Data and Knowledge

Our view of data often doesn't extend further than numbers. When you think about it, data means a percentage, a total, or something to which those numbers are attached. Furthermore, we want to act on those numbers with familiar math.

We don't act on data, we act on information, and we only act on information when it creates knowledge in our minds that enables us to make informed decisions. We might call this customer insight, but in the reality it is - data, information, and knowledge.

Too often, we lose the sight of the need to add together multiple data points to arrive at information that creates useful knowledge. It leads us to think that managing data is an end goal, when the primary objective should be asking how we can make something valuable out of it.

Knowledge is a property of a human mind, so you might consider it information in motion. Knowledge is what makes people to complete their work. A person's name is data, and information might include additional data like job title and company, while knowledge is information extended by understanding the person's objectives for the year ahead. We sometimes interchange these terms.

The role of customer service in organizations has probably never been as important or as difficult as it is now. Competition has spread globally, product life cycles have been reduced, and customization has become more common. The end result is that products and services have become quite complex, and, in response, firms have generated mountains of documents outlining how their products operate as well as policies and procedures detailing how to support them. Companies are trying to consolidate that information and present relevant data to users on an as-needed basis.

The idea of managing knowledge is both vital and perplexing. It is perplexing because knowledge has always been something that we make out of information. How does one manage knowledge in any systematic way? Knowledge management is the grouping of tools, technologies, and processes that constantly and consistently make the right information available to decision-makers.

When it comes to data, organizations continue to struggle with two conflicting goals. On one hand, they want to collect and consolidate information to streamline their operations. On the other hand, data repositories often sprout up in an ad hoc fashion, so it becomes difficult, and in some cases impossible to make sense of an organization's millions and even billions of records.

To solve this problem, organizations first have to uncover the whereabouts of all of their data, which usually is scattered randomly throughout the organization. Next they need to determine how to integrate their various information sources. Finally, they have to find funding for the project. If the integration is achieved, which could be a multi-year process in large enterprises, the potential benefits are great: streamlined operations, lower service costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

Galaxy Consulting has 16 years experience solving this problem. We have helped many organization to organize their knowledge and thus increase their efficiency and productivity, improve compliance, and save cost. We can do the same for you. Contact us today for a free, no obligation consultation!

The Power of Knowledge

Your contact center agents must be available and equipped with the knowledge they need to handle customer issues quickly and efficiently.

However, with the explosion of new channels such as Internet, social media, and mobile computing, many companies lack the tools and processes required to empower their employees to deliver great customer experience.

Organizations struggle with static, siloed knowledge systems that not only provide redundant, often inaccurate information, but are costly to maintain.

Companies that have invested in creating a Powerful State of Knowledge are delivering great customer experiences, which translate into sustainable growth and profitability.

To achieve powerful state of knowledge, companies must be able to:

1. Establish a single knowledge base. Consolidate your knowledge into one single source of truth and make it available to agents and customers across your web site, mobile, and social channels. Tie knowledge to analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to present valuable content and address information gaps. This new level of visibility makes it easy for agents to:

• Update knowledge
• Identify potential customer issues
• Provide fast, accurate resolution

If you become driven by market demand for enhanced self-help services and internal demand for efficient productivity improvements, you can transform your customer and employee support systems, taking your existing separate knowledge repositories and establishing one central cross-channel knowledge base. This solution will help to raise efficiency and reduce the cost-per-call of your agents, and it will also improve the quality of the customer support you provide to your customers.

2. Social media has evolved knowledge management from static data residing in a structured database to dynamic, unstructured data created in every social interaction. As a result, you must monitor customers’ social conversations on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites to analyze sentiment and prioritize and respond to service issues.

3. Not many organizations are using traditional knowledge base technology. Instead, many are attempting to embrace the chaos that Big Data, social media, and the move to the cloud create, yet they still face challenges bringing it all together to make the most out of the information.

Unified indexing and insight technology enables just that - tapping into full knowledge ecosystems and providing support agents, employees and customers with contextually relevant information. This unprecedented access to actionable insight has helped companies achieve dramatic results, such as a 30%+ reduction in case resolution time, 10%+ increase in customer self-service satisfaction and more.

The need to make the most of organizational knowledge, to get as much value from it as possible is greater now than ever before. Organizations of all sizes are finding themselves with overwhelming amounts of information, often locked away in silos--different systems, different departments, different geographies and different data types, making it impossible to connect the dots and make sense of critical business information.

Traditional KM initiatives have considered knowledge a transferable commodity that can be stored in a system of record and used mechanically. Yet, 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.

The building blocks of knowledge are everywhere, fragmented, complex, unstructured, and often outside the systems of record (in the cloud, in social media, etc.). The key is to bring it all together, and presenting it in context to users.

Unified indexing and insight technology is the way that forward thinking companies access knowledge and experts. The technology brings content into context--assembling fragments of structured and unstructured information on demand and presenting it, in context, to users.

Designed for the enterprise, unified indexing and insight technology is built to bring together data from heterogeneous systems (e.g. email, databases, CRM, ERP, social media, etc.), locations (cloud and on-premise), and varied data formats of business today, It securely crawls those sources, unifies the information in a central index, normalizes information and performs mash-ups on demand.

The technology can be context-aware, relying on the situation of the user to anticipate and proactively offer enriched, usable content directly related to the situation at hand such as solutions, articles, experts, etc. from across the vast and growing ecosystem.

Best Practices for a Higher Return on Knowledge

Bringing relevant content to your agents and customers will increase productivity, create happier employees and drive higher customer satisfaction. Follow these best practices to achieve a higher return on knowledge:

1. Consolidate the knowledge ecosystem. Bring together information from enterprise systems, data sources, employee and customer social networks, social media, etc. Connect overwhelming amount of enterprise and social information.

2. Connect people to knowledge in context. Connect users to the information they need, no matter where it resides, within their context and in real-time.

3. Connect people to experts in context. Connect the people associated with the contextually relevant content to assist in solving a case, answer a key challenge or provide additional insight to a particular situation.

4. Personalize information access. Present employees and customers with information and people connections that are relevant, no matter where they are, and no matter what they are working on.

Investing in the creation of a powerful state of knowledge builds a defensible advantage in delivering great customer experiences. Those experiences lead to sustainable growth and profitability by driving customer acquisition, customer retention, and operational efficiency.

Service and support agents can solve cases faster. No longer do agents need to search across multiple systems or waste time trying to find the right answer or someone who knows the answer. They will have relevant information about the customer or case at hand right at their fingertips: suggested solutions, recommended knowledge base articles, similar cases, experts who can help, virtual communication timelines, etc.

