What I Heard at TSW: KM Culture, Social Knowledge, Gamification, KaaS

Last week was our Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas. It was our biggest conference ever, with over 1,300 attendees. I spent most of Tuesday doing more than a dozen 1:1 meetings with members, answering technology questions, helping them create a short list of possible vendors for a planned technology purchase, or giving them a map of exhibiting partners to visit in the EXPO depending on the problem they were trying to solve. Since my Power Hour session on Monday was about the results of my August knowledge management survey, many of my member meetings were related to KM: what wasn’t working, what they would do differently next time, new technologies to invest in, etc. Based on questions asked during the KM session, and conversations with members and partners afterwards, here are some popular conversation threads I wanted to share with a larger audience.

Culture and KM

In my Power Hour presentation, I opened and closed with a focus on corporate culture and KM, and shared some results from my survey on how respondents rated their corporate culture, from a high of “Leaders set the example and reward knowledge sharing” to a low of “Share any knowledge and others will take credit”. We have very smart members, and Jodi McBride, Director, Knowledge & Content Management, Pitney Bowes Global Client Services, asked if there was any data correlation in the survey results between culture and KM success. Well, I hadn’t even thought about that. This morning I spent a bit of time slicing and dicing, and found a very interesting data story:

As you can see in these charts, I sorted all the KM survey responses into three groups by KM culture scores: poorest KM culture (bottom third), average KM culture (middle third), and strongest KM culture (top third). Then I looked at the average scores for each group for the question “How do you rate your existing KM system?” and it appears that culture plays a big role in how well a company’s KM program is going. For both customer-facing and employee-facing knowledgebases, the stronger the culture, the higher the KBs are rated. This played out in many member conversations, and at this point, I see culture as a primary indicator of KM project success.

Social Knowledge

I’ve had a few eye rolls in the past when discussing crowd sourcing knowledge, but that tide seems to have turned. There was a lot of interest in how to incorporate customers into knowledge creation and sharing, with more companies saying they were using wikis or ‘tribal knowledgebases’ to build and curate a knowledgebase by and for customers (Jive Software, who exhibited at TSW, got a lot of booth traffic around this topic). The most telling story came from Scott Bideau, Regional Sales Manager USA West, Coveo, who also attended my Power Hour session. He said that when companies push back on letting customers create knowledge, he asks them: “How many of you truly know more about your customer than they know about you?” After a bit of soul searching, most companies admit that customers DO know more about them than they know about the customer. So why, if the customer does know so much about you (your products, your employees, your website tools, even your culture), why wouldn’t you want to tap into that expertise? Face it, customers who interact with your products in order to do their jobs have a different and likely deeper understanding of your technology than you ever will. Not taking advantage of that would be very sad indeed.

Gamification

I also received multiple questions about gamification, mostly companies looking for some good examples of how to gamify KM to encourage participation in submitting new articles and maintaining older content. I have to admit I have not always been the biggest fan of this topic, and even once wrote that, regarding gamification, “if the emperor is not naked, he is at least scantily clad.” My issue is that many examples I’ve been given of gamification dashboards and contests have been around for 20 years, and are just being re-labeled. One audience member, Chris Hall, Chief Marketing Officer, Transversal, chided me for my ‘grumpy old man’ attitude on the topic, and said there are some very exciting developments in this area. Send me your best examples, and I will blog about them! The bottom line here is that if gamification can be leveraged to encourage employees to participate in what even I admit can be a tedious process, then I’m all for it. But some good examples would be nice. 😉

Knowledge as a Service

This topic was discussed during my Power Hour, and also in several 1:1 meetings afterwards. I wrote about Knowledge as a Service, or KaaS, earlier this year as a hot KM trend, and I think the topic is getting some real traction. After sharing my survey data on “Rip and Replace,” showing that nearly half of companies were on their 3rd, 4th, 5th or more employee-facing knowledge platform, clearly a lot of service organizations have yet to find KM success, with the technology being a scapegoat for what is almost always a process problem. If companies can outsource calls, maintenance renewals, product testing, etc., to a strategic partner who can do it better, why not  work with experts in knowledge management who can make your KM program a success? One of our KaaS partners, Klever,  exhibited in the EXPO, so hopefully they had some good traffic on this topic.

In addition to these themes, I had multiple conversations about KM staffing, how to kickstart a KM program, and who/how/how often to provide KM training for employees. I also explained the difference between federated search and unified search, and the difference between full text search and natural language search, so many times I finally have a fairly short answer to the question. (Short for me, anyway.)

If you would like more information on the results of my KM survey, I will be doing a free webinar this Friday at 8am PT going over all the content I covered in my Power Hour. Here’s a link to register for the event:  http://www.tsia.com/documents/Knowledge_Management_Industry_Pulse_Session/ 

TSIA members can access a copy of the research report detailing the survey findings here: http://www.tsia.com/documents/The_State_of_Knowledge_Management_2014/ 

If you aren’t a TSIA member, we are making a copy of the report available to all members of the Klever community for a limited time next month, so register now and you will be eligible to download the report:  http://www.getklever.com/Public/Register.aspx 

Thanks everyone who attended my session, scheduled 1:1 meetings, or sent emails about my KM survey results. And as always, thanks for reading.

