If you spend much
time following news and community sites that focus on content and knowledge
management topics like I do, you've probably noticed the increased talk about
"next generation portals" that take advantage of the latest social
tools and machine learning capabilities. We really are moving into a
"golden age" of collaboration, in my view, with incredibly powerful
capabilities that learn from our activities and provide very personal
experiences. However, even these new platforms and technologies will fail if
organizations do not focus their plans around 3 key strategies:
- The capture of content
- The application of context
- The correlation of disparate artifacts
Aside from my
exercise in alliteration, these 3 strategies are all-important to your efforts
to ensure that your corporate knowledge is captured from the minds of your
knowledge workers (many of whom will be retiring in the not-so-distant-future);
appropriate metadata and other information architecture are applied to make
that knowledge searchable and, more importantly, findable; and it is then
assembled in a way that can be discovered, assembled, and applied in a way that
allows you to innovate.
While working with a
client in Perth, Australia last fall on go to market strategies for their
software platform, we discussed at length some of the problems they see with
customers almost every day -- chief among these problems, the issue of key
knowledge walking out the door each year as their workforce ages. The company, Glyma, provided me with some interesting data on
the subject, like the fact that of the 155 million people in the US workforce,
over 79 million of them (around 51%) are baby boomers nearing retirement.
Knowing this, our approach to capturing and retaining this knowledge has not
changed much in the past 25 years, even with all of our technical advances. We
have these experts create documentation explaining the key business processes
they own.
I remember joining
Pacific Bell (the telephone company) back in the mid-1990s and being handed a
massive 3-ring binder which, I was told, contained all of our key business
processes, policies, and procedures. While I occasionally opened that binder to
figure out some policy (usually at the request of a manager to "look it up
myself") it largely sat on my shelf and gathered dust. But how different
is that binder from the electronic media we collect, archive, and then forget?
And how easy is it to apply metadata, taxonomy, and other information
architecture components to that content (all things which can change regularly
as your business changes)? Furthermore, as new projects and business problems
arise, are you able to utilize all of that stored wisdom in a way that allows
you to reduce project delivery times, reduce project costs, and increase the
scope and scale of innovation?
Back to the idea of
next generation portals, and why I think we are embarking on a new golden age,
consider the solutions we now have (or will soon have) across the 3 key
strategies I outline above:
- Capture.
We have tools that not only scan your paper records, but read what is
scanned and store both image and content (text) giving you multiple ways
to consume that content. But we also live in an increasingly paperless
world where almost everything we do online can be stored for later recall.
- Context.
Not only can our platforms read through and understand what is in our
content, these latest tools can identify metadata and automate actions
based on what they identify. So whether an artifact is scanned and saved,
a picture is taken with a mobile phone, a document is uploaded, or a form
is filled out in a browser -- all of these are captured and then given
context through automated and manual tagging, through our social
interactions, and based on the patterns of activity of you, your team, and
others within the system. The more you interact with the artifacts, the
more the system learns, and the more accurate the context applied.
- Correlation.
This one is the most difficult to automate, but is made possible
through capture and context.
Correlation is not just about identifying similarities between artifacts, but in finding insights through the patterns. It’s the ultimate
goal of any knowledge management or collaboration platform: learn from the
past to innovate for the future.
The underlying
technologies to make these 3 key strategies a part of your KM platform exist
today, and are increasingly pre-packaged and available through a SaaS
model. These solutions offer a way to
escape the constant drain of knowledge and expertise as people move on or
retire. No matter what platform you use, review how you approach each of these
strategies today. With a clear picture of your current system and its many
gaps, you'll be better prepared to take advantage of these new technologies in
the future.