Customers can solve complex challenges on their own. Logging in to customer self-service, customers will see a personalized and relevant view of information form the entire knowledge ecosystem (from inside or outside your company) intuitively presented so that they can solve their own challenges.

Employees can stop reinventing the wheel. When every employee can access relevant information, locate experts across the enterprise, and know what does and does not exist, they can finally stop reinventing the wheel.

Galaxy Consulting has 16 years experience in this area. We have done this for few companies and we can do the same for you.

Converting Knowledge Into Content

Many of us have grown accustomed to referring to our work email accounts to find that bit of information that we received from one colleague or another. Now you discover you need that information quickly to finish a project.

Where is it? If you have faced this similar situation, it means that the amount of data and its applications have grown more complex. It also likely means that you and your organization are too loosely exchanging important information and have lazy knowledge management practices in place. This is not meant to be insulting, of course. It is simply a way to understand how to improve the process.

As mentioned in previous blog posts, big data has come to encapsulate the work we do now. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a place to cleanly and robustly organize all of the information that we come across. Well, content and knowledge management policies and programs will help you to achieve this. Read on to learn how.

Where is knowledge?

Knowledge is everywhere. In your business or organization, it is likely fostered through learning and growing and experiencing the flow of the market and the culture. Each member, employee, manager, stakeholder and so forth has a different level of that experience, giving each of them unique knowledge. That knowledge is usually transferred through the relationships among staff via verbal exchange and electronic (email, memos, research notes, etc.) and hard (paper documents) means.

This is where our knowledge lives. But as it lives in the minds of the personnel and in fragmented pieces in various formats, how easily are organizations able to attain that knowledge and deploy it efficiently to achieve goals? It must be converted, therefore, into unified content and implemented with policies, procedures and strategies. So how do we do this?

Identify knowledge and outline a plan for documentation

Now that we know where our knowledge lives, we must formulate some type of plan to extract this information. At each layer, the process may be different. It might depend on your industry, your culture and things of this nature. In any case, the main point is to identify the information, record it and put it somewhere, preferably into a centralized system that makes use of taxonomy (see blog posts on taxonomy).

At some stage, this may require you to hire a technical writer or some other documentation specialist that can interview subject matter experts in your organization to get the detailed information that will serve as your organizations knowledge base. This person can identify with processes, components, procedures, policies, records, archived data, intellectual property, financial data, secure data and a broad range of other information that must live in an environment where the appropriate members or users can access it later.

In terms of legal matters or legal information, many regulations have information handling requirements that are rigid and may require that you have certain pieces of critical information readily available to audit. Knowledge management and content management are more important in this scenario than ever. Information audits can be done to sift through organizations’ data including email, memos and other documents to make sense and make use of them.

This process of making an audit of information and knowledge is an important first step, but the next step is just as important. You must now organize the information that you have so that it can be easily found by the right people.

Centralizing your converted knowledge and content

Documents stored as files in a simple network drive will no longer suffice as the volume and complexity increases. It is also a security problem. In the cloud environment, there are backups and options to monitor and distribute storage and speed. This makes converting knowledge into content easier when a content management system is deployed to quickly and efficiently handle all of that incoming information.

The type of content management system your organization will or should deploy depends very much on how the information will be used. It might turn out that you don’t use just one CMS. You might end up using multiple CMS options or configurations for different types of content or information. Of course sensitive information and information meant for the public should be handled differently and therefore should be managed differently.

Popular newsfeed or blog platforms include Drupal and Joomla. Oracle handles various IT and other types of content systems. There are systems like SharePoint that help users collaborate on word processing, spreadsheets, charts, presentations and other kinds of documents. There are hubs where users can go to find or share information with other colleagues within the company or organization.

Of course it is always important to take some time to think about security and access privileges and develop information handling policies and procedures within the company.

Make content searchable and organized

After the information has been properly disseminated and you found the right vendor to store and manage that content, you can begin the critical process of organizing it. Usually, within a content management system, we talk about taxonomy. Taxonomy is the process of categorizing or “tagging” content to make it searchable and displayed properly in results or views for the user. Tagging content within a content management system is an integral part of enabling the user, whoever that might be, to quickly locate bits and pieces or entire batches or wholes of information quickly and efficiently.

You must ultimately decide how to organize content in terms of how it will be used. Web content for the public, for example, may need to be audited for its SEO quality (how easily can it be found by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, etc.). Your internal search systems, glossaries, thesauruses, style guides, policies, manuals and so forth will only be as good as their databases and program functionality as defined by the organization. Try to audit these systems for usability and continually try to improve the way information, both simple and complex, should be handled by internal systems.

Video Instant Messaging for Collaboration and Knowledge Management

Due to falling costs, high-availability data connections, smart mobile devices, and the growth of cloud computing, knowledge management and enterprise collaboration are undergoing something of a rebirth. Most enterprise collaboration remains centered on documents. There is an opportunity to extend beyond document-centric tasks to other collaborative, linear, process-oriented work. Simple to use video instant messaging (VIM) technology may be very useful in this much needed shift.

Today, most companies use video for:

• team conferencing;
• customer interaction/service support;
• pre-recorded-corporate communications;
• an alternative to text for training/education.

Beyond those areas, VIM functionality is just starting to arrive to companies. There are different opinions about VIM. like it and feel it helps tocreate a better "human connection," and others don't like it and claim that it invades their privacy. In fact, the most common arguments in favor of and against the use of video are surprisingly similar to one another and suggest a cultural split that can be difficult to bridge or even manage.

Video instant messaging, as its name makes clear, is potentially the most invasive use of video in companies. For example, it can be images of unexpected video calls on an active laptop coming from an angry boss, with the recipient of the call being unprepared. One-to one, face-to-face discussions are the most optimal use of such real-time technology. There are valuable ways of using the technology.

What is Video Conferencing

Video conferencing is when multiple people, typically four or more, in more than one geographic location use audio and video technology to connect via a virtual conference room environment to conduct a pre-arranged meeting.

Web conferencing (or webinar) is where multiple users watch a single remote screen; this method is typically used for one-to-many presentations.

Video instant messaging (VIM) is distinct from the other two in that the interactions are typically one-to-one and are also most typically not pre-arranged, but rather ad hoc.

Opportunities

VIM is not particularly new, but its use (and misuse) has until recently been largely confined to the consumer world. Some knowledge management vendors such as Citrix, TIBCO and Teambox are adding VIM to their product suites because VIM functionality is particularly relevant in the mobile era: almost all handheld devices contain cameras. This is key to understanding the value of VIM, since it's not so much the video as the mobile camera that has much potential.

