Staying Fit with a KM Health Check
In a previous post “Knowledge Management: How Do I Know I’m Doing It Right?” we explored some of the key outcomes one should see evolving from good KM. We’ve also explored benefits and new capabilities for customers, employees and the organization itself.
So now, how do we know we are doing it right, and how do we identify and address the most important things to improve when our KM system doesn’t seem to enable all the value we seek?
One of the biggest pitfalls in knowledge management is “taking your eye off the KM ball” as your business, stakeholders, products and services change. It’s easy for a KM initiative to slowly sink in focus as other urgent priorities and changes consume attention.
This can manifest itself in:
- Less adoption by users than expected
- Low re-use of knowledge assets
- Poor feedback on the quality of the content or the search experience
- Unclear or even misleading performance metrics on the effectiveness of the system.
Given that effective knowledge management requires a holistic set of organizational capabilities, determining and addressing root causes can be a challenge. Often it can be a combination of factors, such as:
- Poorly edited, outdated or complex content
- Weak search and browse results—poorly tagged or tuned filters and terms
- Unclear or under-resourced authoring/editing practices
- Lack of clarity and engagement with support agents to use their tools effectively
- Little or no governance or metrics to guide and keep focus on the system and content.
Sometimes these factors overlap and impact each other. For example, poor content may be what drives poor search results. Lack of effective engagement/training techniques can directly impact adoption. Or, some topic areas may simply perform well, while others don’t. Figuring out what to do, and what to focus on first, can be challenging.
One approach proven to work effectively in assessing and addressing these issues is to execute a KM Health Check. The health check is a quick survey of the key elements of a KM domain:
- User Experience: search and browse results, agent feedback
- Content Quality: sampling content against specific criteria
- KM System Health: knowledge tool capability analysis
- Program assessment of governance, metrics and culture.
The results of the initial analysis can be collated to provide a “KM Scorecard” that indexes KM capabilities. These scores can be used to identify where the issues and opportunities are in a KM environment to help facilitate quick, effective action by the organization.
Scoring in these areas also provides a benchmark to measure improvement to confirm the impact or evolution of the program over time in future follow-up checks.
Support organizations don’t have a lot of time to spend checking all aspects of their KM system on a continuous basis. The Health Check approach provides a measurable, efficient framework with clear, actionable outcomes to keep organizations on track with their goals.
It’s also valuable to have third-party experts provide an outside perspective on issues or factors you may not be aware of. We offer the Health Check service to our customers as a way to help them get the most out of their KM technology, content and program investments.
The post Staying Fit with a KM Health Check appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.
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