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KM
Communities |
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Communication
Breakdown
How can an
enterprise access and share its intellectual capital for
competitive advantage, asks Campbell
McCracken.
The competitiveness of companies, as they
expand globally, can be limited by their internal
organisation or physical locations. Barriers, both
structural and geographical, can prevent employees from
gaining access to timely information. The Hurwitz Group
an IT and e.consultancy says, “A company’s
knowledge, its processes, employee know-how, customer
information, guidelines and values are its competitive
advantage.” But if the information that the employees
need is not freely available then this advantage is
eroded, often to the point of being nullified.
As
well as physical and organisational barriers, the
knowledge may simply not be available because it is
still locked up in other employees’ heads. “Tacit
knowledge is the single biggest chunk of knowledge in an
organisation,” says Ernst Kallus, vice president of
global sales and marketing at Orbital. “It typically
forms 40% to 50% of an enterprise’s intellectual
capital.” But unless this information is made available
to others, it cannot be used. Furthermore, unless it is
captured somehow, it is vulnerable. “One thing that does
a lot of damage to an organisation is that the tacit
knowledge comes and goes as the people come and go. What
we (Orbital) do is provide a buffer to the entry and
exit of your organisation’s skill set.”
It
has been estimated that employee-to-employee (E2E)
exchange of information is one of the most effective
methods of sharing intellectual capital. In the past,
employees shared this information informally. They were
able to strike up relationships and hold conversations
with each other when they gathered around the coffee
machine. But there wasn’t any way to capture that
exchange so that it could be used to enhance the
performance of others in the business community.
And
now, with corporate globalisation, telecommuting and the
setting up of structures such as centres of excellence,
even this limited practice is no longer possible.
Employees no longer have easy, timely access to the
people they need. They still have questions, but are
finding it more and more difficult to know whom to ask.
What’s the solution -
Knowledge Communities One
of the most effective solutions to this problem is to
organise information into virtual communities that can
be accessed either over the Internet or corporate
intranet, or as part of a corporate portal. By joining
the community and registering their interest
preferences, users can be kept informed of new
information as it gets added. If they have a question,
they can go to the most appropriate community and ask it
in natural language. If the question (or a similar
question) has already been asked, the community will
return the most appropriate answers.
If
the community can’t find an answer or if the user
indicates that the answer does not meet the
requirements, emails will be sent to the community
expert(s) and other interested members, giving them the
opportunity to supply a better answer. Any new answers
are stored in a database for future use and will also be
copied to all users expressing an interest in that
community.
The
way the community organises its information depends on
how the taxonomy has been set up. “For us, taxonomy is
like a matrix,” says Denise Holz, Synergistics vice
president of product. Synergistics products Authoriti
and Prevail (See Case Study - Synergistics at Ryder)
have found success with professional services and sales
organisations. “If you think about the table of contents
of things that people need to do their job - for sales
people it might be corporate strategy, market
objectives, trends in the industry, product information,
etc. That’s one angle on the taxonomy.”
The
second angle is all of those things that people
typically type into search engines as keywords, such as
the list of competitors, the list of products, the list
of industries and so on. “So you could go into Authoriti
and say ‘I need a competitive positioning around
Competitor X, and how do I sell against them for Product
Y and in Industry Z.’ Click. Click. Click.” says Denise
Holz. In response, Authoriti would return the document
that was the single best answer to this query.
If
the user doesn’t like the answer, perhaps because it is
not fully applicable to the X / Y / Z combination, all
is not lost. “He can either widen his search or go into
the contribute mode and say ‘I need help with this
combination in the taxonomy’ and the three subject
matter experts whose names are attached to those three
elements X, Y, Z get an email.”
In
addition to sending out emails to try to get the
questions answered, the community software can also
search through existing documents to see if a document
already exists that might supply the answer, or send out
crawlers to the Internet to search the Internet.
Case Study -
Synergistics at Ryder
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Denise Holz -
Synergistics |
Ryder Systems Inc, the US’s largest
third-party logistics company, was founded in 1933
and has grown to a $5 billion company with 30,000
employees worldwide. Ryder’s management realised
that slim margins and fierce competition were
making the truck-rental side of their business
difficult. They eventually decided to concentrate
on and expand on the logistics solutions side of
their business, solving transportation and
inventory management problems for their clients.
