Knowledge Management Revitalized

KM in a Web 2.0 World

InfoManagement Direct, November 2, 2007

Mike Murphy

In the 1990s, the IT world was abuzz with the knowledge management (KM) revolution. In preparation, companies started hiring KM managers and purchasing expensive systems with the promise of making information flow easier and more efficiently. Over the years, however, the KM-related positions faded away, these systems remained underutilized, and people were left with a bitter taste in their mouth when KM entered the conversation.

So what happened? For one, there were so many different definitions of knowledge and of KM. Some people thought knowledge was what existed in the hard-copy documents lying around the office, so KM meant record or document management, organizing information in a company so it was easier to find. They simply automated existing information processes, taking paper files and documents and converting them into a digital form.

Others thought of it as a way to capture tacit knowledge from employees, which means it relied on employees to contribute information. This latter definition could be part of a cyclical problem - if your employees are not contributing to the knowledge base, then the knowledge base is not very effective and will not deliver on the promise of making information access and exchange easier.

It was also too rigid - older KM systems did not take into account that people were contributing content, so the content would naturally evolve as procedures and policies changed and employees moved roles. Without a flexible system, knowledge would become outdated quickly and rendered useless.

Why the KM Revitalization?

There are several factors contributing to the revitalized interest in KM, or KM 2.0. It is important to remember that Internet, HTML or audio/video content weren’t part of the equation when KM first entered the discussion - people were just getting comfortable with a relational database management system (RDBMS) and records-oriented content. It therefore wasn't obvious why you needed another content storage system. With the arrival of the Internet and its evolution leading up to today, unstructured data exists easily in so many forms that cannot be accommodated in an RDBMS.

Another driver is the aging workforce - according to a recent study by the Conference Board, by 2010 about 64 million workers - 40 percent of the nation’s workforce - will be poised for retirement, though not all will choose to leave.¹ As baby boomers leave the workforce in droves, a growing concern among the companies they are vacating is the knowledge vacuum created in their wake. With a company being only as strong as its employees, companies are faced with the daunting task of capturing the knowledge before it’s too late – and with some sort of efficiency.

Also, competition has intensified across almost every industry as companies focus more and more on the user experience. For companies that sell into a competitive market, purchase decisions often hinge upon customer service quality. Wireless providers, banking institutions and insurance companies, for example, all advertise superior customer service experiences to lure users away from their current providers, leading companies to constantly scrutinize their current offering. Seeking any way to improve their user experiences, many organizations are starting to look to KM as a key part of their customer service function - arming service agents and Web self-service users with the best possible information to solve service issues as quickly and pleasantly as possible, while at the same time preventing future problems from arising for other users. They are also focusing on how employees can benefit from the knowledge their colleagues possess - a call center agent that has dealt with a service issue will have insight into how to solve it quicker and can also contribute to a discussion on how to prevent the issue from happening again.

For many industries, customers are becoming more technically savvy and prefer having the resources available to solve problems themselves. In this competitive landscape, they can and will go elsewhere if the company with whom they do business cannot deliver that level of customer self-service. From a customer satisfaction and an efficiency standpoint, self-service options become even more critical. Taking this a step further, companies in the KM 2.0 world realize that these customers have valuable knowledge that could be helpful in improving the self-service process as well as useful to other users. Companies are becoming more and more open to tools such as discussion forums where users can essentially help each other solve their problems.

Why Will it be Different this Time?

At the heart of it, KM is about enabling people to share information more freely so that they can be more effective doing their jobs. With increasing competitive pressures putting even more emphasis on customer service and the user experience, there is more of an impetus for users to contribute to the knowledge base in order to create additional efficiencies. Companies are becoming increasingly geographically dispersed, so there is even more of a need to have a system that allows information to be efficiently distributed electronically when people are in different offices and time zones. And finally, the much-talked-about Web 2.0 movement has reminded people that knowledge exists in many forms - not just in a dedicated KM system, but in everything from content management and CRM systems to blogs, wikis and forums. It has changed the way knowledge is collected - contributing content is almost second nature to this emerging Web 2.0 generation.

A KM 2.0 system is more flexible and can constantly evolve - agents can update the system when they discover additional insight into how to solve a problem. Users (with the right privileges) can quickly draft or recommend new content, or recommend changes to existing content. Understanding that people are going to use the system in varied ways, users can have personal profiles to update their preferences. This personalized view can automatically track details from previous sessions - for example, it can identify content that the user has not read yet, has already read, or has been updated since the user last read the content.

