Think Outside the (Search) Box
Power Enterprise Search with Knowledge

Enterprises are drowning in unstructured information, and search can help employees get the specific facts they need to do their job, wasting less time hunting for information and resolving problems that have already been solved. IDC estimates that fruitless searching costs companies more than $5,000 per worker per year¹.

There is a catch. The best search engine in the world won’t find content that doesn’t exist. To be truly valuable, enterprise search must be paired with capabilities for capturing, maintaining and continuously improving the content that it serves.

Enterprise search demands effective KM: search alone isn’t enough.

Success Factors
We take a starkly pragmatic view of knowledge management: it’s the set of practices and enabling technology required to provide searchers the information they’re looking for. It comprises four necessary activities: search, capture, maintenance and continuous improvement.

1. Search designed for users and their tasks. Needless to say, if the content is there, search needs to find it. Briefly, here’s how to tell if search is really designed for its users:

• It works for different user types and search techniques. Some users enter one or two search terms; others enter precise text strings; others ask questions. Search engines that rely on a single technology trick, such as natural language search, are stymied when given a two-word noun phrase.
• It avoids dead ends. Search is an iterative process. Search engines that return results and then stand mute, waiting for a new query, are not only ineffective—they’re rude.
• It guides people to more than content. When users ask how to apply for a loan or reset a password, they don’t really want a document that tells them how to do it—they just want their loan or their password. Effective search uses a combination of rules and system integration to become an intelligent entry point to all the services users require.

2. Painless knowledge capture. Knowledge workers generate content all the time. We write email and IMs effortlessly, but struggle with formal documentation. The good news is, formal isn’t required—or even desirable. Consider a user who can’t open a new Microsoft Office document in her older version of Office. Formal documentation would be hard to write, and among all the text, the answer could be hard to find.

A better approach is a simple structured solution:

Problem: Can’t open .docx, .pptx and .xlsx files

Environment: Microsoft Office versions prior to Office 2007

Cause: Microsoft introduced new XML-based file formats

Resolution: Download and install the Open XML File Converter:

• Windows: http://tinyurl.com/2bsvhf
• Mac: http://tinyurl.com/dm7xny

Content like this is easily skimmed and the action to be taken is crystal clear. It’s easier to write, too. It covers the topic in only 47 words, and most of the lines aren’t even complete sentences. This format is so easy to write that people, with a little practice, can generate it in the process of figuring out and communicating the answer—"capture in the workflow"² takes no extra time!

This implies that knowledge must be integrated with other tools used by knowledge workers. In particular, case tracking applications used by customer service and support organizations should be seamlessly integrated to make knowledge capture a painless byproduct of taking careful case notes.

3. Integrated maintenance and improvement. Experienced organizations know that knowledge maintenance is the hardest task. It takes many hands to keep content fresh. Three approaches make it practical:

• Make content quality everyone’s job. It’s tempting to hire a content team to keep your knowledge up-to-date, but the real experts are those who captured it in the first place. If it’s clear that the quality of the content they use is their responsibility, they’ll do their part.
• Evolve content as it’s being used. If all knowledge users review content as they use it, only content that’s being used is reviewed. Also, who better to find problems in content than someone who is in the middle of using it?
• Make it easy to move from reader to editor. Technology often puts enormous barriers between reading and updating content. Users have to leave their search results, open a new window, log in to an authoring module, find the document again, open it and make edits, submit it to a publication workflow... no wonder people won’t do it. What’s needed is to let every entitled user easily switch into edit mode—with one click—make changes, and be done.

4. Analytics for continuous improvement. If we can deliver knowledge through search, capture it in the workflow, review and improve it through use, then only one task remains: continuously improve. The key is to have the necessary data to target our improvements.

To improve search, we need reporting that can help us track and answer the following questions:

• How often are users finding the information they’re looking for? What topics are of particular interest to users?
• Is search generating an ROI? Is it shortening the time required to accomplish tasks? Is it avoiding cases?

To improve our ability to capture and improve knowledge, and to encourage our users to do so, we need to know different things:

• Where are our content gaps?
• How often are individuals contributing knowledge? How often is that knowledge being used? What kind of feedback is it receiving?
• Which pieces of knowledge are being reused most and who contributed them? What knowledge is so high-value that it could benefit from additional investment?

Often, tools report basic activity rather than the information needed to truly optimize the business. Our advice: start with the questions first, figure out what data is necessary to answer them and then define the reporting requirements.

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Consona CRM (formerly KNOVA and Onyx) offers companies with vital and multi-faceted customer relationships, or companies offering complex or technical products and services, a wide range of fully integrated KM and CRM software applications that span customer service and support, sales and marketing. More than 1,300 customers spanning more than 50 industries worldwide are using Consona CRM solutions to manage process efficiencies, drive revenue, increase customer satisfaction and enable unique and extraordinary customer experiences. For more information, visit www.consona.com/crm

1 "The Hidden Costs of Information Work," IDC, April 2006, Document #201334

2 "Capture in the workflow" and other principles described here are defined by Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS), Consortium for Service Innovation, www.serviceinnovation.org