Future use cases for VIM technology in knowledge management will be situations where a physical object or environment needs to be collaboratively viewed. For example, in a service situation, a technician is looking at a complex wiring structure and using a mobile device to stream video of the situation to a remote expert, enabling them to share visuals to resolve the situation. Similarly, designers and creative people can discuss and view samples and compare options in real time. In situations like these, the ability to share a clear real-time moving image of the in real environment via a handheld device can be invaluable and a highly efficient use of collaboration technology.

Pros and Cons of Using Video

Pros

• Seeing the other attendees builds a deeper connection.
• It reduces travel costs and time on the road.
• Meetings can be recorded.
• Processes can be more efficient.
• Collaboration can be enhanced.

Cons

• People are self-conscious on camera.
• Audio/video quality varies.
• A poor or lost connection means no conference at all.
• It is not as good as face-to-face meetings.
• Signal delays can ruin the meeting.

New Horizons

For traditional users, there is a somewhat parallel use case in that they often want to share a document, drawing or whiteboard in real time with a colleague. It is about seeing the same thing and collaborating on it. VIM can have a valuable role in supporting collaborative processes in areas like law enforcement, healthcare, and engineering. The established use for video are users who create a lot of text-based communications and need to occasionally see one another from their home offices.

Moving from a fixed camera position to a fully mobile situation opens the technology to many more uses. Video stream can be used for all the key management and productivity functions, such as calendaring, expertise location, file access edit and view, knowledge sharing, and team and project management.

Three Priority Objectives

On a more tactical level, it will be important to use these objectives in VIM use.

First, focus on tying collaboration and knowledge sharing back to clearly defined business processes that involve human interaction. Take existing technology and configure it to meet your organization needs, and also use VIM to engage with work objects and environments, rather than simply using it as a face-to-face conversation tool.

In an organization situations, communication can't simply stop if someone hangs up. Whether with video or text or voice, the trail needs to be kept traceable, and the files and data created should be contextualized and made relevant. Documents need to be retained intact until a decision has been made to remove or destroy them, depending on governance, housekeeping and compliance requirements. This option should be available for video and other forms of interaction. Information lifecycle needs to be considered.

Third, if VIM is to be used for collaboration, then still-image functionality that freezes and captures views in HD should be provided within the VIM frame. This enables a detailed visual examination of a specific point in time, and also creates a file of record. Shifting between moving and still images in a collaborative engagement, allowing a free-flowing interaction and the capture of specific elements, would be of great value to many industry and process-specific collaborative situations.

Future

VIM has a key role to play in taking enterprise collaboration to the next level. This role is not so much about being able to see the face of the other person as it is about viewing and capturing in real time what the other party is seeing.Refining the use cases and collaborative process that leverage VIM will take some effort. Over time, VIM will prove to be a value in the growth of enterprise collaboration. It will be especially useful for industries such as healthcare, law enforcement, engineering, and maintenance. Enterprise collaboration tools and suites already have many of the key pieces of the puzzle; now they need to put them together into a coherent, practical whole.

Unified Knowledge Management

This scenario might be familiar to many organizations.

Inside an organization, valuable information is not being used. It is scattered in pieces across multiple repositories and siloed organization where no one even bothers to look for it. Valuable content also resides outside your organization: in social media, communities, etc., created by your customers and industry experts, which is used and shared by other customers when they need answers.

In many organizations, employees spend a significant amount of time trying to find and process information, often at a high cost. Recent report found that knowledge workers spend anywhere from 15% to 35% of their time searching for, assembling, and then (unfortunately) recreating information that already exists. And studies show that much of this time is spent not only looking for content, but also looking for experts. Most companies are unable to reuse the majority of work that is created every day.

This is the growing challenge of knowledge management today: how to leverage meaningful knowledge through constant reuse by each and every employee and each and every customer when they need it, no matter where it resides.

Return on Knowledge

These are few points to consider:

• Data on its own is meaningless. It must be organized into information before it can be used.
• Data is factual information: measurements, statistics or facts. In and of itself, data provides limited value.
• Information is data in context: organized, categorized or condensed.
• Knowledge is a human capability to process information to make decisions and take action.

Knowledge keeps organizations competitive and innovative, and is the most valuable intangible asset. Yet, knowledge is one of the most difficult assets to generate a return on (with repeated access, use and re-use), simply because information is so widespread, fractured, and changing at an accelerated pace.

Connecting the dots between relevant content and associated experts on that content is critical to leveraging the collective knowledge of an organization's ecosystem for the greatest return.

How to Get a Higher Return on Knowledge

The key to a higher return on knowledge is accessibility to information from anywhere, presented within any system, and personalized for the user's context.

The following tips would allow your organization to bring the return on investment in managing the knowledge throughout your organization.

1. Consolidate the knowledge ecosystem. Bring together information from enterprise systems and data sources, employees and customer social networks, social media such as Twitter, Chatter and more. Connect overwhelming amounts of enterprise and social information to get a complete picture of your customers, their interaction histories, products, levels of satisfaction, etc.

2. Connect people to knowledge in context. Connect users to the information they need (no matter where it resides) within their context.

3. Connect people to experts in context. Connect the people (the experts) associated with the contextually relevant content to assist in solving a case, answer a key challenge or provide additional insight to a particular situation.

4. Empower contribution. Allow users to create, rate content, and share knowledge about customers, cases, products, etc.

5. Personalize information access. Present employees and customers with information and people: connections that are relevant, no matter where they are, and no matter what they are working on. Just like the suggestive items on the e-commerce websites you visit, the experience is personalized, because it knows what you are working on.

Bringing this content to the fingertips of your employees and customers will increase organizational productivity, result in more innovative and customer-pleasing products, create happy employees, and drive customer satisfaction as well as profitability.

Unified Indexing

Unified indexing and insight technology is the way that forward-thinking companies will access knowledge in the 21st century. The technology brings content into context: assembling fragments of structured and unstructured information on demand and presenting them, in context, to users.

Designed for the enterprise, unified indexing and insight technology works in a similar way to Google on the Internet, but on the heterogeneous systems (e.g. email, databases, CRM, ERP, social media, etc.), locations (cloud and on-premise), and varied data formats of business today. The technology securely crawls those sources, unifies the information in a central index, normalizes the information and performs mash-ups on demand, within the user's context. The user creates the context based on his or her needs and interests.

Advantages of Unified Indexing:

• Customers will see a personalized and relevant view of information from the entire knowledge ecosystem (from inside or outside your company) intuitively presented so they can solve their own challenges.
• Service and support agents can solve cases faster. No longer support agents need to search across multiple systems or waste time trying to find the right answer or someone who knows the answer. They will have relevant information about the customer or case at hand, right at their fingertips: suggested solutions, recommended knowledge base articles, similar cases, experts who can help, virtual communication timelines and more.
• Knowledge workers can stop reinventing the wheel. When every employee can access relevant information, locate experts across the enterprise, and know what does and does not exist, they can finally stop reinventing the wheel.

