Considering I’ve used this blog to rail on poor self-service website experiences I decided to focus in on the best practices web self services pdf to wrap up the remaining reading posts.. Here are some of the things I found interesting.
“A recent Forrester study showed that more than a third of companies rate their self-service capabilities as below average to poor”
The article discusses the importance to have a strong, relevant, and healthy KB at the core of your self-service website. The KB should have:
- Access methods to know that make sense to your users
- Quick, simple escalation choices to agents who have a customer-centric view in mind.
The article referenced an interesting statistic:
“Users with a positive search experience spend 270% more on e-commerce sites”
While the article stressed that a self-service website shouldn’t just rely on search, it recognizes that search is an important feature of a KB. As a result it makes the following recommendations:
- too many answers make it overwhelming
- ask clarifying questions
- spelling suggestions
- automated learning built into a kb to promote documents to top of results based on use or expert weighting
- save searches,
- replay past searches,
- auto complete search terms
Going beyond search a good self service website should include:
- FAQ’s
- service alerts
- subscribe to content of interest
The article also discussed one best practice which is to change authoring of KB articles from non-customer centric authors to customer service agents. This way the KB articles can be more relevant to the questions being asked by users/customers.
Some other best practices recommended:
- Feedback forms can be appended to all solutions
- If an agents is unable to find right solution, agent can author a jit knowledge article
- Expert users ability to post
- Forums integrated into kb articles
All in all this was a very straightforward and relevant article on KB’s at the center of a self-service based web site.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Elevator Questions
"I see from your transcripts that you took a course in KM. What is KM?"
Who the hell gave you my transcripts?
I keed, I keed….
Put simply, knowledge management revolves around the ability for an organization to capture, codify, and easily serve established knowledge from an organization. KM lies on the bedrock that organizational knowledge can be a powerful resource inside an organization and should be easily transferred between different internal and external parties.
"Tell me how you would apply KM in my organization."
Well it would be incredibly important to see what problems or issues currently prevent KM from being effectively applied in the organization. Once we can determine the root causes we must then solve them and employ one or many different techniques to establish an effective knowledge management system for the organization.
"What KM technologies would you recommend here?"
Again, this is a difficult answer to give you without fully knowing what the organization needs are and what barriers, if any, there are to effective knowledge management.
"KM sounds great, but how do I justify KM here?"
KM is not just something that should be added to your current operations, but it should be seen as the very lifeblood of operations. While it might be hard to quantify the amount of knowledge lost due to ineffective KM, it’s easy to monetize knowledge lost and to see knowledge as an essential resource of your organization. KM not only saves time, energy, and money, it also can provide a competitive advantage over others in your market.
"KM sounds great, but what KM metrics do you recommend?"
It's hard to discuss metrics before deciding on a technology. Overall it's important to see if a KMS has added value to organization instead of just disrupting your processes. You can determine that in a variety of ways: output, behavior, etc.
"Tell me the main barriers to adopting KM I can anticipate. How would you overcome them?"
People. For many different reasons people will be your main barrier. Some people will be resistant to the work involved in KM, some will not really understand it’s purpose, and others will be threatened that their knowledge will be in a system instead of their head, making them feel expendable. Besides people, processes are another huge barrier. If your business processes are not properly setup for KM, KM here will certainly fail.
"Summarize for me what you learned in that KM class."
Well, the most important thing I learned is that all problems are knowledge problems. But about KM specifically is that Knowledge is one of the most important resources in any organization, and the better an organization can manage knowledge, the more they’ll stand to be an industry leader in whatever field or discipline.
Who the hell gave you my transcripts?
I keed, I keed….
Put simply, knowledge management revolves around the ability for an organization to capture, codify, and easily serve established knowledge from an organization. KM lies on the bedrock that organizational knowledge can be a powerful resource inside an organization and should be easily transferred between different internal and external parties.
"Tell me how you would apply KM in my organization."
Well it would be incredibly important to see what problems or issues currently prevent KM from being effectively applied in the organization. Once we can determine the root causes we must then solve them and employ one or many different techniques to establish an effective knowledge management system for the organization.
"What KM technologies would you recommend here?"
Again, this is a difficult answer to give you without fully knowing what the organization needs are and what barriers, if any, there are to effective knowledge management.