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Technology Services World: Knowledge Management Content and Exhibitors

Capturing, sharing and maintaining knowledge is always a popular topic at TSIA Conferences, and at our upcoming Technology Services World in Las Vegas, October 20-22, there will be a lot of great content on this hot topic. Our 2nd annual knowledge management survey was completed in August, and I’ll be revealing the findings and publishing the results at the event. I’ve had mulitple inquiries over the last week asking what KM content will be featured at the show, and what exhibitors in the Expo offer knowledge management tools and services, so here’s a peak at KM-releated sessions and exhibitors so you can start planning your time now.

First up are the breakout sessions focusing on knowledge management. For detailed sessions descriptions, see the TSW agenda online.

• Transforming Knowledge Management: Hot KM Trends. In this Power Hour session on Monday at 4:15, I’ll walk through the results of the KM survey, including information on KM across service divisions, and emerging technology areas such as mobility, video, unified search, expertise management, etc.
• Three Months, 300% Productivity Improvement: Transforming Customer Success Using Rapid Knowledge Sharing. Phil Verghis, Klever; Mitchell Spence, Tyler Technologies, Inc. Tuesday, 2:00 PM.
• Using KCS and Discovery Based Consumption Analytics to Generate Proactive Support Deliverables and Guaranteed Customer Outcomes. Rob Baker, Akamai Technologies, Inc. Tuesday, 3:30 PM.
• OK, We’ve Done KCS. What’s Next? David Kay, DB Kay & Associates; Sean Murphy, Riverbed Technology, Inc. Tuesday, 3:30 PM.
• From Knowledge Hoarding to Solve-Once: Aligning Support around a Knowledge Culture. Linda Hartig, Avaya; Dan Pratt, Avaya; Joey Fister, Avaya. Tuesday, 4:45 PM.
• Knowledge: Experience Sharing of KCS Implementation. Nicolas Brunel, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Wednesday, 11:30 AM.

Here’s a look at KM-related partners participating in the Expo:

• Aptean/Knova. Knowledgebase, search
• Coveo. Unified search, expertise management
• DB Kay & Associates. KM and KCS assessment and training
• GeoFluent/Lionbridge. Translation services
• Klever. KM and KCS assessment and training, Knowledge as a Service
• Jive. Employee and customer collaboration, crowdsourcing KM
• LivePerson. Self-service knowledgebase, multi-channel service
• Radialpoint. Knowledge management, search, mobile self-service
• Stone Cobra. KM implementations, assessments, training
• SYSTRAN. Translation services
• Transversal. Knowledgebase, self-service, collaboration
• Verint/Kana. Knowledgebase, self-service, multi-channel, crowdsourcing KM

If you are attending TSW and would like to discuss your KM strategy, I have open slots for 1:1 meetings on Tuesday, 10/21. When you arrive at registration, ask to schedule a 1:1!

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

Finally: A Community for Knowledge Management Best Practices

I’ve been giving advice on knowledge management for support since the mid 1990s, and the list of FAQs about successful KM programs hasn’t changed all that much:

• What staffing levels are required? Dedicated resources? Rotating positions? What skills are required for good knowledge workers?
• How long should it take to publish new content, and how many approvals are normal in a publishing process?
• How do I convince laggards to participate?
• How do I get techs to check the knowledge each time in case something has changed?

Those are just a few of the common challenges I hear from companies again and again. When TSIA first looked at launching an online community platform back in 2006, this was the use case I kept talking about. Everybody seems to struggle with the same issues related to KM, so a discussion forum seemed the perfect vehicle to allow people to post questions and chime in on what worked and didn’t work at their companies. TSIA has many members with very mature knowledge practices, and they are willing to share their expertise at our conferences and on our webcasts, so why not in a discussion forum?

Seven years later, our online community never took off. Most of that blame I place on ourselves, due to issues with tools, focus, staffing, etc. But I still think the use case of collaboration around KM best practices makes sense.

So I was very pleased to checkout the progress of Klever, the new KM think tank offering low cost advisory and coaching services for support knowledge management, the brainchild of Phil Verghis and his impressive team of KM experts. Klever offers *free* assessments of your KM practices, with low cost subscriptions to content and coaching. Currently, the Klever community is free and open to everyone (for now), and you can see threads around topics like creating effective article keywords, KM mission statements, program manager job descriptions, training techniques, key KM related metrics, and more. For only $100, you can signup to be part of the Klever community and have access to all of the content, invitation only webcasts, and can post questions on the forum and interact with Klever’s experts. There is also very low subscription pricing if you want to signup your KM team.

Klever’s motto is “knowledge sharing for all,” and the open, sharing and collaborative feel of the website and participants is refreshing, instead of the usual “we know everything and you don’t” attitude from large consulting groups. So checkout the Klever website, and especially the community, and cough up the $100 and get started. If you’d like more information or a 1:1 conversation with Phil Verghis, he and some of the Klever team will be exhibiting at our upcoming Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas, October 21-23. Hope to see you there!

And as always, thanks for reading!