The new age of knowledge is here and it is powered by instantly accessible, collective, crowd-sourced and contextually relevant information that comes from everywhere and is presented as knowledge workers go about their work and customers look for information they need.

Tips to Ensure Knowledge Management Success

It is very important for long term success of knowledge management initiative to align it with organizational strategy, especially in times of change. KM initiative can "drift" over time if measures are not taken to align it with organizational mission, new turns in direction, management changes, and different product/service offerings.

Here are useful, actionable tips to ensure that an organization's knowledge management initiative succeeds not just at launch stage but also over the years.

1. Bring knowledge management into mission critical activities. Knowledge management is a great enabler of many business processes, but it can be very relevant to ensure success and continuity of mission critical activities in areas ranging from banking to security. For example, you can leverage knowledge management to acquire, retain, and spread mission critical knowledge in IT global services.

2. Focus on knowledge retention during times of down-size or reorganization. Globalization, aging work forces and economic downturns are leading to loss of valuable knowledge. KM can help to eliminate that gap in the near term and especially in the long term.

3. Use KM to improve understanding and execution of business reorganization. KM sometimes gets put aside during complex organizational restructuring, but can actually be useful in determining how to reorganize effectively. Some companies seem to spend almost half of their time on restructuring, but are not using KM to be more effective or innovative in restructuring.

4. Go beyond connecting to networking. KM at the people level sometimes gets stuck at the stage of people profiles and a bewildering range of discussion forums. It is important to add collaborative tasks on top of such connections, so that actual networking takes place and collective intelligence emerges.

5. Conduct more research on knowledge work. With all the commotion about social media in the enterprise, people tend to forget that knowledge work is essentially built on effective communication. More research is needed about the changing workplace to understand how KM is becoming even more critical to 21st century organizations, and how knowledge seeking/collaboration behaviors of knowledge workers are changing.

6. Pay more attention to design and visualization. In a workplace of increasing information overload and multitasking, it is important to design knowledge interactions and interfaces in a compelling yet effective manner. Effective design can help in sense-making in fast changing and information-intensive environments.

7. Pay attention to the requirements of mobile knowledge workers. BYOD (bring your own mobile device to the office) is now accustomed feature. More and more employees and managers are using mobile devices not just for accessing information but also for full workflow. Knowledge processes should be optimized for mobile devices, and not just in terms of device interface but also in speed of delivery, e.g. fast loading dashboards for sales teams.

8. Blend informal and formal activities in knowledge sharing sessions. For example, a knowledge fair format with each project team presenting its achievements and learning enforces the KM message stronger for all participants. The very act of presenting a KM case study can help employees develop a deeper appreciation of the strengths and opportunities for KM at work in the long term, and instills a sense of pride.

9. Use KM initiative in many different audiences and don't restrict it to only select managers or project managers. The more people who engage with KM in full-time or part-time roles, the more buy-in KM will gain and the more value it will contribute.

10. Highlight KM practitioners across the organization. Don't just showcase the usual super-achievers; also feature the employees who are coming up with their first, unique work insights or first reuse of existing knowledge assets.

11. Don't pitch KM as an extra activity to be done after usual work hours; it should be embedded in regular workflow. Even additional activities such as conferencing and industry meetings should be seen as a way of learning, brainstorming and bench-marking.

12. Avoid too much theory. While the core team certainly needs to be abreast of developments in KM models and research, its recommendations and implementations must be demystified and simplified so that employees are not distracted or confused with more buzzwords.

13. Don't get hung up on the name KM. Some people seem to have a problem with the words knowledge management and even KM. Other terms such as collaborative work or knowledge sharing seem to be in use as well.

14. Use metrics and analytics effectively, and conduct KM course corrections as appropriate. Many KM initiatives stop their outcome studies at the level of activity metrics, but fail to connect them to deeper processes, knowledge insights, people attitudes and overall impacts on productivity and innovation. One company reported that only 40% of its knowledge assets were being used, and some were being viewed only by the creator. At the same time, metrics are not the only assessment.

15. Help ensure long term success of KM by evangelizing it to employees. This helps create awareness in employees about the importance of KM and strengthens the KM initiative.

Choosing the Right Content and Knowledge Management Tools

Effective content and knowledge management is a combination of theory, practice, and technology. You should not focus too much on the technology part without considering other parts.

However, effective technology deployment are essential to content and knowledge management success. The challenge is that there is no such thing as "content and knowledge management tools" marketplace. Depending on the application, content and knowledge management can include different types of technology, comprising many diverse market segments.

Today, content and knowledge management practitioners need to follow technology developments.

For many years, the main platforms for content and knowledge management revolved around searchable knowledgebases and discussion forums. Enterprise portals emerged to try to present enterprise information via a single dashboard. That didn't usually work out so well, although portal technology still plays a key role for many use cases today.

Similarly, enterprise search held and important part in the enterprise content management where the right information easily retrievable from multiple repositories through the single interface. Search technology still plays a critical role in many cases.

Now content management practitioners have to take into account a wide range of repositories and applications, from enterprise video to social media monitoring and intelligence. The diversity of content management technology is growing and proliferates.

Of course, knowledgebases still remain important, but the way we build and manage them has changed dramatically:

• Wikis now power some of the most definitive knowledgebases within and beyond the enterprise.
• Sophisticated social Q&A applications are generating impressive, demand-driven knowledge sets in many environments.
• Digital community spaces are not new, but richer community platforms with increasingly important facilitation features have made them far more accessible in the enterprise.
• Ideation (a.k.a., open innovation) applications are also coming of age, amid much healthy experimentation.

For content management practitioners, this means mastering a new set of technologies to address old problems. But the opposit is also true: some older technologies are finding new use within the enterprise.

Digital asset management and media asset management platforms are not new. What changed is their increasing adoption within broader enterprise contexts. More and more of our digital knowledge is not textual any more.

Much of our textual knowledge that does remain still resides in files waiting to get more liberated. Hence the meteoric rise of file sharing services, most of them based in the cloud, and many of them now targeting enterprise scenarios.

The rise of social media monitoring and intelligence has given new life to the field of text analytics, even while exposing the limitations of individual analytics engines.

Not every organization needs all those types of tools. But the savvy content management practitioners can help guide his or her colleagues to the appropriate technology for their organization.

Very often over the past decade, when content management practitioners began new projects, the preferred solution was Microsoft SharePoint - a platform that seemingly can do it all. You need to remember to not to focus too much on any one platform but base decisions on your organization business requirements.