"KM sounds great, but how do I justify KM here?"
KM is not just something that should be added to your current operations, but it should be seen as the very lifeblood of operations. While it might be hard to quantify the amount of knowledge lost due to ineffective KM, it’s easy to monetize knowledge lost and to see knowledge as an essential resource of your organization. KM not only saves time, energy, and money, it also can provide a competitive advantage over others in your market.
"KM sounds great, but what KM metrics do you recommend?"
It's hard to discuss metrics before deciding on a technology. Overall it's important to see if a KMS has added value to organization instead of just disrupting your processes. You can determine that in a variety of ways: output, behavior, etc.
"Tell me the main barriers to adopting KM I can anticipate. How would you overcome them?"
People. For many different reasons people will be your main barrier. Some people will be resistant to the work involved in KM, some will not really understand it’s purpose, and others will be threatened that their knowledge will be in a system instead of their head, making them feel expendable. Besides people, processes are another huge barrier. If your business processes are not properly setup for KM, KM here will certainly fail.
"Summarize for me what you learned in that KM class."
Well, the most important thing I learned is that all problems are knowledge problems. But about KM specifically is that Knowledge is one of the most important resources in any organization, and the better an organization can manage knowledge, the more they’ll stand to be an industry leader in whatever field or discipline.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Week 7: Dave Simmons Visit
I really liked Dave’s speech to us. While many of the things he discussed about his current situation sounded suspiciously more like information management than knowledge management, I still greatly appreciated his anecdotes and real world experience.
Here were some of the things Dave touched on that I really found insightful:
“The real knowledge is in the failed projects”
“Organizing info so we can derive knowledge from it”
He also quoted the famous KM line: “We’re starving for knowledge but drowning in information”
He stressed the importance of keeping a personal journal, which was something I was thinking a lot about personally.
“Discernment for better decision making”
When it comes to information “less is more” focused information is better than more information
And the most important piece of knowledge he dropped on us:
“Simple projects can have the biggest impact”
Here were some of the things Dave touched on that I really found insightful:
“The real knowledge is in the failed projects”
“Organizing info so we can derive knowledge from it”
He also quoted the famous KM line: “We’re starving for knowledge but drowning in information”
He stressed the importance of keeping a personal journal, which was something I was thinking a lot about personally.
“Discernment for better decision making”
When it comes to information “less is more” focused information is better than more information
And the most important piece of knowledge he dropped on us:
“Simple projects can have the biggest impact”
Week 6: Part II Reading / In Class notes
#2
IT vs. business users
Centralize vs. leverage
Simplify vs. access
Manage vs. empower
#4
Get persuasive content that educates and informs customers can
Strengthen customer loyalty
Achieve unified brands, messages, and corporate image
Accelerate worldwide product launches and promotions
Optimize customer process efficencies (also reduces costs by 70% or more)
Provide regulartory compliance and security
#6
o Capture KM
o Create CM
o Route KM
o Manage CM
o Convert KM
o Publish CM
CM under KM
#8
Corporate records for reg compliance and e-discovery
Eliminate IT headaches
Bus critical info
5 req’s (in bullets)
#10
make it easy to install
easy to uprgrade interface
make sure it searches quickly
accurate
comprehensive
#15
accounts payable: indexing paper documents to integrate everything.
Contract management: collaborative solutions, document capture, online electronic approval
IT vs. business users
Centralize vs. leverage
Simplify vs. access
Manage vs. empower
#4
Get persuasive content that educates and informs customers can
Strengthen customer loyalty
Achieve unified brands, messages, and corporate image
Accelerate worldwide product launches and promotions
Optimize customer process efficencies (also reduces costs by 70% or more)
Provide regulartory compliance and security
#6
o Capture KM
o Create CM
o Route KM
o Manage CM
o Convert KM
o Publish CM
CM under KM
#8
Corporate records for reg compliance and e-discovery
Eliminate IT headaches
Bus critical info
5 req’s (in bullets)
#10
make it easy to install
easy to uprgrade interface
make sure it searches quickly
accurate
comprehensive
#15
accounts payable: indexing paper documents to integrate everything.