Customer feedback, via the contact center or Web self-service, when accessed in real-time, can be used in turn to amend existing knowledge content and prevent future problems. A more effective Web self-service capability can reduce contact center costs. To harvest the knowledge that resides in these Web 2.0 tools, such as discussion forums and blogs, internal users with privileges have the ability to click to recommend or contribute content from a forum topic, easily capturing questions and solutions for publication as formal knowledge content. Consumers using Web self-service systems have tools to navigate and find information within the forums, such as navigating forums by product category, quickly viewing popular or recent topics by category, filtering replies to topic questions by those marked as solutions, or quickly listing all of the user's individual questions posted to the forums. In addition, topics are marked as read, unread or updated since last read by the user viewing the forums.

And finally, search and knowledge management capabilities have caught up to the evolution of content. Companies can use intelligent search mechanisms to categorize user intent and knowledge applicability, and then in turn drive a better user experience (i.e., not just search results). To make sure that these searches produce the most accurate results, there are mechanisms that can value knowledge content by its reuse, and management mechanisms and workflows for information review, approval and archiving.

What Needs to Happen

Whereas the old KM was too limited and rigid, KM 2.0 is expansive and could overwhelm customers and employees if not managed properly. Good knowledge is essentially worthless without an effective way to retrieve it. With this sort of volume and the more Internet-savvy consumer and employee, basic keyword search isn’t going to cut it - the sheer magnitude of responses generated is time-consuming to sort through. In this time, the consumer might abandon the search and pick up the phone, thus defeating the purpose of having a Web-self-service option. In the case of the contact center agent, the extensive time it takes sorting through the keyword search results not only impacts the bottom line, but also customer satisfaction and retention. Using a natural language - or intent-based search makes accessing this information, regardless of its format, significantly more productive. With these systems, when content or user input is processed, a series of sophisticated linguistic and statistical techniques are applied, each of which builds on previous steps to add to the complete understanding of the content or question currently being evaluated. This allows the system to automatically retrieve the best answer available in the content sources present, as well as alert content owners to exact cases where more detail might be necessary. An intelligent search system not only satisfies current needs, but can also complete responses that anticipate and fulfill subsequent needs by delivering related information and relevant promotional offers that enable the user to continue his or her sales, service or research process.

In addition to the more traditional forms of structured and unstructured data, a company’s search capabilities need to cover Web 2.0 technologies- when a user posts a topic in a forum as a question, an intelligent search system can determine if there are any answers or related information available to display from forums and other content sources; or even determine if marketing promotions should be offered to the user posting the question. Forum content needs to be searched along with metadata, such as the replies to questions that have been marked as helpful or a solution. To help sort through the potentially massive amounts of data, your search can return just those answers that others marked as helpful for resolving similar problems. Reputation models allow the user community (including employees, customers, partners) to determine the strongest contributors and the value of each contribution.

Although the search tools of these new KM 2.0 systems can now expand the knowledge base to encompass this user-generated content, it does lend itself to potential disaster if not properly structured. To ensure that contributing content remains a reward and not a risk, companies need to have managed, controlled processes in place that can address this without hampering one’s willingness to contribute. Internally, companies can restrict the number of users that can contribute content. Externally, companies can set up triggers or alerts, so that when certain keywords are contributed, that post or document is brought to the attention of the person or persons managing the forums. Filters can prevent profanity or other offensive language from filtering in on both sides.

Updating your KM and introducing Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise can be a blessing but potentially a curse if not done correctly. To make sure that you are on the positive end of the spectrum, you need to 1) get enthusiasm built behind the project - your knowledge base is only as strong as the people that contribute to it; 2) have a search function that can not only access the right information, but also understand the user’s intent to generate the most accurate response experience possible; and 3) monitor the Web 2.0 technologies- the ability to harvest knowledge from users and employees is wonderful, but if it is not managed properly, it can get out of hand.

Reference:

1. Lynne Morton and Jeri Sedlar. "Managing the Maturing Workforce." The Conference Board, July 2005.

Mike Murphy brings more than 20 years of technology management and sales experience to InQuira and has been the CEO of InQuira since 2002. Prior to InQuira, he served as one of four key executives at Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP) and worked at Hewlett Packard for 13 years. Murphy can be reached at mmurphy@inquira.com.

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