Ryder’s business was subdivided into
competency areas such as distribution management,
supply chain development and design and
transportation network design. However this
resulted in the inability to share supply chain
expertise efficiently. Realising that the
company’s wealth of knowledge resided in corporate
files and in minds of individual employees, the
management decided to create a knowledge base
containing best-in-class solutions, where
employees could access this and other information
quickly.
The knowledge base was put together by
Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) using
Synergistics Prevail Knowledge Centre. Ryder
employees can now access sales proposals, market
research information, technology solutions,
project plans and corporate policies and
procedures. In addition to providing consistency
in the solutions they create, it also reduces
cycle time and lead time of putting together a
supply-chain design. David Baildon, group director
of Ryder’s knowledge management group said, “We’ve
received emails from people reporting that they
now can repeat short-notice Requests for Proposals
on time, because they can quickly find reusable
quality content from the knowledge
centre.”
The Knowledge Centre portal also boosts
productivity by reducing the amount of calls that
experts get for information. “The people who are
really good and highly knowledgeable about a given
topic tend to get called all the time for
information. Then they have to spend time to pull
together the information and send it through Lotus
Notes or fax, usually with several phone calls.
The Knowledge Management Centre now gives people a
facility to donate their intellectual capital in
one place, where it then becomes easy for people
to find and utilise it to better serve Ryder’s
customers.” |
Taxonomy
Tree By
contrast, Orbital’s flagship product Organik organises
the communities in a tree structure. “Organik
facilitates Question and Answer dialog, capturing the
results, storing them and making them available for
reuse with the organisation,” says Kallus. “In most
organisations, people are currently asking questions and
getting answers by email. They are seeking out experts.
But these emails never get recorded.
“The
same questions get re-asked and re-asked. What Organik
is doing is providing a capture mechanism for these
questions, storing the answers and making them available
for re-use by a wider audience. Tacit knowledge is the
single biggest chunk of an enterprise’s intellectual
capital, making up 40% to 50%, compared with intelligent
search methods which typically address 20% to 25%.
Organik raises the collective IQ of an organisation.”
At
the same time as it is capturing the questions and
answers, Organik creates a profile (or Persona) of each
user either from existing data sources or from
information provided by the user himself. All question
and answer dialogues are used by Organik to update these
Personas. These can then be used to help find the most
appropriate person or persons to answer questions. (See
Case Study - Orbital at ProfNet and Matrix)
Alternatively the user himself can choose the person he
thinks will best answer the question.
Orbital recently announced a strategic alliance
with one of the leaders in high-performance search
engines, Excalibur Technologies Corporation. The
partnership will allow Orbital customers optionally to
replace the search engine in Organik with Excalibur’s
RetrievalWare intelligent search system, regarded by
some as the best-of-breed.
Case Study - Orbital at ProfNet and
Matrix
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Ernst
Kallus VP Global Sales and Marketing,
Orbital Software
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ProfNet, a subsidiary of PR Newswire,
describes itself as a “collaborative of public
relations professionals linked by the internet to
provide journalists and authors convenient access
to expert sources”. It is a network of more than
10,000 academics and experts from colleges,
universities, corporations, think tanks,
government agencies etc. who are available for a
fee for soundbites or comments on a particular
topic.
The press, for example, can log on to
ProfNet and make a request for someone to give
them five minutes on the current state of, say,
nuclear physics. Queries are input in natural
language. Orbital’s Organik product, the power
behind ProfNet, profiles the experts and
determines which of them are most suited to answer
the query. It will find however many experts the
user specifies, send questions to them, and get
soundbites or statements back.
In a different venture, Matrix Management
Consultancy has launched an online community,
directornet.com, for leaders and directors of
progressive companies, again powered by Organik.
The community allows members to search for
previous networking dialogues on a specific
subject and also identify members with experience
in that field. By harnessing this shared
knowledge, directors are able to make better
decision and respond to issues and challenges more
quickly and efficiently.
