Automate Your Knowledge: Delivering on the Promise of Knowledge Management
For many IT organizations, knowledge management is an attractive concept for streamlining service and support. Why not empower customers and employees to solve their own problems by giving them access to the corporation's knowledge stores?Unfortunately, traditional knowledge management applications have failed to live up to this potential. Early systems attempted to make every bit of corporate knowledge accessible through a single service and support knowledgebase, resulting in information overload.
Not making things any easier, knowledge management systems did not integrate easily with other enterprise applications such as internal support and customer service systems. By focusing on system requirements instead of the user's knowledge needs, and force-fitting service and support to the existing knowledge management system, knowledge management systems failed to deliver what users were looking for. This caused companies to sacrifice speed and accuracy of information access, and saddled them with more time-consuming content authoring and maintenance.
One of the biggest fundamental flaws in using traditional knowledge management to improve service and support is the intensity of backend activities: gathering information, funneling it into a knowledgebase, and keeping it refreshed. This laborious process explains why the field is often called "knowledge engineering." It's also why the answers generated from "how to" questions are often outdated and irrelevant to the person seeking the information.
Same Game, New Strategy
Knowledge automation technology changes the game. Specifically designed for service and support environments, knowledge automation answers the question, "How can the fastest, most accurate and personally relevant answer be delivered to the individual who needs it the most—i.e., the person with the problem?" Knowledge automation does exactly this, by leveraging automated personalization capabilities based on the user's context. It does this by automatically determining the PC enviroment or Web site location in order to present the most relevant information ranked by effectiveness weighting.
Knowledge automation can also help ensure the quality of the information by automatically delivering personalized answers to requested questions. It can reach beyond the delivery of static answers to include active content in the form of "one click fixes." This means that instead of forcing users to manually execute complex tasks, they are presented with automated "how-to" choices that can solve their problem with a click of the mouse. Other knowledge automation benefits include streamlined delivery of knowledge to users and analysts, and the ability to delegate knowledgebase management to other groups within the enterprise.
Unlike traditional approaches, Knowledge Automation:
- Delivers automated personalization without manual input
- Supports all knowledge—including static and active content as "one click fixes"
- Supports the ability to search structured and unstructured knowledge
- Is built from the ground-up on a Web platform
- Provides template-based WYSIWYG authoring & flexible publishing workflows
- Delivers self-evaluating value-based metrics
SupportSoft (Nasdaq: SPRT) is a leading provider of service and support automation software. Its Web-based family of product solutions is designed to help corporations automate and personalize the service and support they provide to their customers, subscribers, employees and partners. Its software is used both within office environments and in the home. SupportSoft counts 6 out of the top 7 North American broadband service providers as customers, while 25% of the Fortune 50 have standardized on its product offerings. Global 2000 customers include corporate enterprises like GE, Cisco Systems, Bank of America and Schlumberger, plus OEMs like IBM and Sony, and service providers such as Comcast, SBC and BellSouth.
To better understand how knowledge management has evolved into knowledge automation, read SupportSoft's free white paper at