KnowledgeFarm
Knowledge management solutions: Strategic advisory and consulting on People, Process, Content and Technology.Archive for May, 2008
Fuel Costs vs. Face Time
The news for this traditional travel holiday weekend in the US is that fuel costs are actually cutting into Americans’ travel plans. It’s the first significant year-on-year drop in projected travel since the 1979 fuel crisis. This time around, it could be different, though. We all saw the ‘79 gas shock as a skirmish in the West’s cold war with OPEC — and as a temporary event. Today, however, there is a sense that oil prices in the US are permanently resetting themselves at a level more consistent with those the rest of the world pays.
Combine this ground level observation with the desperate measures airlines are taking to cope with fuel prices and it becomes obvious that something basic in the economies of the industrialized world is changing. Already, the relationship between service businesses and their customers is changing, and not for the better. And within organizations, this is going to have an effect on our relationships with one another. While the data really aren’t there yet to prove this, it is reasonable to expect the rising costs of air fares, car rentals and hotels to cut significantly into business travel, soon. (Possibly a leading indicator: Air travel in first and business class is already off. This is where the real value is for the airlines.)
What this means, if it’s borne out, is that we’re all going to start seeing less of one another.
That’s worrisome to those of us whose business it is to see to it that people in organizations successfully exchange knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t travel solely in explicit forms — in e-mails, memos, articles published in knowledge bases, or bulletins posted in SharePoint sites. Knowledge often is transmitted subliminally, or accidentally, in the body language and conversational nuance that only comes from face time.
That’s why executives insist on reviewing the troops in person; it’s why meetings (when they’re run effectively) continue to matter. If companies cut back sharply on travel to meetings, something that materially affects productivity and competitiveness — for individual companies and eventually for the economy as a whole — is going to be lost.
Closer to ground level, in service desks and call centers (the ones that are still physically located in North America), there is growing interest in a parallel coping strategy: The “agent at home” concept, in which customer service or help desk agents, instead of commuting every day to a warren of cubicles, do what they do from home, connected through CRM software, IP telephony and instant messaging.
What the agent at home loses is the opportunity to “prairie-dog” — to collaborate on problems with peers one cubicle away. But it’s a sacrifice many agents will willingly make when it costs $70 to gas up the minivan. This option is already making it possible for companies to find and retain capable people in jobs that are neither glamorous nor particularly lucrative — but actually can be done rather effectively from home, if these people are both disciplined and knowledgeable. So the agent at home has the feel of inevitability, at least in the US.
It seems self-evident that as people increasingly view themselves as knowledge workers (since everything that isn’t knowledge work is being outsourced), their ability to pick one another’s brains is of strategic importance to the organizations they work for. It is unrealistic to conceive of an agent at home operation without some kind of shared knowledge base. That one is obvious.
But work at every level, in every functional area in organizations, is increasingly collaborative, and collaboration is increasingly virtual. Those companies that have thus far resisted adoption of social media applications (forums, wikis, collaboration systems, blogging platforms, Facebook) will have to investigate them to fill the knowledge gap created when the travel clamps go on and peers become, more and more, disembodied voices and blog personae.
All organizations are feeling the pressure to change the way they operate. Asking technology to enable managers to go on functioning as they always have — e.g., using videoconferencing to try to run the same types of meetings they used to run in the face to face world — will be a short-lived pattern. Work is changing — and the tipping point, when it becomes too obvious to ignore, is likely to be expressed as a price per gallon.
KM and the 800 Lb. Gorilla
[This article also appears in the online newsletter CRMAdvocate.]
We management consultants love to draw attention to our enterprise-scale experience. But we all work with smaller teams — departmental units within large companies, and small to midsize businesses. This surely is the case in Knowledge Management. Even at a mammoth multinational, the first beachhead for KM is likely to be a small functional group responsible for a specific type of work, such as an IT Service Desk.
Once, there were a range of effective KM solutions for small service desks — a reasonably stable low end of the market. But the low-end vendors have been swallowed by enterprise solution suppliers and moved up-market. At one pharmaceutical company I’ve assisted, a small, cost-center functional team needed a KM solution and sent its RFP to the usual suspects, only to see two of the household name vendors decline to respond because the budget for the license was under a quarter million dollars.
I have a couple of questions for my friends in the software space. With all due respect, guys…are you having a good time, in the present economy, explaining to people who run departmental service desks where they’re going to find $250,000 in defensible value in a problem resolution tool? 