Contract management: collaborative solutions, document capture, online electronic approval
Week 6: Part I Reading / Blog Questions
Huber
Media richness falls under the Information Interpretation branch. That’s interesting because that’s exactly the same conclusion we reached after the “One” exercise in class. I do agree, because as stated I did agree with that conclusion from the “One” exercise. Media richness can aid in helping to frame and correctly interpret information (but as noted during the exercise, can also cause there to be bias drawn as well).
Unlearning also falls under information interpretation. Huber describes “unlearning” in two different ways. One way can be functional in that it helps someone to forget or discard obsolete or incorrect knowledge. The other form of unlearning occurs when knowledge is not retained by the worker, nor is it passed on, which is a negative outcome from unlearning.
General:
“What is the difference between knowledge management and organizational learning?”
KM focuses on the content of the knowledge whereas OL focuses on process.
“Knowledge transfer vs. organizational learning”
Knowledge transfer is actually the process of transmitting the content from a KMS to a known or unknown entity and again, OL is the process of having said content used to help shape the processes of the organization.
“Knowledge transfer vs. knowledge management”
Transfer is the process of transmitting the content contained in KM.
Media richness falls under the Information Interpretation branch. That’s interesting because that’s exactly the same conclusion we reached after the “One” exercise in class. I do agree, because as stated I did agree with that conclusion from the “One” exercise. Media richness can aid in helping to frame and correctly interpret information (but as noted during the exercise, can also cause there to be bias drawn as well).
Unlearning also falls under information interpretation. Huber describes “unlearning” in two different ways. One way can be functional in that it helps someone to forget or discard obsolete or incorrect knowledge. The other form of unlearning occurs when knowledge is not retained by the worker, nor is it passed on, which is a negative outcome from unlearning.
General:
“What is the difference between knowledge management and organizational learning?”
KM focuses on the content of the knowledge whereas OL focuses on process.
“Knowledge transfer vs. organizational learning”
Knowledge transfer is actually the process of transmitting the content from a KMS to a known or unknown entity and again, OL is the process of having said content used to help shape the processes of the organization.
“Knowledge transfer vs. knowledge management”
Transfer is the process of transmitting the content contained in KM.
Week 5 Reading and Blog Questions
Action Learning
Out of all 6 steps, Determining causes of the problem is the most important step in organizational problem solving. The blog questions state that there are “2 new steps before determining the cause” I’m not quite sure if that’s a reference to presenting the problem and reframing the problem. However presentation of the problem and reframing the problem certainly makes a lot of sense. It’s important to present the problem and then to look at the problem from a different angle in order to properly define the problem. Once a problem is properly defined only then can you attack it’s root cause.
Understanding & Supporting Decision Making
The underlying idea of naturalistic decision making is the notion that “how people make decisions begins with observation, and not testing hypothesis drawn from mathematical and statistical theories.” Essentially naturalistic decision-making deals with intuition and how that shapes the decision making process. According to the research provided naturlisitc decision-making rarely compares options (less than 5% of the time actually). The Naturilistic decision-making camp looks at the traditional model of decision making (hypothesis-expirement-theory etc) is too narrow of a way to describe true scientific thinking.
What data mining can’t do
The “more is not better” has to do with the fundamental idea of data mining: and that is that data mining is based upon understanding the “radomness” of human behavior by using fairly basic probability distributions. So, when it comes to data warehousing more is not necessarily better because sometimes all of that additional data can be a bit of a red herring and can capture more of the random idiosyncrasies of human behavior which can then make the data too muddied and much more difficult to draw conclusions.
Reflection questions:
“Is there a difference between decision making and problem solving?”
I believe yes there very much is a difference between decision making and problem solving. Decision making, as seen in the naturalistic article, often times can be based on intuition and quick thinking. While this has many positivies, it also has many negatives when it comes to problem solving. As we saw in the action learning article there are many steps involved in adequately solving a problem, with defining the root cause as the most important. Often times in decision making processes defining, framing, and finding root cause isn’t determined nor are they often thought about.
True or False:
There are good decisions, and there are bad decisions: Kinda true, kinda false
There are simply decisions. It’s context that makes them good or bad.
Better information yields better decision making: True
Absolutely.
