have used five or more systems for employee-facing knowledge totals 15 percent, while 11 percent said five or more systems had been used for customer-facing knowledge.
Having done many KM training classes and implementations, and advised hundreds of companies on improving KM over the years, I can tell you that technology is rarely the problem when a KM program goes off the rails. The single biggest reason for the failure of knowledge management initiatives is a lack of content maintenance. Most projects get off to a successful start, with good results after a few months and a strong library of content after the first year. Unfortunately, all too often, the project then loses focus, with project drivers moving on to new initiatives, and both budget and resources cut in years two and three. When constant content maintenance does not occur, the knowledge quickly becomes filled with stale, outdated, and duplicate content. When employees or customers search the knowledge base and find mostly garbage, they stop using the system.
Before implementing a new KM technology, make sure your long-term content maintenance processes are in place or you will very likely be implementing a new solution in two to three years.
Crowdsourcing Knowledge Management
Today's highly connected customers follow you on Facebook and Twitter, join your online communities, and take advantage of ideation Web sites to submit product ideas, and vote on what enhancements they want to see in the next release. These customers also want to have a direct impact on your knowledge base. The survey asked, "How do you involve external customers in the knowledge creation process?"
Though nearly half of companies, 48 percent, currently do not involve customers in the knowledge creation process in any way, many have begun to embrace various approaches. The most direct approach, used by 15 percent of respondents, is offering a "tribal" knowledge base, sort of an online wiki for customers to add knowledge articles as well as edit or submit comments on existing articles. More indirect approaches include allowing customers to "like" content, used by 34 percent of companies, and accepting customer comments on knowledge base articles, used by 31 percent of companies.
Companies that have embraced crowdsourcing knowledge are usually surprised at the strong and insightful information customers provide. As users of the products, customers have a unique insight to add to your internally developed content. With so many companies struggling to maintain employee participation in submitting knowledge, why not leverage customers willing to pitch in?
A big thanks to everyone who responded to the KM survey. Wishing all you a happy holiday season, and a successful and knowledge-enabled 2015!