Many knowledge management initiatives fail because user buy-in is either not there, or not sustainable.  For a knowledge-based culture to really take hold, you need an active community of contributors and participants.  Mandating desired behavior is destined to fail, as is any effort to co-opt the right behavior by appealing to the individual's responsibility to serve the 'greater good' of the knowledge community. 

No, the right way to maintain momentum and build your organization's knowledge culture is to persuasively answer the question that is on every user's mind - "What's in it for me?" (aka WIIFM).  Everyone is motivated by something.  The trick is to find out what motivates an individual and demonstrate how he/she will benefit by participating in the knowledge community.  To be persuasive, you must convince them of the benefits they will gain by embracing knowledge management and incorporating the right behavior into their daily routine. 

For contact center users, that could mean demonstrating how the knowledge management system will empower them to resolve even the most complex customer problems in a fraction of the time normally allotted to troubleshooting difficult issues.  Or it could be demonstrating how the system could eliminate redundant calls by improving how customers help themselves on the web (contact center agents generally hate answering the same question over and over).  Or maybe you outline how the new processes and tools affect the key metrics that determine their variable compensation and bonus pay.  There could be dozens of others answers to the WIIFM question, and they will likely vary by group.  What motivates the contact center agent is likely to be different from what motivates the product development team, or management, or even customers who participate through discussion forums or other community mechanisms. 

Two answers to 'what's in it for me?' are particularly popular, and warrant further exploration.  Money and recognition have always proven to be strong motivators, and are easy to apply to knowledge management initiatives. 

Compensation Models to Encourage Contributions

Compensation models are the simplest way to encourage and reward KM contribution. These models are typically based on how much an individual user contributes – either through new content or updating existing content – and measures this activity over a specified period of time (i.e. monthly or quarterly).

Though this model encourages KM contribution and content creation, it does not necessarily encourage behavior consistent with building a knowledge culture.  The challenge with this model is that it does not incent users to incorporate knowledge management into their daily routines and workflow.  Instead, you create an environment where knowledge contributions spike at the end of the measurement period, which in effect limits their relative value by deferring the benefit others receive from it. 

There is one other major problem with compensation models - if a company focuses exclusively on quantity (i.e. a goal of 10 articles per quarter), the overall quality of the contributed knowledge will suffer.  You will also likely clutter your knowledgebase with redundant content.

Reputation Models to Recognize the Best Knowledge Contributors

Reputation models, by contrast, focus more on rewarding users (often with recognition) based on the value of their contributions – not the amount of content created. The value of the contribution can be determined by many factors - how other users (including customers and partners) rate the content;  how often the content has been marked a 'solution' or linked to resolved cases (i.e. reuse counts); or even by a sliding scale that assigns more reputation value to knowledge contributions associated with complex problems.  In one very interesting development, a few companies are exploring an opt-in model for problem resolution and reputation measurement.  Under this model, reputation point values are determined by the complexity of the problem and the time that has elapsed since the case was submitted.  Rather than assign the case to a specific agent, experts swarm to the case, drawn by the complexity and point values at stake (which decrease as time elapses).  It is easy to see how offshoots of this model could encourage collaboration between experts, allow point-sharing, and reward knowledge contributions that originate from problem resolution.

In our experience, reputation models are superior to compensation models in eliciting the right behavior from your knowledge community. With reputation models, there is less need to cleanse the knowledgebase.  There is no incentive to contribute less relevant or poor content, so total overall knowledge quality increases. Users are encouraged to consistently contribute relevant, accurate and timely content to knowledgebase and other users are able to access and gain value from their contributions on a more regular basis.  

So keep it simple - put yourself in the shoes of the users you want to embrace the new knowledge management processes and systems and answer 'What's in it for me?'.  Demonstrate the answers to those questions.  Then design a reputation model to recognize and reward participation and contribution. 

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