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Guaranteeing Quality of
Information Knowledge communities work best when the
information they provide is mission critical. And with
so much hinging on the accuracy of the stored
information, there has to be a high degree of trust that
it is accurate. “Communities of interest can help people
in operational roles like professional services, and
sales people,” says Synergistics’ Holz, “but only if
they trust the environment and if they trust the info in
the community and if they trust each other. If they
trust the environment they’re more likely to contribute
to it.”
“Usually in an enterprise environment you’d have
the data managed and authenticated by a moderator,” says
Orbital’s Kallus, “so you don’t get someone saying they
are an expert when they are not. The management and
deployment are critical to making the community work.”
But
being an expert is not simply about being able to answer
any questions. In addition, you are accountable for
everything that’s written in your community. If the
information is of low quality, you’re not doing your
job. Both Authoriti and Organik give users the
opportunity to rate the answers that are given. In the
Authoriti system, the ratings can be fed back to the
original document authors and category experts to let
them know how well the existing information answered the
question.
“Just like how you can rate a book in
Amazon.com,” says Holz, “we have a rating scheme that
allows users to rank a document on three parameters -
quality, usefulness, accuracy.” Authors can be rated by
averaging the ratings of the documents they produce. “If
it’s acceptable that I get a B+ then I’m doing well at
my job. If all of the quality of my content is low, then
maybe I’m not a good person to be a subject matter
expert.”
With
Organik, the ratings are used as part of the profiling
decision making when determining the appropriateness of
that expert when answering similar questions in the
future. The ratings from previous answers are also
available for review by users when selecting an expert.
This allows them to make informed choices regarding
experts.
Community
Culture Because online knowledge communities require
openness and sharing, they are not immediately suited to
all organisations. “You need to have a critical mass of
questions and answers in the system at an early stage,”
says Orbital’s Kallus. “In some cases you may need to
seed the community to make it interesting and effective.
You may also need encouragement and incentives for
organisational users to participate in the question and
answer sessions. You can do this with rewards, beans, or
gift vouchers.” Sometimes the best motivation can be the
participation itself. “People like to be seen as
experts.”
“Some users are not, by nature, information
sharing,” says Holz. “They want to know what’s in it for
them. They want to get in to get information quickly and
get back out. A lot of times they see that information
as competitive advantage. But because we’ve put in the
structure and we are about accountability for quality of
content, people come here because it will help them
close more business or raise their utilisation rates.”
Not
only does there have to be some incentive to make users
want to get involved in the communities, it has to be
made easy for them. “The litmus test for customer
participation is that if it’s harder for you to put an
idea into the portal than it is to send an email or
track somebody down on the phone system,” says
Synergistics’ Holz, “then people won’t do it.”
What are the
benefits? There are other benefits to the knowledge
community approach. Email blitz is avoided, by contrast,
in the knowledge community the questions are sent to the
relevant people.
The
community also encourages participation - people like to
be seen as experts and are keen to contribute when they
know the answer to a question. This, in conjunction with
the software’s ability to reuse previous answers if they
seem appropriate, frees up the experts. “The load on
experts actually reduces as the community grows virally
or organically,” says Kallus. “Members start
participating, answering questions as experts.”
Producing measurements of the effectiveness of
the online community is not a straightforward task -
normally an organisation has several changes or
programmes running concurrently that can have an effect
on the top or bottom line. So, you have to look at other
measurements, such as increases in productivity and
efficiency. “We’ve carried out some studies in the US
that suggest that Organik can produce 15% improvements
in the efficiencies of white collar workers,” says
Orbital’s Kallus.
Other measurements include the decreased response
time to customer queries, the reduced cycle time for
reaching business decisions, more timely access to
business information, etc. “Many times we’ll go through
a pilot process where we implement for a small subset of
the sales people,” says Holz. “We find that when we
implement with those sales people they tell us that
we’re not allowed to take it away from them. All you
need is one or two war stories that somebody won a deal
because of information they found in the Knowledge
Centre, or somebody’s utilisation rate increased by 5%,
and that translates to a very significant return on
investment.”
Campbell McCracken
Links
Hurwitz Group: http://www.kmmag.co.uk/CURRENTFEB/www.hurwitz.com
Orbital: http://www.kmmag.co.uk/CURRENTFEB/www.orbitalsw.com
Synergistics: http://www.kmmag.co.uk/CURRENTFEB/www.syner.com
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