KnowledgeManagement

Deploying a document management solution will change a company’s processes, enhancing corporate knowledge, enabling easier document retrieval, improving regulatory compliance, and saving time.

 

However, deploying such a solution is not a quick and easy process. Because the project will impact every part of the organisation, it takes time and forethought to get the platform right, and that forethought needs to begin even before the software is chosen.

 

In my experience, there are three “foundation stones” of research that are essential for document management success:

Do your homework

Cross examine your options

Choose your best fit

 

Spending time on each of these three research foundation stones provides the information that will enable you to make an informed choice of document management solution and vendor, resulting in the selection of solution that best fits your organisation’s needs – for your immediate project and for possible future expansion.

It arms you with the right knowledge to make a smart choice. All that’s left is the decision.

The results for “document management” in popular search engines will feature a wide spectrum of products and services, which are often very different from each other. The reason for this is because “document management” is a broad term that can encompass imaging and text recognition, database indexing, version management, business process automation, and records management and many other capabilities.

Organizations seeking a solution for managing their documents and business processes often find that the task is often not as straightforward as procuring other business products. Document management solutions can range from multi-million-dollar enterprise-wide systems for global corporations, to free, open-source applications for small businesses and individual users, and can vary drastically in price, features and areas of specialization.

Because document management needs can differ significantly by industry, and due to the fact that every organization has its own unique requirements, so too do information management offerings vary greatly in capabilities and price. Evaluating the various alternatives and making the right choice for a specific business can be a daunting proposition. There is a real risk that an implementation will fail if it does not align well with the practical day-to-day needs of the users.

This is why the selection of a documen

Complex product portfolios and high volume customer service inquiries cannot be serviced by simple FAQ lists and generic search engines. Your ChallengeFrequently Asked Question (FAQ) lists and website search is sufficient for most simple customer service scenarios. Organizations with complex product portfolios and high volumes of service inquiries need knowledge tools optimized for multi-channel customer service.Failing to provide consistent solutions to customers’ problems across all service channels lowers customer satisfaction, reduces customer retention rates, and creates redundant service efforts.Effective customer service requires knowledge platform services that support customer-facing self-service tools, agent-facing assisted service tools, and  product specialists in the creation and maintenance of service content.Our AdviceCritical InsightSearch engines alone are inappropriate for Tier 1 customer service agents. Tier 1 agents are process workers, not knowledge workers, who need to locate solutions quickly and not spend time doing unfocused research.Most CRM systems come with some service knowledge tools, but these rarely scale up to support complex service scenarios.Customer Service Knowledge Management (CSKM) is a discipline which requires dedication of full time knowledge managers to create, maintain and structure service knowledgebases, bridging the gap between product specialists, service agents and customers.Impact and Result

Understand the features and business benefits of using a dedicated customer service knowledge management (CSKM) platform, and determine functional requirements based on organizational needs to focus product evaluation on the right things.Plan for and select a CSKM platform that supports your product portfolio, customer segments and service interaction channel mix.Use Info-Tech's Vendor Landscape to compare the major CSKM platforms available and prepare a vendor shortlist to save time and money in the selection process.Use Info-Tech's CSKM platform RFP template and demo script to prepare solid requirements for vendor finalists and select the right product.

Communication, the traditional meaning of story-telling and way back when we were getting started on this stuff in the Institution for Knowledge Management in IBM a lot of people were interested in the wider story-telling movement.  There was a lot of exchange then with groups such as the Jonesborough Story Telling Festival and other traditional groups.   These deal with full stories, often designed (well mostly designed) for performance, often told and retold to many audiences.   A lot of teaching stories focus here along with the bulk of story telling consultants, who vary from the interesting and informed to the charlatan purveyors of snake oil!  Learning & knowing  started to see stories, or anecdotes as I called them as a primary method of knowledge capture and distribution.  Others went a stage further and brought in journalists to record full blown stories, but that then starts to overlap with the communication aspect.  Interestingly one of the problems there was that while people would come to listen to an experienced or retired person tell stories, they rarely used the library tapes.  The granularity was wrong.Research has high value with a long history of narrative work.  Some of the best names here are Czarniawska, Gabriel and Boje who have very different approaches.   There is also a whole body of longitudinal research and other material in play here.  The big issues such as observer independence, engagement and bias remain unresolved with different takes on how to manage that.   This group can be very critical of the story telling consultants and its been interesting to see some of the evasions of this criticism.  The normal approach is to say that they are doing something very different which worries me a bit as there is a body of theory and practice they could learn from.

I came across this post via the Knowledge Flow (thank you Susan Frost!), and was struck by the idea, and its parallels in the world of networks and communities of practice. It's the "Little Free Li...

n the course of research into the sentiment analysis sector, I learned about  Semantria.  Founded in 2011, the company is a joint venture between Lexalytics and the software development company Postindustria, as well as the consulting firm DemandGen.

I found the demonstration of the Semantria semantic analysis interesting. You can experiment with the online content processing athttps://semantria.com/demo. You can copy and paste a chunk of text as I did. I processed text from my blog Beyond Search and the system displayed a report that is similar in format to Figure 1 on page 18. The idea is that Semantria turns unstructured content into actionable data. The company's website asserts:

"Semantria's API helps organizations to extract meaning from large amounts of unstructured text. The value of the content can only be accessed if you see the trends and sentiments that are hidden within. Add sophisticated text analytics and sentiment analysis to your application. Turn your unstructured content into actionable data."

Semantria's technology integrates with an organization's existing enterprise applications. Those systems can be traditional search engines, enterprise resource planning solutions or content management systems.

