization looking to save time and effort by streamlining its learning content management processes. It doesn’t replace your LMS or LXP, but it works alongside them, meaning you can switch to a “one-and-done” approach to uploading, distributing, and updating content.
What an LCMS does replace, though, is your various authoring tools. You can create, collaborate on the review process and manage a multitude of content variations from a single location. This is infinitely easier than creating a learning asset on one tool, getting it reviewed and edited by each individual stakeholder, going back to the original tool, editing it, then finally uploading it across your platforms.
Your LCMS can also facilitate:
- Multi-format publishing
- Creating a knowledge base from your existing content
- eLearning content authoring
- Simulation creation
- Scenario branching
- Gamification
- Video interactivity
- Collaboration, review, and approvals
Shifting your strategy
Switching to a more centralized learning content management strategy goes beyond the purely practical concerns. It also requires a shift in mentality and your overall learning strategy, so it pays to make sure that everyone is aligned around your new and improved processes.
If you’re looking to maximize your return on a centralized content strategy, opting for an LCMS like dominKnow | ONE is the smart choice. With dominKnow, you can convert existing content and adopt a new program that will save you hundreds of hours on your content management, giving you your most efficient learning strategy yet. It’s an absolute must for large organizations with multiple authors and roles on your learning and development team.
dominKnow has all the tools your team needs to create and distribute knowledge wherever and whenever it’s needed.