For most organizations, initial investments in social computing have centered on creating social spaces where employees could go to engage in more informal discussions and networking. The actual results have often proved uneven, yet promising enough to sustain further investment and experimentation within most enterprises.

Social features are important to effective enterprise collaboration. More social and collaborative digital workplace experience has become increasingly essential for all enterprise computing. Your colleagues really want a social layer across their digital experience. But it could be the opposite as well. Again, remember your business requirements.

Many of new tools come with their own repositories and, left alone, will lead to more information silos reducing their long-term value. Many vendors argue that search technologies will solve that problem. You need to focus on things like filtering services for activity streams and appropriate levels of information management.

You will also add value by demonstrating that collaboration and knowledge sharing are not places people go, but things they do.

With the rise of mobile, that kind of contextual relevancy has become more urgent. But it is going to require an understanding of a wider choice of technology choices.

Content management practitioners are uniquely positioned to help the organization to put new tools in the context of daily work. Understand the suitability of the right tool for the right job. Advocate for a scenario-based approach to all technology selections. The right tool is not sufficient for content and knowledge management success, but it is an increasingly important condition.

Knowledge Management Adoption Through Gamification

One of the most important components of a successful knowledge management program is its ability to promote and support a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Tools, processes and organizational policies are important elements but they will only get you so far. Culture is the cornerstone that will determine the willingness of your employees to participate in knowledge management.

How do you influence employees in your organization to adopt productive behaviors around collaboration and knowledge sharing? The answer may be found in a new concept called gamification.

What is gamification? It is a new and rapidly evolving area, but the following description is a good starting point: gamification is the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts.

That definition of gamification contains three distinct elements:

• Game elements - this is about leveraging the components, design patterns, and feedback mechanisms that you would typically find in video games, such as points, badges and leader-boards. It is sometimes referred to as the engineering side of gamification.

• Game design techniques - this is the artistic, experimental side of gamification. It includes aesthetics, narrative, player journey, progression, surprise, and, of course, fun. Games are not just a collection of elements, they are a way of thinking about and approaching challenges like a games designer.

• Non-game contexts - some common areas in which gamification has taken hold include health and wellness, education, sustainability, and collaboration and knowledge sharing in the enterprise.

There are three key types of knowledge management behavior:

• connect: how people connect to the content and communities they need to do their job;
• contribute: the level at which people are contributing their knowledge and the impact of those contributions on other people;
• cultivate: the willingness to interact with and build upon the ideas and perspectives of other employees, to help nurture a spirit of collaboration.

The unique selling point of gamification is the potential to learn from games and to draw on what makes games so engaging and attractive and to apply those components in other contexts. What is behind this philosophy? While people can be drawn in to collaborate and share via extrinsic motivation, the more you can tap into their intrinsic motivations and help people realize the inherent benefits of collaboration, the more successful and sustained that engagement will be.

We can identify three ways to affect intrinsic motivation: mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Mastery

Getting really good at something, be it a skill, sport or mental discipline, has its own benefits. The goal of gamifying collaboration is to help people get good at it and, therefore, realize its inherent benefits. As participants progress through the "game", they gradually learn the skills to find expertise, build their network, and share their knowledge in a way that makes them more effective, and advances their careers.

Autonomy

Autonomy is about giving people the freedom to make meaningful choices. Instead of dictating a prescribed path, an autonomous approach allows them to set their own goals, choosing how they wish to collaborate, and ultimately providing a sense of ownership. The more individuals feel that they are in control, the better engaged they are going to be. Participants can share a document, write a blog, post a microblog or create a video. It is about giving participants choices, equipping them with the tools, and rewarding them for their knowledge sharing behaviors regardless of the specific mechanism they used.

Purpose

While there are plenty of personal benefits to collaboration, people are more engaged when they feel socially connected to others as part of a larger purpose. As part of that wider organization, they can take pride in the fact that they are making a broader impact on their organization and collaboration is a key part of that experience.

The use of gamification assumes that you already have knowledge management program in place. Assuming gamification can magically transform absence of knowledge management program into something engaging is a common error. A well thought-out and sustainable approach to gamification offers significant potential to make collaboration fun and engaging.

Gamification Tips

Don't lose sight of your objectives

Start with your business objectives in terms of their outcomes and keep your eyes on those objectives and validate them as you design, develop and implement your knowledge management program.

Focus on behaviors, not activities

It is very easy to get caught up in focusing exclusively on activities and end up having people busy doing "stuff". Similar to objectives, keep a focus on the behaviors you want your people to adopt and identify activities that are indicators of those behaviors.

Data is king

You need to be able to capture, store and retrieve data. Without a way to quantify and measure it, you will be stuck in the first step.

Spread the recognition

Don't limit the number of people who can be recognized through your program. In addition, recognize people's efforts in a variety of meaningful ways. Some examples of recognition are:

• e-cards with 100 recognition points (monetary value of $100);
• thank-you notes from leadership;
• shout-outs in internal corporate communications;
• badges on employees' profile pages;
• feedback during the employee's performance review process.

People will game the system

You will need to pay attention to people who want to "game" the system. Where possible, build in approaches to limit the ability of people to do so.

Start small and evolve

Gamifying collaboration is not just something you build at once. To arrive at a good and sustainable knowledge management program, you need to be iterative, creating rough versions and play-testing continuously.

No silver bullet exists

Gamification is not a silver bullet. All the available evidence suggests that it can be leveraged further to embed the collaborative behaviors that go to make up a meaningful culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing across any organization.

Knowledge Management Applications - Coveo for Service and Support

In my last two posts about Coveo products, I described Coveo search applications - Coveo for advanced web search and Coveo for advanced enterprise search. Today, I will complete describing Coveo products with Coveo knowledge management application - Coveo for service and support.

With Coveo, knowledge required to solve cases faster can be found wherever it resides, within and beyond the knowledge base. Many companies are challenged with the proliferation of data, in multiple systems, communities, on-premise and in the cloud. Knowledge is everywhere and hard to manage.

Coveo solves this challenge by placing information from anywhere, related to the agent’s context, directly in front of them. Coveo technology automatically "reads" case information, established context, and instantly shows contextually relevant content and experts directly within the CRM such as Salesforce, or within a separate Insight Console. Coveo creates information mash-ups regardless of where the information resides, combined with advanced enterprise search and navigation abilities that bring your entire knowledge ecosystem to your agents.

Such knowledge availability decreases case resolution time, increases first contact resolution, and empowers lower level agents to become productive faster and to solve more complex cases. The results show dramatic impact on contact center capacity and customer satisfaction.

Features

Solutions and experts from anywhere - Coveo automatically presents 360° views of customer, case, or product information and communications, as well as experts who can help. Using advanced data enrichment, solutions and customer insight can stem from multiple sources, across enterprise, community, and social content.

