There’s a Crisis in the Workplace
If workers showed up two hours late each day, we’d read them the riot act. If they stopped working on Mondays, we’d fire them. But in effect, this is exactly what’s happening: research shows that 20% to 30% of the average knowledge worker’s day is wasted, searching for knowledge [1]. And how much more time is wasted recreating the wheel…solving problems or answering questions that have already been resolved by someone else?
The Cost of Failed KM
All around the enterprise, we see people wasting time on frustrating, pointless tasks:
- Product managers re-answering the same product functionality questions from account managers and sales engineers
- HR advisors interpreting benefits policies for employees over and over
- Professional services staff re-writing the same RFP answers in proposals, or not benefiting from their colleagues’ experiences in client engagements
- Procure to pay staff struggling to communicate procedures to fellow employees and vendors
- Legal teams writing and re-writing contract language
- IT Service Desk agents re-solving problems that have already been solved
- Product development and data center operations staff getting interrupted with questions about known issues
Where do you see wasted effort in your job function?
Why Hasn’t Knowledge Management Worked?
We’ve known about this problem for some time. So why haven’t we fixed it? Search and content management vendors say we just need better technology. But if knowledge isn’t current, useful, and easy to find, it doesn’t matter what technology you use. Knowledge management consultants say we just need to be more disciplined about documenting, reviewing, and carefully meta-tagging content. But these exhortations fall flat in the real world, where everyone has a day job with urgent demands, and no time to do extra KM work. So we’ve deployed technology, we’ve hired knowledge managers, and yet the content we have is
- Incomplete
- Hard to find
- Out of date
- Not written for the actual users
- Of questionable accuracy
…in short, it’s an inconsistent mess. Maybe what we need is a new way of thinking about knowledge—one that makes capturing, structuring, reusing, and improving knowledge simply a part of people’s day jobs, with little or no extra effort. And one that rewards and recognizes employees for the knowledge they share, not just the knowledge they have. Fortunately, that way of thinking exists: Knowledge Management, based on KCS℠, Knowledge-Centered Support.
KCS for the enterprise: Applying a Proven Knowledge Management Approach to the Rest of the Enterprise
For more than 20 years, technical support organizations have been taking advantage of a powerful idea: they capture and structure knowledge while they’re working on problems (not as a separate task), they reuse existing knowledge to avoid rework, they share knowledge with their customers, and they improve knowledge as they use it. For them, knowledge management isn’t a separate job: it’s how they do their job. KCS has delivered remarkable results:
- Customers solving their own problems without needing to ask for help
- Dramatically shortened ramp-up speed for employees
- A single, up-to-date source of truth that makes support tasks more efficient
Now DB Kay has adapted the proven KCS principles to the rest of the enterprise.
Learn How Commonsense Knowledge Can Work For You
Get the tools to make Commonsense Knowledge work for your organization. In our three-day, hands-on, interactive workshop, you’ll learn:
- The nuts and bolts of integrating knowledge into your job function
- How to keep content quality without review queues
- What technology you need—and how to best use the tools you already have
- How to measure Commonsense Knowledge and prove the benefit
- How to drive the culture change required for effective knowledge
Register today! [1] McKinsey says employees spend 1.8 hours per day, 9.3 hours per week searching and gathering information. Interact puts the cost at 19.8% of business time. IDC says it’s 30% of the workday. Whichever numbers you believe, it’s too much.