What’s the secret to improving business-process productivity while lowering operating costs? For document-driven processes, workflow is the magic ingredient.

For many businesses, scanning paper documents and transforming them into digital images is a first step into content management—but it can be a mistake to stop there. While there are benefits to simply scanning paper documents and getting them into an electronic form, adding workflow can bring an order of magnitude greater efficiency and productivity to document-driven processes.

Automated electronic workflow can be applied to improve a wide spectrum of document processing operations—including invoice processing, loan approvals, insurance claims, mortgages, sales orders, customer inquiries, prescription fulfillment, publishing, engineering drawings, new employee processing, and new customer onboarding, to name just a few.

 

TheCube host Dave Vellante was joined by guests Dorothy Ortale, Knowledge manager, Ricardo Chavira, IT Director, and Rick Smith, Director of Metrics & Quality Assurance with Yale University, to talk about the way practitioners are using ServiceNow at the recently concluded Knowledge13 conference.

Chances are that you hear the phrase “knowledge management” every day of the business week. But what does it mean? Where did it come from? We sat down with Bill Ives, a partner with the Merced Group, who’s been working in the field of knowledge management since the 1980s, including for Accenture, and who has written the blog Portals and KM for ten years.

 

Step 1: Investigation Understanding what makes your organisation tick is the key to successful Managed Document Service. To identify where changes should be made in order to improve your business performance, we will conduct an in-depth analysis covering your workflow processes, usage patterns and calculate the actual costs of running your operation. 

Step 2: Design

The results of our investigation will establish the best way forward for your Managed Document Services. We then set out a tailored strategy based upon these findings and designed to make you significant savings with sustainable benefits. Once we have agreed this strategy we then begin to work together in partnership to develop a model and schedule that will optimise your print fleet and introduce best practice to your workforce.

Step 3: Implementation 
Once the strategy has been agreed our expert Prince 2 Accredited Project Team and IT specialists will become involved in order to implement the Managed Document Service. We use the very latest technology in combination with workflow solutions and integrated software.

Whilst the technological practicalities are intrinsic to the strategy, internal acceptance from your staff is crucial to the success of a Managed Document Service. In order to make the transition to new processes as pain free for your team as possible we will support them with expert and on-going training.

Step 4: Optimisation

Our involvement with you doesn’t stop once the services are up and running. We will continue to monitor every aspect of the process to ensure that it is delivering what was agreed in the original strategy. We will also proactively look to identify new ways of working that will refine and enhance the existing benefits and savings of the Document Management Systems to further improve productivity.

Step 5: Management

This past year, I have been in contact with many business or IT executives, asking them to tell me their experience with Athento and other solutions in the same sector, asking what had led them to acquire a solution for document management or ECM . 

I would say that for 99% of them a document management system is clearly needed, and no matter if the outcome of this experience has been good or bad with the acquired solutions, the path will always be to look forward, no one thinks of ruling out ECM software. By contrast, those who had a bad experience, seek another provider (which is why I have the opportunity to meet them) and those who have done well, look for ways to further expand and improve their solution. 

The sustainable interaction between humankind and planet Earth poses huge hydraulic and environmental engineering challenges.

Confronting these challenges one-project-at-atime, while seemingly attractive from a budget management perspective, results in grave inefficiencies in developing and archiving the basic elements that are invariably involved: data, models and tools. Hardly any project is by itself of sufficient scale to develop easily accessible and high-quality data archives, state-of-the-art modelling systems and well-tested analysis tools under version control.

Research, consultancy as well as major construction projects commonly spend a significant part of their budgets to set up some basic data and knowledge management infrastructure, most of which dissipates again once the project is finished.

Businesses have long searched for the value of collaboration. Skeptics will say that the quest is a fool's errand. Many argue that knowledge workers are too rooted in traditional tools, like e-mail, to ever fully exploit the spectrum of value of today's social business and collaboration tools. However, evidence is growing that there is a road to measuring social business and collaboration success. The journey is marked by a series of small wins that, taken together, represent discrete business value.

Popular opinion has been that today's knowledge workers are faced with responsibilities that are too ad hoc and chaotic to be formalized. Yet companies like Atos Consulting (atos.net), ConocoPhillips, IBM and Cisco Systems are beginning to challenge this notion by studying the communications patterns around internal processes. The key is to focus less on the activities of individual actors and more on optimizing common, repeatable patterns among groups that drive optimal results.

To achieve the best results with social tools, start by focusing on areas of known inefficiency. The challenge is to define instances where knowledge workers struggle. Ask any knowledge worker and you are likely to hear that information is hard to find, access to expertise is constrained by personal networks, and there is no capacity to drive results collectively. According toForrester Forrsights data, on average, 42 percent of information workers spend more than an hour a day just searching for information.

Bookmarking services are a dime a dozen. So, I wasn’t too keen on checking out yet another iteration by the name of Keeeb. But, and I honestly mean it, I’m glad I did. Keeeb is not simply a social bookmarking service, it is a knowledge management system and it levels up the quality of my research on longer and more complicated articles easily. I am both an avid user of Pocket and Evernote Premium, yet Keeeb still closes a gap I didn’t even know existed. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?!

PARTNERSHIPS!

The holy grail of development!

Well, when you bother about collaborative approach that is. And some prefer to use partners for results rather than relationships. But for any development organisation with the right frame of mind, partnerships are central. Only it tends to be a lot of discourse and perhaps not enough action.

Let me offer, in this shoot post, a few ideas to work practically with partners.

This excellent video explains the Knowledge Management program at the Olympic Games. The first part of the video explains the scale and complexity of the Games, then from 7:20 you get a short overview of the Olympic Knowledge Transfer program.