I mean, of course, before the cost of integrating this tool with the incident management system effectively doubles that investment?
Oh, and have you noticed the 800-pound gorilla in the room? His name is Web 2.0.
You’ve heard of Web 2.0. What you may or may not have gathered is that it isn’t a new generation of technology. It’s a mindset. What it signifies is that the value to the business that your applications generate comes not from the designed-in features, but from the contributions of the end users — especially the content, but to an increasing degree the user-modifiable attributes of the software.
In fact, users are generating some of today’s most interesting software. The Open Source Community, driven by a geeky but grand ethic that software ingenuity is meant to be shared for little or no cost, has spawned thousands of useful applications, including many that look and act a lot like KM systems.
Guys, who’s really your competition in the problem resolution space? Heh…you’re all looking at each other. Have you seen what wikis can do?
In case you’ve never tried one, a wiki is basically a user-editable web site. The most famous example is, of course, Wikipedia, the user-generated, living encyclopedia. You don’t like the entry on your favorite rugby team, Iranian movie director or management fad? Just register, and you can go in and change it. It’s the wisdom of crowds, on steroids. It’s fast becoming the way knowledge proliferates across the globe. And you can now buy the technology that makes this possible.
The service desk world has begun to notice wikis in a big way — and to ask a really interesting question about them: What does a “conventional” knowledge management tool do that you can’t do with a wiki?
What is a knowledge management tool, really? It has three fundamental components:
- A repository for “solutions” — essentially a document management system;
- A means for retrieving solutions based on specific queries — generally some variant on search; and
- A workflow engine to manage the authoring, review, approval, publishing and eventual retirement of solutions.
There are service desks whose knowledge requirements are such that they cannot depend solely on search for quick and specific knowledge retrieval. These situations are very choice opportunities for KM vendors…but they’re rare. Most knowledge bases are small and narrow in scope, and, given the comfort nearly everyone has now with Google and its brethren, search tends to suffice.
A wiki will, in general, satisfy the content management and search requirements. Try a few — the web site WikiMatrix lists 80-odd wiki platforms, many of which provide at least trial access free. What they lack, by design, is the authoring workflow engine.
Orthodox KM proposes that the workflow be thoughtful, carefully designed to insure that all knowledge content is fully vetted for accuracy and style, and that the tool enforce or at least facilitate this process. So that’s a point of differentiation for the commercial problem resolution tools. (Actually, it might be a rather compelling point if the content and the process for generating it are subject to compliance audits.)
But, how much differentiation? Is it $250,000 worth? Or, conversely, would having to manage this workflow manually, without help from the tool, be okay if it saved $250,000 in license fee? Because, while some of the wiki platforms are marketed and priced like enterprise KM tools, there are quite capable little wiki platforms that can be had for as little as $50 a year. A few are actually free.
Could a service desk design a KM process that engineers around the limitations of wiki technology so that it actually meets its problem resolution needs? I suspect a growing number of them are going to try.
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Peter Dorfman is the founder and president of KnowledgeFarm, a process consultancy specializing in KM and IT Service Management for customer service and service desk operations. He can be reached at pdorfman@knowfarm.com.
Welcome
You’ve found your way to the new KnowledgeFarm blog site — in keeping with the general cultural drift toward “Web. 2.0″ thinking, this site is designed not only to promote the consulting services of KnowledgeFarm, but to promote dialog on the value generated by KM.
Knowledge management has grown beyond the technology hype cycle. Most corporations have some form of KM initiative in place, and many are experiencing remarkable, tangible benefits, including:
- More and faster sales;
- Higher customer satisfaction;
- Productivity gains in customer service and support; and
- Higher first-contact problem resolution rates.
Once concerned principally with systems to resolve customer service questions and issues, the KM discipline has embraced a wide variety of collaboration, social networking and other technologies, recognizing that interpersonal relationship building is becoming a core business process.
Headed by an 18-year KM veteran, KnowledgeFarm helps its consulting clients to:
- Develop knowledge-sharing strategy,
- Design effective processes,
- Establish standards for organizing knowledge content and maintaining timely, high quality content over its full life cycle, and
- Make effective decisions on the technical platforms and tools for leveraging knowledge.
We see KM in the larger context of corporate governance and IT service management. Often, it is only in this larger context that KM can generate support and funding. We look forward to a productive dialog, and hope we can help you to build effective resources to manage your knowledge. Make yourself at home.