Advanced enterprise search and navigation - expanded views enable deep, broad, knowledge exploration for cases, securely, across any enterprise content.

United indexing - Coveo federates searches and mash-ups from cloud, enterprise, and social data securely and in real time—regardless of format or source. It indexes source data from Salesforce, SharePoint, databases, file shares, Exchange, Dropbox, Lithium, Gmail, etc.

Expertise finding - dynamically, through context and topics, from internal colleagues to external experts, Coveo locates people with experience relevant to each case and customer.

Customer is in the center - Coveo cuts across departmental and system silos and enriches cases with sales or engineering content, thus providing richer and more relevant customer interactions. Conversely, other departments benefit from information generated by agents to inform product development and sales.

Virtual interaction - consolidates all customer and prospect communication and interactions from any channel, bringing together opportunities, cases, transactions, e-mails, events, cases, calls, tweets, etc.

Customization - The intuitive admin interface enables customization of any objects and combinations of information, including custom fields.

Current Trends in Content and Knowledge Management

Current KM trends changed the way we work in KM environment. Let’s look at these current trends and how they affect KM.

Big Data

According to Cisco study, global IP traffic will reach 1.3 zettabyes annually by 2016 which is fourfold increase from 2011. By 2016 there will be 19 billion global network connections, the equivalent of two-and-a-half connections for every person on earth. Huge amount of data needs to be moved, collected, stored, and analyzed to create value out of it.

With social networking and global depression and exponential rate of information growth, the question becomes: how are you going to store, manage, and utilize this information in a way that meets your organization objectives. You need to be able to derive value from your information.

Social Computing

During last decade, social computing has widely spread in the work place. It has emerged as integral part of enterprise productivity. Social tools changed ways people work together. The proliferation of social software in the enterprise demonstrates that users find value in this new generation of tools.

In just a few years, social media has gone from cutting-edge phenomenon to a main-stream channel that companies use to engage clients, partners, and vendors.

Gartner predicts that by 2014 social networking services will replace email for interpersonal business communication for 20% business users.

Some statistics:

• 65% of world’s top companies have an active Twitter profile.
• 23% of Fortune 500 companies have a public-facing corporate blog.
• 58% of Fortune 500 companies have an active corporate Facebook account.
• Facebook has 901 million monthly active users.
• Twitter now has more than 140 million active users, sending 340 million tweets every day.
• Enterprise social software solutions are being used in 67% of organizations surveyed in 2013, up from 43% in 2011.

This highlights the fact that social software is becoming part of business processes in the work place. Employees want to engage socially with the people they work with and build stronger relationships within their companies. Traditional content management and collaboration solutions are incorporating new features to satisfy the social and information sharing demands of the enterprise.

Enterprises are using these emerging social computing technologies to improve collaboration among employees, clients, and vendors around the globe.

Tools such as blogs, instant messaging, wikis, social tagging and bookmarking, discussion boards with comment fields. Individuals comment on case studies, exchange ideas, and contribute their own material. Employees can follow up with people, search for subject matter experts, get updates on projects, participate in conversations that are going on.

The use of social software for collaboration in a business environment is most successful when there is a business purpose. The social capabilities of enterprise applications will continue to be extended because of the value that collaboration brings to a wide variety of business activities. Meanwhile, enterprise social software products, which have matured considerably over the past 5 years, are achieving increasing acceptance by corporations.

Challenges

Emergence of social networking has been a two-edged sword for organization. On one blade rests knowledge sharing. On the other is a ton of useless information and you need to dig thought it to get to what you need. In other words, they have added to the noise, volume and diversity of information.

When it comes to social networks, the question used to be: how much you want to connect vs how much you want to collect? The new version is: how much do you want to curate vs not curate?

Non-curated content is typical unmanaged social network content. The question is: how much of it do you want to have control over?

Companies must understand how social media use may impact the company’s ability to manage risk. It is important to understand how business and employees engage in social media, develop and deploy policies and solutions necessary to stay compliant, to meet business requirements and be flexible at the same time.

Companies need to increase information control and visibility.

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing gained significant adoption as a way for companies to shift from capital-intensive model of buying and running infrastructure and software to renting usage of shared infrastructure and applications.

With the power of cloud computing, small businesses can have the same level of IT infrastructure as Fortune 500 companies with vastly limited overhead.In addition to hosted servers, small businesses can purchase software as a service (SaaS) that is hosted online and completely scalable. Forrester predicts growth in SaaS applications.

While some companies are replacing licensed software with SaaS applications, most are using SaaS for new product categories that complement their existing on-premise software.

Benefits

With software purchased as a service, a small business no longer needs IT personnel on site to install and maintain software and hardware. SaaS allows businesses to purchase software without multi-year contracts and without painful software installation.

Rapid Deployment - with no hardware or software to install and no servers to buy, cloud content management virtually has no setup time. So, it can be deployed very quickly.

Access Anywhere - A cloud content management solution offers an application available anytime and from any internet browser. Information is always accessible and data can be shared instantly. The cloud gives the company centralized control of info while allowing users to access it from any computer or device.

Easy Collaboration - Since it can be accessed anywhere, cloud content management systems allow any authorized personnel to access and collaborate on content. Sharing lets you get information to those who need it instantly, and from anywhere in the world.

Low Cost - Cloud ECM solutions offer a highly-affordable alternative to on-premise solutions.

Speed - Cloud ECM implementations typically take 24% of the time of similar on-premise projects. That rapid time-to benefit translates directly into the higher ROI that business managers want.

Flexibility - Cloud ECM implementation gives the business this flexibility, both in terms of right-sizing capacity and in terms of aligning ECM capabilities with changing business needs.

Reduced Risk - Cloud ECM projects don’t require large outlays for uncertain results. And a variety of protections can be written into vendor contracts. For these and other reasons, the cloud fits well into today’s corporate risk mitigation strategies.

For activities that involve collaboration, SasS browser access to an application is far more superior to running it behind a firewall.

It enables IT to respond quicker to business requirements. Cloud vendor often provides an effective mobile client which otherwise you would have to undertake yourself if you were to customize your on-premise platform.

Challenges

Cloud is no panacea. Even the largest cloud vendors can experience outages.

Multiple File Formats - The documents that you might like to upload into your cloud content management system may be in many different formats. The device that is being used to display the content often may not have the correct software needed to display the document or image.

A common solution is to convert the files on the server to a generic format that can be viewed by many devices. For example, most browsers and devices today can display JPEG or PNG formats for images, Microsoft Office or PDF format for documents, CAD for drawings, etc.

Document Size - It is very important to consider the size of the document, either the number of pages or the physical size of the file. Downloading the entire document can take a long time depending on available bandwidth. This is especially an issue on mobile devices with slow or crowded data connections.

