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June 2006
Does Knowledge Management Really Matter?

In This Issue:
Companies Collaborate to Develop KM Best Practices
KM a Hot Topic Across Industries
What the Experts are Saying
Resources from the Blogosphere

by Mark Buckallew, Director, Product Management, InQuira, Inc.

Knowledge Management (KM) has been considered a good concept but results vary when implemented. How many companies can claim that they have implemented a solution that provides 50% case deflection, 50-60% improved time to resolution, or moves 20% of resolutions to Tier 1 support?

The Consortium for Service Innovation has studied the customer support problem, and with the help of its members in the industry has created a methodology and a set of best practices to achieve the promised results through what they call Knowledge Centered Support (KCS).

KCS is forward thinking. KCS seeks to benefit from the collective experiences of others, with the ability to connect people-to-content or people-to-people. KCS develops a knowledgebase from collective experience and rewards collaboration and sharing of useful information. KCS makes content creation part of the support process, ensuring that relevant knowledge is shared, both internally and externally.

KCS does not address all environments today. Since Consortium members are largely from technology companies, the best practices have been created to focus on the demands placed on support organizations in an environment with complex products. For this reason, some organizations may pursue a different KM model than KCS. However, it is worth understanding the best practices presented with KCS to determine if they apply anywhere in your environment.

KCS will continue to evolve. Even within environments for which KCS is specifically designed, there are some areas where KCS has not provided best practices. For example, multi-lingual knowledge content and the intersection of agent training (eLearning applications) and knowledge management are not addressed today. This will change as more members join the consortium and influence the work of the project teams to research and implement solutions in these areas.

To understand how the InQuira product line supports KCS best practices, register and download the complimentary white paper featured in the right sidebar.

by Jason Hekl, Senior Director, Marketing

Yes, KM matters, now more than ever! We recently facilitated a packed think tank session at the Frost & Sullivan Customer Contact East event in Orlando. The participants represented companies from across a wide range of industries, including travel, banking, government, high tech, retail and others. Despite the varying backgrounds and experience levels, the entire group agreed that knowledge management is critical to their customer support operations. As part of faciliating the session, we divided the participants into four industry-diverse groups, and first challenged them to arrive at a common definition of KM, and to list their top KM challenges. As a group, we then debated those definitions and discussed common challenges, before breaking again to develop 10-minute executive level presentations on how to address a fictional organization's KM challenges.

There are many working definitions of knowledge management.  Wikipedia defines knowledge management as "the ways organizations gather, manage, and use the knowledge that they acquire."  Alternatively, KM may be considered "an approach to improving organizational outcomes and organizational learning by introducing into an organization a range of specific processes and practices for identifying and capturing knowledge, know-how, expertise and other intellectual capital, and for making such knowledge assets available for transfer and reuse across the organization."

Each group of think tank participants arrived at similar definitions that incorporate elements of people, processes and technologies.  One group defined knowledge management as the process by which an organization "collects, organizes and disseminates the right information to the right people at the right time to generate value."  Another proffered that KM is an "effective tool for gathering, structuring and delivering an ever-evolving amount of intellectual capital in such a way as to provide a solution for agents that meets speed and accuracy needs of customer while enabling an enhanced customer experience."

The groups were surprisingly consistent in how they defined the challenges they associate with an effective knowledge management strategy.  It was clear that an effective KM strategy is equal parts organizational alignment, process improvement, and technology investment.  Some core challenges recognized by the group included user adoption, integration to existing processes and systems, content quality, search and retrieval capabilities, and insufficient resources to effectively manage knowledge resources.

In articulating how they might pitch the benefits of a knowledge management project, one group focused on the impact an effective knowledge management program can have on the entire organization.  The group argued that KM improves agent productivity and service quality, fosters greater customer satisfaction and loyalty (in part due to more one and doneservice interactions), and increases the lifetime value of each customer.  They argued that effective KM can both help train and retain agents, and ensure consistency across the various teams and channels within a support organization.  Done properly, effective KM can have a positive branding impact and drive revenue through integrated cross-sell and up-sell offers.

So yes, knowledge management does matter!  If the recent Frost & Sullivan event was any indication, you could even say knowledge management plays a central, crucial role in the success of any support organization.

KM and Innovation Management
Tekrati reported:

Knowledge management is a key element of innovation management and a core competency for innovation, according to market research by Delphi Group, a Perot Systems company. "We take innovation for granted as something that happens naturally when we apply ourselves to the task of creatively thinking about a market challenge to deliver a new product or service," writes Delphi Group president Thomas M. Koulopoulos in a recent white paper. "That view is far from the truth. Most often, innovation ends up involving high measures of serendipity and simple brute force."

Part of the difficulty in understanding innovation is pinning down a definition. A Delphi Group survey on this subject approached the challenge of defining innovation from the standpoint of, "I'll know it when I see it," asking respondents what sort of innovation they had most often been involved with personally.

56% of the survey responses indicated that innovation is most likely to be promoted by tools for Knowledge Management (KM). Tools for KM, which have become prevalent over the past decade, are a platform for sharing practices and experiences in ways that accelerate the process of innovation. "This response indicates that KM is a bright light on the horizon," said Koulopoulos. "We expect to see KM continue to be a key element of Innovation Management and ultimately a core competency for any organization which intends to excel in its efforts to innovate."

Download the full report from Delphi Group

Dove Lane explores several of the academic arguments at the heart of modern knowledge management theory. Check out the post where the author visualizes the future of knowledge exchange and what her "immersive learning/knowledge management system might look like."

Check out The Knowledge Jolt with Jack, in particular the post where he distills three rules of knowledge management from Michael Polanyi's ideas of tactic knowledge:

1. I can never tell as much as I know.
2. I can never write down as much as I can say.
3. I never know what I know until I need to know it.

He goes further to say, "In my mind, this has usually been a trump card played when discussing content management systems or expert systems, saying that these systems can never be as good as getting people together and letting them converse and share stories. The conversation either stops or devolves into a discussion of tacit and implicit knowledge."

But what if knowledge management systems could foster a human-like conversation?

Wikipedia's entry for Knowledge Management provides an informative overview of knowledge management, common terminology and the difference between tacit and implicit knowledge.