Better knowledge yields better decision making:True
Out of all 6 steps, Determining causes of the problem is the most important step in organizational problem solving. The blog questions state that there are “2 new steps before determining the cause” I’m not quite sure if that’s a reference to presenting the problem and reframing the problem. However presentation of the problem and reframing the problem certainly makes a lot of sense. It’s important to present the problem and then to look at the problem from a different angle in order to properly define the problem. Once a problem is properly defined only then can you attack it’s root cause.
Understanding & Supporting Decision Making
The underlying idea of naturalistic decision making is the notion that “how people make decisions begins with observation, and not testing hypothesis drawn from mathematical and statistical theories.” Essentially naturalistic decision-making deals with intuition and how that shapes the decision making process. According to the research provided naturlisitc decision-making rarely compares options (less than 5% of the time actually). The Naturilistic decision-making camp looks at the traditional model of decision making (hypothesis-expirement-theory etc) is too narrow of a way to describe true scientific thinking.
What data mining can’t do
The “more is not better” has to do with the fundamental idea of data mining: and that is that data mining is based upon understanding the “radomness” of human behavior by using fairly basic probability distributions. So, when it comes to data warehousing more is not necessarily better because sometimes all of that additional data can be a bit of a red herring and can capture more of the random idiosyncrasies of human behavior which can then make the data too muddied and much more difficult to draw conclusions.
Reflection questions:
“Is there a difference between decision making and problem solving?”
I believe yes there very much is a difference between decision making and problem solving. Decision making, as seen in the naturalistic article, often times can be based on intuition and quick thinking. While this has many positivies, it also has many negatives when it comes to problem solving. As we saw in the action learning article there are many steps involved in adequately solving a problem, with defining the root cause as the most important. Often times in decision making processes defining, framing, and finding root cause isn’t determined nor are they often thought about.
True or False:
There are good decisions, and there are bad decisions: Kinda true, kinda false
There are simply decisions. It’s context that makes them good or bad.
Better information yields better decision making: True
Absolutely.
Better knowledge yields better decision making:True
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Week 4: Readings
Week 3 was an off week for articles.. here is a summary of Week 4's readings:
Many forms of e-collaboration
The author presents the many different ways to build a collaborative work place. At the beginning of the article he outlines the three fundamentals of collaborative tools. They are
• A way to communicate
• A mechanism to share documents
• Some means to discover other members of the community
He then goes on to discuss when your office or working group needs an online collaboration tool. He outlines three of the most common tasks that an online collaboration tool can help manage more effectively. They are:
• Manage the control and access to your materials
• Track what was posted when and who has reviewed it
• Make your project debriefing meeting based on a record of what happened during the project life cycle
He also discussed how online collaboration tools can help make your team more effective and efficient by having a centralized repository of documents and information so a team doesn’t have to go searching in multiple places.
Finally a comprehensive list of types of collaborative tools were listed. I was familiar with all of them so I will only list them. Some of the types discussed were:
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Portals
• Groupware
• Discussion Boards
• Instant Messaging
• And of course… email
Finally the article discussed the importance of defining the r requirements your team has in order to choose the correct collaborative technology. The major requirements were:
• How frequently do people need to communicate?
• What types of communication is preferred – asynch vs. synch
• What access is need to previous communications
• How often do groups want to share documents and other digital objects?
7 Things you should know about Wikis
This is simple to summarize. Here are the seven things:
1. What is it (a collaborative page that can be viewed and updated by members of a community)
2. Who’s doing it? (basically, everyone who needs to)
3. How does it work? (over view of the technology )
4. Why is it significant? (it’s a powerful and flexible collaborative tool)
5. What are the Downsides? (integrity of info. Structure can be challenging. Collaborative bias)
6. Where is it going? (article states they show great potential)
7. What are the implications teaching and learning? (Focuses on the educational use of wikis)
Grassroots KM
This is a very interesting Gartner article on KM in the enterprise and looks at current trends and makes future predictions of KM in enterprise. Basically the article notes a trend (as of it’s writing in 2003) of enterprises moving away from large enterprise controlled KMS’s to “grassroots” KMS’s run by individual business units inside an enterprise. The idea is that each business unit might have individual needs for a KMS solution and therefore one large KMS in the enterprise might not suit their needs, however multiple different KMS’s across an organization may help each individual until maximize their KM needs. The article goes on to predict that this trend will continue over time and that enterprises will start to encourage each business until to have it’s own KMS solution.