A system that provides a preview of the document can help the user to determine if they want to download the document would help.

Browser compatibility - Another challenge is that there are various browsers that are used to access the Internet and not all of them work the same way. Each browser has differences in how they operate and how the code works under the covers.

Mobile viewing - With today’s on-demand business world, it is imperative to be able to support viewing documents on mobile devices. But not all the devices behave the same way, and different operating systems are used on the various devices. Without a consistent mobile viewing platform, separate viewing applications may need to be installed on each device and results will vary. Using a single technology that supports many document types is very important in a mobile environment.

HTML5-based viewers can help resolve some of the challenges associated with browsers and mobile devices. Older versions of the browsers that are used in many government, education and businesses do not support HTML5.

Understanding that these common challenges are a possibility and preparing for them before you encounter them is important. Providing a single platform with multiple viewing technologies, including HTML5, Flash and image-based presentation, can help to ensure that all users can view documents, regardless of their specific device, browser or operating system.

Responsibility for your information in the cloud still falls on you: data ownership continuity, security, compliance. Take the same test-based approach to selecting cloud solutions as you would on-premise solutions. Focus on user experience.

Mobile Computing

The workspace is becoming increasingly mobile. Mobile computing enables access from anywhere. Forrester predicts that by 2016, smart phones and tablets will be used by a billion of global customers. Looking ahead, employees and customers will expect and demand that all business applications support mobility. Need to be able to deliver mobile experience - Ability to access content from mobile devices.

Content and systems must be optimized for mobile devices. Employees working in the field must be able to access content from their mobile devices. Employees use mobile devices to collaborate on docs, take meeting notes, create presentations, and collect data in the field. Decide what content and services make the most sense for your organization mobile devices.

"Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD)

It is becoming a reality of office life these days. It is a natural consequence in a world where people bring iPads, iPhones, Androids, and Blackberrys to work. This trend is relatively new and it continues to grow. As a result, organizations have been compelled to open up their networks to a wider variety of these devices that their employees want to use.

For corporations, trying to save IT $, it is good news – employees are now paying to acquire and maintain phones, tablets, and laptops that were once funded by IT. These organizations realized that encouraging employees to bring in their own devices can be a win-win situation for them as well as for their employees.

On the downside, the ever growing variety of BYOD devices and the fact that they are owned/controlled by employees poses serious security, workflow, and IT management issues for employers.

Employees are using their own smart phones and tablets to conduct business. While the actual device belongs to an employee, business info does not. This creates new twist in info governance initiatives.

If employees upload corporate data into a consumer-based public cloud, the cloud operator has de-facto ownership of this data.

Also, there are hackers accessing corporate data through relatively insecure consumer devices, challenge of integrating BYOD platforms with enterprise-wide corporate software, and extra IT funds being required to support a myriad of BYOD platforms.

A company can’t dictate which devices are used, in which security parameters and under what conditions.

Therefore, define and control what levels of access BYOD equipment has to a company networks, applications, and corporate data.  It is vital to establish a comprehensive governance policy.

Companies need to keep their employees happy and productive while protecting and leveraging the info they create and consume.

Knowledge Management - 5 Steps to Do IT Right the First Time

A strategically implemented knowledge management solution is the answer to the growing need to do more with less. It can reduce costs and increase efficiency and productivity.

But while a carefully implemented knowledge management initiative can transform employees experiences and organizational efficiency, a poor implemented initiative can have a negative impact.

Here are five steps for optimizing customer service and support with an effective, best practice led knowledge management initiative.

1. Define and phase your knowledge management initiative.

Start with clear goals and objectives, and roll out your implementation in stages. Implementing knowledge management in only few departments at a time, offers a chance to fine-tune knowledge management in few departments before expanding to the rest of your organization.

2. Target and tailor your employees interactions.

Be sure you understand the context and intent of your employees queries for information. Choose knowledge management tools that enable you to avoid overloading your employees with information and would deliver tailored, interactive, accurate answers to their queries.

3. Foster collaborative knowledge creation.

Encourage collaboration during knowledge creation making sure that your knowledge capitalizes on the collective knowledge of your organization employees. This collective knowledge might be included in social networks of your organization.

4. Analyze the Performance.

Powerful analytics are vital to optimizing your knowledge management initiative. They should be used on an ongoing basis to identify opportunities for improvement, emerging questions trends, and common employees information seeking behavior. You should monitor the performance of your knowledge management initiative and adjust practices accordingly.

5. Think enterprise-wide.

But where do you begin? Start with one group or department but think enterprise-wide. During early stages, be sure to involve all those who would benefit from future roll-outs. Knowledge management can ultimately deliver benefits across enterprise - from expanding the scope of marketing campaigns and supporting the development of departmental intranets and portals, to enhancing relationship with partners and vendors.

Comprehensive knowledge management solution helps organizations strategically transform the customer service and support experience - and drive customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, increased sales and reduced costs.

Knowledge Management - Knowledge Driven Customer Relationships

Knowledge is power but only when it is deeply integrated into the customer experience, the agent experience, and the enabling technology. Service and support organizations can benefit tremendously from knowledge. When implemented effectively, knowledge management processes and technology can deliver significant benefits:

Support operations are more efficient. Rather than handling customer requests based only on their own experience, all customer-facing staff have access to the collective experience of the whole team. Problems are solved once; agents don’t repeat work that others have done, or bother escalation teams with already known issues.

Customers help themselves. A shared knowledgebase enables call deflection. Effective self-service will remove case load that is low value to the enterprise or an irritant to the customer. This saves money and makes customers happier.

Also, customers can use self-service to receive help on topics about which they might never have called an agent. That is, self-service that is powered by a strong knowledge management initiative will satisfy customer demand for service and support that would otherwise go unmet. This is a very cost-effective way to create value for customers and nurture customer loyalty.

The organization continually learns from its customers. Tracking the ways customers and agents use knowledge provides an ongoing, measurable listening post for the Voice of the Customer. With this information, products can be improved, the customer experience can be enhanced, and service and support can be made more effective.

Every customer interaction is an opportunity to capture, improve, or reuse knowledge. With knowledge at the center of the CRM implementation, every time a support staffer helps a customer, the knowledgebase and the organization as a whole becomes that much smarter. If knowledge exists in the knowledgebase, its use is tracked to drive product improvements and customer outreach programs. If the knowledge is not completely current, certified staff can update it on the fly. If the knowledge does not exist, it can be captured in a simple, structured, reusable form.

Knowledge management deeply embedded inside the case management process helps staff continually create, reuse, and validate their knowledge. With continued improvement, the knowledgebase becomes even more valuable.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to receive these benefits unless knowledge is at the very heart of everything the organization does, starting with CRM.

