Commitment and Cooperation: Essential Ingredients for KM Success
Many services organizations aspire to excel in knowledge management (KM). However, only a percentage of these organizations put enough focus and effort toward developing the specific capabilities and relationships that KM needs to evolve over time as a core business program. The focus of KM initiatives is often heavily weighted on technology and user interface presentation, with less thought given to cultivating the best possible expertise and experience in each role in the knowledge development and delivery chain.
That’s unfortunate, because a clear, comprehensive understanding of the actual audiences and outcomes of KM can drive effective behavior and help your organization achieve fast, efficient, and effective service delivery.
Because KM spans many areas of information development, technology, and business process, contributing parts of your organization may have different related goals. For example, product and marketing organizations may focus on creating and updating complete, compliant, and accurate product information. Technology groups think about tools as they fit and relate to the whole IT footprint of an organization. Support organizations typically focus on services processes and measures.
As a business practice, KM seeks to leverage these groups as a virtual team toward one focused end: delivering the best information, in the correct context, at each moment and touch point in an information domain. In the world of support and service, this means providing the right information, quickly and intuitively, to respond in each support channel and interaction.
Given this objective, each group must evolve shared responsibilities for KM outcomesin order for the solution to deliver maximum value. This can mean surrendering some level of control toward the common goal of delivering a great customer service experience.
A mature KM program exhibits the following behaviors and investments:
User-Focused Knowledge Access Tools–The organization commits to evolving and maintaining a robust, multi-faceted context model that represents all relevant potential dimensions of customer interaction. Browsing, filtering, searching, and navigating content are enabled in concert to support knowledge access scenarios, from simple browsing, to complex natural language queries, to stepwise guidance through specific content objects.
Task-Focused Content Formats–All content creation groups in the organization commit to providing information to enable focused, task-friendly views of information required in services interactions—and to providing regular information updates. Content authoring includes keeping the context model and associated tagging up to date.
Emphasis on Agent Adoption and Ownership–Successful KM-centric support organizations focus on agent KM coaching and recognition, not just training. Ongoing support, communications, and recognition reinforce the value your organization places on effective KM use.
Continuous Improvement Metrics–Business intelligence expertise is resourced toward consistent analysis and reporting of KM key performance indicators in understandable, actionable formats.
Through shared roles, responsibilities, and commitments, key stakeholders in your organization can foster KM excellence as a virtual team. When knowledge assets are truly considered and treated as valuable business resources, your organization can realize the full benefits of effective content knowledge development and delivery.
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