Defining knowledge workers' creation, description, and storage practices as impact on enterprise content management strategy

As part of the effort to digitally transform, organizations are seeking more and better solutions to long‐standing enterprise content management challenges. Such solutions rarely investigate the relationship between knowledge workers' daily work to capture information and the perceived or actual value of that information to the enterprise per established content management strategy. The study described in this paper seeks to identify gaps in content management practices versus policy by modeling the conventions by which one organization's knowledge workers typically generate, store, and later recover their daily work products. Thirty‐five interviews with knowledge workers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were conducted on this subject. The results of these interviews provide an insight as to how knowledge workers interact with enterprise content in their dual roles as both the primary creators and primary consumers of enterprise content. This paper, which outlines various permutations of the digital object creation, description, and storage (CDS) model, provides basic strategies for bringing the value perceptions of knowledge workers into alignment with institutional directives related to improving content findability and reuse in the enterprise.