Knowledge management must be the core of any successful CRM deployment, not an add-on module. When knowledge is deeply integrated with CRM, not tacked on as a side dish or an add-on module, enterprises can truly begin to nurture loyal customer relationships.

Everything customers say and do can improve their self-service experience. CRM systems typically advertise themselves as the "customer information repository of record", But customer information sitting passively in a repository serves no purpose. Self-service that is fully integrated with case tracking takes advantage of everything customers have shared to personalize the interaction and efficiently deliver what they need. Self-service can even use configuration and diagnostic information from the customer’s system to deliver precision-targeted information.

Streamlining the agent experience means providing an integrated resolution workbench with a single screen for any tools the user needs. In knowledge driven CRM, both case management and incident management are all part of a single process.

The resolution workbench should proactively deliver knowledge to agents or analysts based on information they have received from the customer to date. Of course, this is just a starting point. Agents must be able to drill in and refine searches on an ongoing basis.

Some of the information that agents, analysts, or engineers want to record is specific to that customer and case, for example, "the customer promised to send me a log file after the next error message appears". But some information, such as symptoms, the root cause, or a problem resolution, is relevant to anyone working on the same customer issue. The support staffer must be able to seamlessly capture both kinds of information on the fly, without retyping, copying, or pasting. As one team member learns something new, all can immediately share in the benefits.

Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) is the industry standard set of best practices developed by the members of the Consortium for Service Innovation. Its central tenet is that "knowledge is not something we do in addition to solving problems. Knowledge becomes the way we solve problems". In addition to all its other benefits, an integrated resolution workbench is a tremendous accelerator for adopting KCS.

If self-service ends up not solving one particular issue, customers should have an absolutely seamless experience where the agent (via chat, phone, or any channel) can pick up right where self-service left off.

It is hard to read too much into the raw knowledge statistics: just because a knowledgebase article was viewed frequently in self-service, we can’t be sure that it resolved the customer’s real issues. Reporting by resolution categories in CRM rarely gives product developers sufficiently detailed information to take action. But combined knowledge and case reporting, for example, which knowledgebase articles closed the most cases, can provide precision guidance into the root causes of customer frustration.

Also, combined analytics enable specialized dashboards that help managers and executives assess individual and team performance. In a knowledge-creating company, it’s not enough to just measure how many cases were closed or how many articles were written; performance assessment requires a broad view of what individuals and teams are doing, including how their knowledge work improves their case work.

Finally, organizations must quantify and continually increase the business value being generated by the service and support organization. For example, how much demand for support is being satisfied automatically through the website, and how much must still be addressed by agents? These questions lie at the intersection of knowledge and case management. True knowledge-driven CRM can provide clear answers.

Content Management Systems Reviews - Open Text - ECM Suite - Knowledge Management

OpenText Knowledge Management (formerly Livelink ECM - Knowledge Management) is a comprehensive knowledge management solution that enables organizations to search, classify, navigate, and collect all of their corporate knowledge in a single, secure, web based repository.

OpenText Knowledge Management works with OpenText Document Management or OpenText Content Lifecycle Management, leveraging the power of these content repositories and adding functionality that manages all knowledge from a single interface, regardless of originating source. Open Text Knowledge Management is a completely integrated, web based solution that delivers end-to-end, closed-loop management for all of your corporate knowledge assets.

Knowledge Management enables employees to perform their daily work more efficiently and accurately. The benefits of a centralized knowledge repository and library services ensures that you are working with the most up-to-date information. Specialized tools enable you to identify topic experts; quickly finding the best information resources from anywhere in your organization.

Powerful search, classification and navigation tools to help you find and manage an unlimited number of documents: from files, documents and objects, to project logs, search queries, discussion items, tasks, workflow maps and more in an organized, hierarchical structure.

You can identify subject matter experts and harvest their knowledge from the centralized knowledge repository. Open Text Knowledge Management extends the functionality of Open Text document management foundations - Open Text Document Management and Open Text Content Lifecycle Management. Open Text document management solutions fit your existing security framework, ensuring protection of content through permissions based access rules. Authorized users benefit from full access to all functionality from a single, secure web browser, and the flexibility of Open Text document management foundations allows for configuration of permissions on a group or individual level.

Features

Organize and share knowledge: Knowledge Management manages any type of electronic document in any file format. You can organize electronic documents into hierarchies of folders and compound documents within three types of workspaces that reflect the different ways in which people work: the Enterprise Workspace; Project Workspaces; and Personal Workspaces.

Capture knowledge automatically: Knowledge Management allows you to associate metadata with documents. Metadata is indexed and can be used to more easily find, retrieve, and generate reports on documents based on your custom criteria. Each piece of metadata information is an attribute, and sets of attributes can be grouped into categories that can be associated with any document.

Classify and categorize knowledge assets: multiple taxonomic classifications can be associated with documents in their original locations. This enables you to browse and search documents in the knowledge management repository according to taxonomies that differ from the one implied by the folder structure without having to create multiple copies of documents. You can organize information placed in Open Text Document Management or Open Text Content Lifecycle Management repositories via manual, assisted, or automatic means. Streamline browsing and improve search precision.

Automate knowledge management processes: Knowledge Management's graphical Workflow Designer tool enables you to automate document management processes, such as document change requests and document review and approval processes, to ensure that they are carried out accurately and consistently. You can design processes according to your own requirements or those imposed by regulatory agencies.

Discover knowledge with prospective queries: Knowledge Management provides prospective searching capabilities. You can create special queries to monitor various data sources, including the OpenText Document Management or OpenText Content Lifecycle Management repositories, shared network drives, external web sites and any integrated databases. When new information is discovered, you are immediately notified.

Single point of information access: federated search enables you to query multiple repositories and brings disparate information sources together. Use powerful search tools to quickly information access locate the right information. View results on a single page in a sorted, clustered format. Show hit highlights, document summaries, relevance rankings and result themes to improve fidelity.

Dynamic, multi-dimensional navigation: create dynamic, virtual folder structures built on pre-defined information taxonomies and document attributes; no pre-defined hierarchy is required. Often, metadata is not visible or navigable when you browse for information. Using taxonomies for browsing and additional context, you can decide which dimension is best to find required documents. Drill down the hierarchy using associated metadata to refine values and corresponding documents.

Optimize taxonomy creation and maintenance: analyze and cluster related documents, and extract and generate key concepts. Create suggested taxonomy nodes based on analyses; import and export in many common formats.

Automatically collect and extract information: crawl multiple Web-based information sources including intranets, extranets, web sites, and more. Create personal entries for crawling, search specific sites and search from the Document Management or Content Lifecycle Management user interface.