January/February 2008
How Do You Manage Your Organizational Memory?

(Congratulations to the readers from TD Bank and Wipro who submitted this month's topic!)

In this issue:

• Use Forums to Manage Organizational Memory
• Customer Connection: GE Fanuc Wins 2007 InfoWorld 100 Award
• InQuiring Minds Want to Know: Q&A With Mark Buckallew

You don’t know what you know until you are asked. This is the challenge that many organizations face – having so much of their corporate knowledge compartmentalized in the heads of one or a few experts in each department. What is needed is a way to capture and share this tacit knowledge so that it can be accessible to others.

The key to managing organizational memory is to capture knowledge when it is provided, directly within the workflow. First, it is helpful to examine the ways that knowledge is currently being exchanged within workplace activities and how the information is captured:

• Direct personal exchanges, such as conversations and meetings: The information is sometimes captured in the form of summary documents or emails.
• Email threads: The information may be captured, but can be challenging to find when you want to access it.
• Phone calls: The information is lost unless recorded.
• Instant messages: The information exchanged is saved by some, but not captured by most.
• Forums: The information is captured and accessible to all.

Except for forums, the commonality of each of the vehicles above is that the information shared is only exchanged with a limited audience.

Forums provide many advantages for managing organizational memory. First and foremost, as stated above, information is captured from many and accessible to all. The knowledge is organized by topic so that each topic consists of issues or questions raised along with the associated responses or resolutions. The information input into forums may reveal content gaps in the company’s general knowledge base. In these cases, forum entries can be promoted to knowledge base articles, helping to formalize the content so that it is in a state to be maintained in an ongoing basis (either proactively, through a periodic review process, or reactively, through usage, where users are able to review and amend content.) Finally, forums can be crawled so that the content can be accessible to the search engine. In this way, the content of forums can be included in search results when relevant inquires are made.

Forums help companies and users identify who topic experts are as well as the value of content contributed. Through a reputation model, users accumulate points in the system based upon the value of their contributions. For example, if a user replies to a question posted to the forums, and the person who posted the question identifies the reply as helpful or a solution, then the user receives points. In this manner, content can be rated subjectively by users. Additionally, forum content can be measured for effectiveness based on usage. Reuse can be counted by the number of support cases linked to the document and the document value can be determined by the total of all incident values attached to each case.

Forums provide companies with the ability to build communities, to leverage these communities to resolve issues, and to use these communities as a source for capturing and creating new knowledge content. When the current experts leave an organization and the next generation takes over, forums help the organization create a trail of their tacit knowledge to be left behind for everyone to leverage.

GE Fanuc's new support web site features numerous self-service enhancements, including a knowledge base repository for solutions, documentation and downloads; on-line case management; user forums; content ratings; and a powerful natural language search engine. This initiative allowed GE Fanuc to improve customer satisfaction levels by providing the finest support experience in the factory automation industry.

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Answer: It varies, but in some cases companies claim to have the majority of issues resolved by the community. Also, in some cases companies will rely solely on the community for supporting certain products.

Question: When searching, are discussion forums also included in the search process?

Answer: Yes. There is a specific crawler for InQuira's discussion forums so that their content can be included in search results.

Question: Does InQuira use discussion forums?

Answer: Yes. InQuira's development organization uses forums to consider design options, discuss requests, track resolution to request issues, and, all the while, have the conversation open and visible. InQuira has used forums for an account team to manage a proof of concept (POC) effort. Specifically, the forum was used to enable the customer to ask questions about the product, provide responses from account team, and track of all of the questions and their responses so they can be evaluated once the POC has completed. Additionally, enhancement requests have come out of information attained, use case scenarios that evolve have been used to help identify usability issues, and overall, forums provide a high visibility of general issues throughout the process. Similarly, forums have been used by Professional Services as part of project implementations. Issues are called out in the forum topics, resolutions are tracked, and a list of the issues and their resolutions are reviewed upon completion to help plan the next project.

Question: Can chat sessions be captured by InQuira as knowledge content?

Answer: Content can be created from chat sessions and linked to a case, or recommended as a solution in the knowledge base. As an example of this, when two users text message back and forth to resolve an issue, the transcript can be recommended as a knowledge article.

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