Authority
Who owns the knowledge?
Why it matters
Who owns the knowledge?
An assistant answering a traveller has to treat something as authoritative. If your organisation has not established what it is definitively the source for, something else fills the gap: an aggregator, a review summary, a decade-old article, another organisation describing you in passing.
Authority is not a claim you make on a page. It is a question of whether a specific, current, attributable source exists for each thing you are responsible for, and whether a named person is accountable for keeping it true.
What to identify
Where to look first
- The facts you are the definitive source for, as distinct from facts you merely repeat.
- A named owner inside the organisation for each of them.
- Where third parties currently answer on your behalf, and whether they are right.
- The single place each fact changes when it changes.
Assessment
Four questions worth answering honestly
- Can you name the owner of every fact travellers routinely ask you about?
- Is there a published, current source you would confidently point an assistant to?
- Do you know which third parties are answering for you today?
- When something changes, does it change in one place or several?
Maturity
Where organisations usually sit
- No ownership. Nobody is accountable and nobody is sure what is current.
- Informal. Ownership sits with individuals by habit, not by design.
- Assigned. Owners are named, though coverage is uneven and review is ad hoc.
- Governed. Every material fact has an owner, a source and a review cycle.
- Authoritative. Ownership is published, attributable and survives staff changes.
Find out where you stand
Most engagements begin with a baseline across all six pillars, and a view of which one is holding the others back.