CEO Mandate: A Higher Return on Knowledge
Excerpted from the Coveo eBook "Measuring a Return on Knowledge in a Big Data World."
The top CEO challenge—according to recent surveys including IBM's annual CEO survey—is responding to customers and marketplaces with greater relevance and immediacy. That's because lack of relevance and responsiveness carries huge economic consequences—missing opportunities, poor customer service, lower sales, customer-churn, sub-optimal products and services, costs associated with reinventing the wheel and more.
CEOs recognize collective knowledge as a critical asset-under-utilized and yet fundamental to business agility and competitiveness. Relevant knowledge—everywhere—is their key competitive differentiator and the greatest source of profitability.
Just like any other asset, knowledge will only generate returns to the extent that it is re-utilized by employees and customers to take higher value business actions. Otherwise the asset only sits there, latent and untapped. What's more, at most companies, employees spend a significant amount of time trying to find and process information, often at a high cost. For example, IDC's survey on the "High Cost of Not Finding Information" reported that knowledge workers spend anywhere from 15% to 35% of their time searching for, assembling, and then unfortunately, recreating information that already exists.
Companies have an urgent and financial incentive to get a higher return on their collective knowledge. Many see the opportunity presented by their collective knowledge and big data, but face a challenging conundrum of relevance versus volume as data and content are increasingly fragmented across countless and ever-changing sources.
Understanding Knowledge: Why Traditional KM Failed
Traditional KM has failed to achieve the goal of shared, ubiquitous, dynamic and contextually relevant enterprise knowledge at the worker's and customer's fingertips. KM initiatives historically considered knowledge a transferable commodity that could be stored in a system of record and used mechanically. In reality, knowledge goes beyond data and information, and is personal and contextual.
Data is factual information-measurements, statistics or facts. In and of itself, data provides limited value. It must be organized into information before it can be interpreted.
Information is data in context—organized, categorized or condensed.
Knowledge is a human capability to process information to make decisions and take action.
So, if knowledge is a human capability, how can it be housed in a system of record, such as a knowledgebase? It can't. This is the fundamental flaw of most knowledge management initiatives—and why traditional KM has failed.
How to Get a Return on Knowledge
A new breed of context-aware technologies are transforming knowledge management initiatives, allowing companies to capitalize on their collective knowledge—across systems, the Web and social media—to become more relevant and responsive to their customers.
Unified indexing and insight technology brings content into context—assembling fragments of structured and unstructured information on demand and presenting them, in context, to users. Applying this technology to reach, correlate and contextualize knowledge and experts from anywhere will generate a meaningful return on knowledge-and help your organization be more responsive and relevant to customers.
1. Crawl, enrich and contextualize the knowledge ecosystem. Designed for the enterprise, unified indexing and insight technology securely crawls the systems storing your valuable information (e.g. email, databases, SharePoint, Salesforce, CRM, ERP, social media, etc.), no matter the source or format. The technology unifies the data in a central index, normalizes and enriches the data (using text analytics), and creates mash-ups on demand within the user's context.
2. Present relevant content and experts, in context. Just like the suggested items on ecommerce websites you visit, your employees and customers will see personalized views of the information and experts they need— from your entire knowledge ecosystem—in their context. This information can help them solve customer support cases faster, be more relevant, build better products and more.
3. Empower contribution. In an environment where knowledge is used (and re-used) people see value in sharing. With a clear audience and context, your employees and customers will be motivated to create content, rate it and share knowledge about customers, cases, products, etc. to make your knowledge ecosystem stronger.. Leading organizations are using unified indexing and insight technology to unleash the value of contextual knowledge. For example, a FORTUNE 500 organization saw both a 30% reduction in case resolution time and a 10% increase in customer self-service satisfaction by providing customers and employees with better access to knowledge.
A recent Forbes article highlighted the trend, saying that we're in a "new era of search-powered wealth creation," powered by organizations that are unlocking the value inherent in their disparate sources of knowledge. Companies that adopt these new methods to exploit their collective knowledge will create new value and reap significant rewards. Those that do not will be outpaced.
For best practices and guidance on how to compute the financial benefits of these new KM initiatives, visit Coveo for a free copy of the Coveo eBook "Measuring a Return on Knowledge in a Big Data World."
Coveo's highly advanced, Unified Indexing and Insight platform transforms knowledge management initiatives by redefining how people access and share fragmented knowledge around the customer-focused enterprise. Coveo brings together the collective and yet fragmented information from cloud-based, social and on-premise systems, and injects it into the context of every user, every time.
More than 500 companies use Coveo to achieve their business goals. Among Coveo customers are L'Oreal Switzerland, Lockheed Martin, YUM! Brands, GEICO and SunGard. For more information, visit www.coveo.com, follow us on Twitter @coveo or like us on Facebook.
For additional information follow this link to our blog: http://blog.coveo.com/author/esteban-kolsky/