Best Practices for Knowledge Management: Pre-Implementation
by Kent Heyman

What you do before you actually implement your knowledge management solution is crucial to your success. Here are some pre-implementation steps to help ensure your implementation process flows smoothly, with minimal interruption to your business and employees.

Locate your knowledge sources
Most companies, no matter their size, have ineffectual knowledge repositories scattered throughout departments. Usually limited to single business silos, these sources are often stored in binders, on network drives, on Web sites, and even on sticky notes. Sometimes, the knowledge pieces are stored only inside employees’ heads, where it’s unlikely to be shared with anyone.

Before you implement a KM solution, you must uncover these sources. This also helps you identify the types of information that you should include in the knowledge base. It’s important to identify project champions -- employees who will help you find the knowledge sources, evaluate the usefulness of that knowledge, and ensure that the knowledge is suitable for the initiative.

Within most organizations, there are certain people who are the keepers of knowledge. Many times, finding a source of knowledge is as simple as knowing who to ask about a particular problem. While that sounds simple, asking team members and getting them to share their knowledge can be challenging. Employees are often the most difficult sources to document; perhaps they feel that sharing what they know will make them expendable, or that their knowledge on any given subject is what makes them unique.

For example, one of our customers needed to overcome two internal issues when they decided to implement their KM initiative – knowledge possessiveness and knowledge creation. First, the company’s agents were concerned that their job security would be diminished if they had to share their knowledge with the team. Second, the company had a great deal of unrelated knowledge sources in addition to the knowledge that stored in their agents’ heads. These situations are common when implementing any type of new system, which leads us to our second pre-implementation best practice: corporate culture.

Know your corporate culture
Understanding your corporate culture is perhaps the most critical success criteria for a KM initiative. Everything from staff cuts to M&A to tightened budgets to rapid growth has an impact on the loyalty that an employee base shows to its employer. When employees leave their jobs or change departments, they take what they know with them. Because a KM system encourages the sharing of knowledge amongst employees, it helps buffer the loss of knowledge.

There are several factors to fully understanding your corporate culture and the impact the new KM system will have on it. You must know how your organization identifies and solves problems. If not through a central knowledge base, how do agents come up with answers? Is it through trial and error? How are the answers validated? How are they shared with others? Do agents collaborate? Do they rely on chat or email?

Employees, particularly those who have been with a company for a while, tend to resist change so you have to consider the agents’ work style, language, attitude, and personalities; then develop a thorough and formal process for rolling out the KM system to agents and the rest of the company. These steps will help you encourage the usage of and contribution to the system.

Conduct a knowledge audit
The first step in actually implementing your KM solution is conducting a knowledge audit that assesses your company’s individual knowledge needs and existing knowledge sources. The audit is critical to determining your level of readiness and establishing goals. When preparing for an audit, one of the most important steps is to determine how your agents solve problems. Be sure that your company is ready to create a formal process to manage the knowledge. Processes are necessary to ensure that the knowledge's meaning is unambiguous and sound. This process doesn’t have to be multi-faceted or difficult; it just needs to conform to the way your company organizes and uses knowledge.

Secure management buy-in and support
When adding new technology or business processes, executives are usually concerned with ROI and TCO metrics. They want to know how the initiative will improve efficiency, increase productivity, and reduce operating costs. Therefore, KM champions must be prepared to educate the executive team regarding the system's ability to save the company money.

This process doesn’t have to be difficult. As long as the average cost per service transaction is known (i.e. the cost per phone call or e-mail transaction), you can determine how a KM initiative can reduce the cost per transaction. For example, Web self-service solutions can reduce a company's transaction costs to pennies. Your vendor’s KM consultants should be able to help you with your ROI and TCO requirements.

Identify integration needs
The final recommendation in our list of best practices focuses on integration. Most companies that consider a KM system have applications that support their support centers or IT help desks. Applications like call-tracking systems, IVR systems, and e-mail or remote diagnostic systems. As a result, integrating these existing applications with the KM system is almost always necessary.

To ensure you can integrate applications, your KM system should be based on an open architecture that allows for this integration. It’s important to choose a vendor that has a track record of integration success using your company’s existing technologies. Since KM implementations affect current business processes, you need a plan for how your business will adapt to the integration with reporting and/or measurements systems.

About the author
Kent Heyman is President and CEO, ServiceWare Technologies, Inc., a provider of web-based knowledge management solutions for customer service and support. www.serviceware.com.