Big Vision, Small Steps: A KM Strategy within a US Agency's Policy Content Management Environment

The US Social Security Administration (SSA) provides retirement and disability benefits to about 50 million Americans. Nearly 60,000 staff members and over 14,000 state employees rely on the Agency’s policies to know how to process benefits claims accurately. In the last two years, SSA has begun to improve the systems that support creation and distribution of policy and procedural content. Many of these improvements demonstrate important concepts for end user information access. Alongside this has been the recognition of a need for more sophisticated knowledge management spanning the authoring and the end-user communities. This case study discusses the developing knowledge management strategy, in light of the experiences and lessons that are being learned from the ongoing implementation of a content management environment.