ABSTRACT
If your organization is losing valuable knowledge due to staff retirement, staff moving to other departments, or staff dismissed for a variety of reasons, then your organization has a strong case for the implementation of a knowledge management (KM) strategy. Specifically, if your organization is experiencing any of the following scenarios then it has a strong case to implement a KM program or at the very least initiate a KM project to address these needs.
Scenario 1: Customer service representatives respond to customers and/or potential customer inquiries with inconsistent and oftentimes incorrect answers.
For interacting with your customers, the information in your organization can be transformed into useful and actionable knowledge to address customer inquiries and provide them with what they need to know at the right time and the right context.
Customer-facing activities include
Providing knowledge to customer support representatives in response to customer inquiries.
Providing FAQs to customers related to the products, services, and other aspects about the organization via self-help options/functionality.
Knowledge is also provided through help modules accessed by the customer usually through the organization’s website, and/or through web-based chat or click-to-call capabilities.
Scenario 2: Your organization has a need to address employee/associate knowledge needs:
Knowledge provided here reflects the need for employees to access key knowledge holders in the organization to answer questions, collaborate on problems/issues, and/or provide content.
The knowledge in this space often resides in the minds of individual workers (tacit knowledge). In addition, there exist a myriad of artifacts, which include but are not limited to, lesson learned, standard operating procedures, guidelines, templates, tips and techniques, spreadsheets, presentation files, videos, and graphics (explicit knowledge) that must be captured to address the individual worker’s knowledge needs.
Scenario 3: Your organization has a need to address corporate operations knowledge needs:
The corporate operations/technical support activities of the firm provide technical solutions to inquiries not only to customers but also to internal knowledge workers (employees) as it pertains to any hardware and/or software being provided by the organization.
The knowledge in this area is reflected by documenting software “bug” solutions, known errors, software patches, issue resolutions, and other specific data concerning the hardware and software configurations in the organization.
Scenario 4: Your organization has a need to bring new product innovations to the marketplace:
The need for KM in this area addresses situations where duplication of effort occurs, not having the right team in place to perform the research to bring the product innovation to market successfully and in a timely manner, always reinventing or starting from “square one,” difficulty locating current and/or historical corporate information/knowledge on a specific topic(s), and expertise leaving the organization creating a knowledge gap (see Chapter 5).
