Implementing Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is as much an activity (“ something you do”) as it is a type of system or technology. That’s why it’s worthwhile to explore what’s involved in implementing knowledge management, or to put it more formally, in capturing existing knowledge within an organization, and then adapting that old knowledge while capturing new knowledge going forward. The process can involve a series of steps: creation, identification, collection, organisation, sharing, adaptation, and use. Once such knowledge is captured, knowledge management professionals can apply the processes of analysis, organisation, assigning relationships and priority rankings between questions and answers.

To begin, implementing a KM system within an organisation means analysing its current sources of knowledge. This includes not only capturing useful information from wherever it may exist, it also requires analysing call logs, customer e- mails, and other sources of customer interaction to learn not just what the answers are, but what questions make such answers necessary. The phases that a KM effort goes through when capturing knowledge, and the activities related to completing each phase are:

Document knowledge: Analyse all possible sources of organisational knowledge to build a taxonomy of knowledge types and to decide what attributes and values should be associated with knowledge in the company if a key person does leave. Therefore, it can reduce turnover and minimise the impact when it does occur.

Training time for agents to become productive is reduced: By training service and support agents to effectively use a knowledge management solution they quickly become productive. Once agents know how to use their KM solutions, they become much more efficient and are ready to consistently and accurately deal with whatever customer queries may come their way.

Identical queries can be answered from already- discovered solutions: Once knowledge is captured in a KM solution, it is readily accessible to all agents. Thus, once a question is researched and answered the benefits of that work is available to anyone who needs access to that information. The result is increased productivity, allowing agents more time to deal with new queries and improve customer satisfaction.

Information is accessible to all agents: Since knowledge captured in a KM solution is accessible to all agents, individual agents can reach the same level of expertise by building on each other’s experience and knowledge. High level, built- in mechanisms for enterprise- wide replication in KM solutions enable agents in remote offices to have access to the same information as agents in the organisation’s headquarters — ensuring consistent, right answers.