Meeting the Challenges of the Media Savvy Workforce

By Tim Hughan

In this article, Tim Hughan, Director of Marketing for Altus Learning Systems, discusses how video technology addresses the challenge corporations face in capturing and sharing knowledge conveyed verbally in meetings and web conferences.

“Altus extends the shelf life of our content, making it easy to find information and create new assets from it. That’s the advantage their tool provides to the Oracle sales force”
-Paul Salinger, Vice President of Marketing at Oracle

Video as an information source has taken off, with 300 million worldwide web visitors downloading 5 billion video streams monthly and 15 hours of new video content uploaded every second. 

Consumer adoption of media is driving corporations to create video datasheets and product demos to quickly educate their employees, customers and partners.

Simply put, video is the easiest way to capture and share the vast amount of knowledge that is verbally conveyed during meetings, video conferencing sessions or web conferences.

Conservative estimates put the number of web conferences (WebEx, GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting, etc.) at over 400,000 meetings a day. Yet, the content of these meetings is not being captured in a way that can be used by the wider organization.

Video goes beyond traditional document-based knowledge management tools that depend on experts to document their knowledge to make it available for all to consume. This documentation burden is often not a core job function so is either not done or is incomplete. Nor can document-based systems effectively convey the energy of an executive or field star delivering a corporate presentation. A common lament of internal knowledge portals is that employees cannot find what they are looking for. If they only had a better search engine, all would be right with the world. The reality is search is not the problem—the knowledge they need was never captured.

The above-described limitations are only becoming more problematic as the pace of change for most organizations continues to accelerate. The “importance of immediacy” is an ever more critical factor for successfully achieving corporate objectives. This requires that accurate, up-to-date knowledge be available when and where it is needed.

To incorporate video into their knowledge management strategies, innovative enterprises are turning to media management systems to make video assets searchable and accessible by all employees. A leading vendor in this space is Altus Learning Systems, which offers a SaaS-enabled video capture and management platform called vSearch. Altus vSearch turns enterprise media, from video to web conferences to telepresence meetings, into a searchable, accessible asset that customers, partners and employees can leverage to increase productivity and revenue.

Altus serves over 20 Fortune 500 enterprises including Cisco Systems, NetApp and Oracle. Cisco joined forces with Altus to capture live events, web conferences and conference calls and shares the knowledge from those events with its sales force of 16,000 sales people in 87 countries. Recently, NetApp was recognized by CIO Magazine for its deployment of Altus vSearch in its sales and channel enablement efforts, earning praise as one of 100 innovative organizations that use IT effectively. In 2009, Oracle saved $10 million by hosting a virtual sales kickoff rather than bringing in employees and partners from all over the world for a 3-day onsite event. Oracle turned to Altus vSearch to capture and share all kickoff video presentations and sales tools.  Paul Salinger, Vice President of Marketing at Oracle, commented, “Altus extends the shelf life of our content, making it easy to find information and create new assets from it. That’s the advantage their tool provides to the Oracle sales force.”

The Big Payoff

It’s easy to see how the video-enabled enterprise can raise the level of productivity, increase revenue and enhance the bottom line for any organization. But that’s only the beginning. Perhaps the most exciting possibilities grow out of how video can transform all of the ways that an organization utilizes, shares and even creates information.

5 Easy Steps to a More Productive, Informed Organization

1. Make the Commitment

Make verbal knowledge capture part of the corporate process instead of a throwaway effort.  Digitally record your next sales meeting, meeting, training session or corporate communication so that all the knowledge from your organization is captured, not just the knowledge that someone writes down. 

2. Capture the Knowledge

Video capture can be as elaborate as a full production studio or as simple as a consumer-grade video camera or even web conferencing application like WebEx or GoToMeeting.  Organizations need only make the commitment to digitally record meetings and using commonly available tools can capture vast amounts of institutional knowledge from employees. 
By using video or audio recording, subject matters experts do not need to learn new software or create additional documents. They simply present their knowledge in a traditional manner – via meetings or web conferences.

3. Share the Knowledge with the Organization

Once media content is captured, it needs to be shared with the organization in an accessible library. Effective media repositories deliver streaming content to anyone in the world through global content delivery networks to ensure smooth playback for all users, regardless of how far they may be from the corporate office.

4. Make Video as Accessible as Documents

It is not enough to record and post videos on-line in a library though. To be truly useful to an organization, the content in the video must be easily accessible and searchable. Once knowledge is captured, the audio/video can be transformed into searchable data by transcribing it, timing the transcript with the audio, and putting the indexed text and timings in a database with a full-text search engine such as Altus vSearch.

People speak on average at 160-170 words per minute when presenting, which means that a one-hour presentation has roughly 10,000 transcribed words. By using specialized transformation techniques, the audio data, plus the 1,000 words from a one-hour PowerPoint presentation can be converted to digital data that retains the all of the inter-related coherence of the original session – with the added advantage that it is now inherently searchable.

5. Go Mobile

To be an efficient knowledge transfer mechanism, video needs to be as reusable as any other document. By fully transcribing the spoken word, video is transformed into data. This content can be streamed or deployed to mobile devices as downloadable MP3 audio or MP4 video or even embedded as links in web sites or blogs.

With tens of millions of Smartphones and now iPad devices being used, Altus recently introduced vSearch Mobile, which gives mobile users the same ability to browse, search, and play video and slide content as the desktop version, providing continuous and seamless access to corporate knowledge. For more information on Altus Learning Systems, please visit www.altuscorp.com.