Taking the leap: Migrating to a new platform
Bloomfire is a KM platform designed to transform how employees create and store information to do their jobs through knowledge capture and sharing. The platform has made effective use of the convergence of AI, enterprise search, and KM. “We leverage AI for automation and search, both to create content and find it,” commented Anderson. AI is also used to enable natural language inquiries and provide answers derived from the validated content of the knowledgebase.
The need for high-quality metrics is a motivator for some organizations to seek a new KM platform. “Leadership wants reporting capabilities from the KM platform to show the value of the tool,” Anderson continued. “Engagement metrics, time savings, and ways of identifying knowledge gaps—what is being searched for and not found—are all topics of interest to management.” Some platforms may not have the reporting capabilities needed to provide the desired feedback.
The guidelines for migration are the same from the vendor perspective as from a third-party migration team. “Our main recommendation is that organizations assemble a group of representative stakeholders from every part of the organization for alignment,” said Anderson. “Also, clean up your data, and focus on the end user rather than the knowledge manager when determining how to organize it in the new platform.”
Best practices that Anderson points to include leveraging whatever structural elements are in the new platform, such as the ability to generate data categories and identifying necessary silos when access should be limited. “When you map information from the old tool to the new one, don’t think just in terms of content but also processes such as ownership or approvals. Don’t just layer the old process over the new one. Either find a tool that fits your existing workflows or revise the workflows to take full advantage of the tool’s features.” More broadly, the new system should not try to emulate the old one. “Focus on the goals of the user experience, rather than on trying to replicate the old system exactly. Then provide the necessary training and support to help users adjust,” Anderson concluded.
Focus on the user
When user adoption is so low that the value of a software solution is not being realized, it’s time to think about user friendliness and a new platform. KnowledgeOwl was designed to support software teams in building, managing, and sharing information in public and private knowledgebases for customer help centers, software documentation, and internal policies and procedures. A motivation for establishing the company was the founder’s belief that existing products were not friendly enough nor sufficiently cost competitive.
When selecting a new platform, organizations typically test it to be sure it meets technical requirements, but user response is sometimes overlooked and insufficiently tested in advance. KnowledgeOwl incorporates the user-friendly features that have helped make it popular. For example, the default user interface is visual and engaging. According to Veronica Calvage, customer success lead at the company, “KnowledgeOwl is also very customizable; developers have access to HTML code and CSS, so the interface can be designed to meet user needs.”