Personal toolkit
This article was moderately helpful. The real key to the article was the chart that laid out different types of technologies that can be helpful for different needs and uses. The chart was arranged by principles, processes, values, skills, and tools. The different principles listed were: accessing, evaluating, organizing, analyzing, conveying, collaborating, andsecuring,
IEEE Spectrum Wikipeida review
The IEEE article outlines how Wikipedia works and how relevant and accurate its information is or could be. To me the major finding was in the Brittanica vs. Wikipedia showdown. A study done by the journal Nature discovered 3 errors per Brittanica article and 4 per Wikipedia article. However the IEEE article goes on to caution to not just flat out trust a wikipedia post, it does mention that Wikipedia can be quite useful.
For me personally I’ve found Wikipedia to be a great first step/resource. I think the greatest strength is in it’s references section. Often times Wikipedia can point me to a great list of references about a topic, which can help me to further learn about it instead of me trying to compile all of the information myself.
Many forms of e-collaboration
The author presents the many different ways to build a collaborative work place. At the beginning of the article he outlines the three fundamentals of collaborative tools. They are
• A way to communicate
• A mechanism to share documents
• Some means to discover other members of the community
He then goes on to discuss when your office or working group needs an online collaboration tool. He outlines three of the most common tasks that an online collaboration tool can help manage more effectively. They are:
• Manage the control and access to your materials
• Track what was posted when and who has reviewed it
• Make your project debriefing meeting based on a record of what happened during the project life cycle
He also discussed how online collaboration tools can help make your team more effective and efficient by having a centralized repository of documents and information so a team doesn’t have to go searching in multiple places.
Finally a comprehensive list of types of collaborative tools were listed. I was familiar with all of them so I will only list them. Some of the types discussed were:
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Portals
• Groupware
• Discussion Boards
• Instant Messaging
• And of course… email
Finally the article discussed the importance of defining the r requirements your team has in order to choose the correct collaborative technology. The major requirements were:
• How frequently do people need to communicate?
• What types of communication is preferred – asynch vs. synch
• What access is need to previous communications
• How often do groups want to share documents and other digital objects?
7 Things you should know about Wikis
This is simple to summarize. Here are the seven things:
1. What is it (a collaborative page that can be viewed and updated by members of a community)
2. Who’s doing it? (basically, everyone who needs to)
3. How does it work? (over view of the technology )
4. Why is it significant? (it’s a powerful and flexible collaborative tool)
5. What are the Downsides? (integrity of info. Structure can be challenging. Collaborative bias)
6. Where is it going? (article states they show great potential)
7. What are the implications teaching and learning? (Focuses on the educational use of wikis)
Grassroots KM
This is a very interesting Gartner article on KM in the enterprise and looks at current trends and makes future predictions of KM in enterprise. Basically the article notes a trend (as of it’s writing in 2003) of enterprises moving away from large enterprise controlled KMS’s to “grassroots” KMS’s run by individual business units inside an enterprise. The idea is that each business unit might have individual needs for a KMS solution and therefore one large KMS in the enterprise might not suit their needs, however multiple different KMS’s across an organization may help each individual until maximize their KM needs. The article goes on to predict that this trend will continue over time and that enterprises will start to encourage each business until to have it’s own KMS solution.
Personal toolkit
This article was moderately helpful. The real key to the article was the chart that laid out different types of technologies that can be helpful for different needs and uses. The chart was arranged by principles, processes, values, skills, and tools. The different principles listed were: accessing, evaluating, organizing, analyzing, conveying, collaborating, andsecuring,
IEEE Spectrum Wikipeida review
The IEEE article outlines how Wikipedia works and how relevant and accurate its information is or could be. To me the major finding was in the Brittanica vs. Wikipedia showdown. A study done by the journal Nature discovered 3 errors per Brittanica article and 4 per Wikipedia article. However the IEEE article goes on to caution to not just flat out trust a wikipedia post, it does mention that Wikipedia can be quite useful.
For me personally I’ve found Wikipedia to be a great first step/resource. I think the greatest strength is in it’s references section. Often times Wikipedia can point me to a great list of references about a topic, which can help me to further learn about it instead of me trying to compile all of the information myself.
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