Set Up Your Centralized Insights Management Platform for Success

If you’ve ever experienced the pain of searching across multiple vendor portals, sifting through your email inbox, or spelunking across a shared drive to find an answer to a research question, you already know how important it is to make research and insights easy to find and access. By centralizing all finalized research and insights documents in one searchable platform, you make it easier for all insights team members and stakeholders to find the information they need to drive decisions – and significantly cut down on time spent searching across different locations.

You may already be in the process of selecting an insights management platform or determining if the software your organization already has will meet your needs. But as you go through this process, it’s important to think about how you’ll set up the platform to meet your users’ needs. After all, it doesn’t matter how powerful the technology is – if your platform isn’t set up in a way that makes it easy for users to jump in and start finding relevant insights on day one, you’re going to have a hard time convincing users to adopt the platform long term.

Whether you are partnering with a vendor or setting up a new insights management platform on your own, here are seven key steps to keep in mind:

 

1. Define your goals and objectives for your new platform.

Your goals should represent your desired outcomes and tie back to broader business impact areas. For example, a goal might be to make insights accessible and searchable for stakeholders across the organization or to enable stakeholders to make strategic decisions backed by data in real-time.

Your objectives should be concrete steps that are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, an objective might be to roll out an insights platform to the Marketing, Sales, and R&D departments in 6 months or to have each insights team member posting new reports at least once a month.

Documenting your goals and objectives will help you stay on track and communicate the value of the platform as you prepare to launch. It will also make it easier to assess the success of your insights management initiative further down the road.

 

2. Perform an insights content audit.

Before you can launch your insights platform, you need to round up all the research and insights content that currently exists across your organization and determine what you need to migrate to the new platform.

It may be helpful to set up a spreadsheet with the following columns:

• Asset Name: The document’s file name or title, including the file extension (.pdf, .pptx, etc.)
• Category: How you want to structure content; if you want to organize content across multiple dimensions (e.g., by research type, line of business, etc.), then it may make sense to include multiple Category columns
• Contributor: The internal author or vendor that created the report
• Locations(s): Where the content is currently stored
• Date published or updated
• Status: Whether the content is current or outdated

This spreadsheet will give you a clear view of everything that needs to be moved to the platform – as well as content that should be archived or updated before your launch. Having a category structure in place will also help you keep content organized and apply categories to content in the new platform, making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.

 

3. Establish your steering committee.

Your steering committee is the group of stakeholders that will meet regularly as you set up and prepare to launch your insights platform. They are responsible for providing strategic direction, ensuring the project is aligned with company goals, and managing the project’s execution. Additionally, they are individuals with whom you want to establish early buy-in for the initiative.

The steering committee should be representative of the stakeholder groups that will be using the insights management platform and should ideally include senior leaders from the functional areas that will be impacted. It can also be valuable to include an end user (someone who will be using the platform on a daily basis) to serve as the voice of your internal customer.

 

4. Get on your IT team’s radar.

Determine what deliverables you will need from your IT team and make sure to get on their calendar well ahead of your planned launch date. IT will help implement technical deliverables that will make it easy and seamless for end users to access the platform. Examples include setting up a vanity URL for your insights platform, setting up Single Sign-On, and adding the domain of your insights platform to your organization’s allow list.

 

5. Migrate content.

It’s time to take the content that you corralled during your audit and upload it to your new insights management platform. If you’re partnering with a vendor that provides implementation services, they can do the heavy lifting of content migration and ensure that all content has the appropriate categories and tags applied to it.

 

6. Determine roles for users.

If you’re using a platform that has different permission levels, it’s important to determine who your end users will be and what role they should be assigned. For example, you may decide that all members of your insights team should be able to contribute new content, while you may want your stakeholders to be able to comment and ask questions but not publish new content.

 

7. Beta test.

While this step is optional, it can be valuable to launch your new insights platform to a small group of beta testers ahead of your general launch. Your beta testers can provide feedback that will allow you to fine-tune the structure of the platform (for example, you might discover that some of your category names or report titles are not intuitive for users and should be changed).

Beta testing can also help get a select group of end users bought into the platform before the official launch. These beta testers can become champions for the platform and get other end users in their departments excited to use it.

 

Set up your platform for long-term success.

Being strategic about your setup process before you roll out your new insights maorgaznagement platform will help ensure you and your users start seeing value right away. It’s important to clearly define how the platform will fit into their existing workflows, and set clear expectations for how and when they should be using it. Make sure your team members and stakeholders see the platform as the single source of truth for research and insights so that it becomes their go-to place to self-serve insights content. The more comfortable users are with the platform, and the more they see it returning relevant answers to their research questions, the more they will leverage insights to make informed decisions.