Knowledge
management (KM) platforms need to embrace employees' use of mobile
devices and give employees several ways to find the information they
want and to share it with each other, some KM experts recommend.
New KM systems embrace
employee access through smartphones and tablets, and they allow
employees to share data and access information and training through a
variety of methods, including e-learning and connecting with internal
experts, KM experts said this week at the KMWorld
conference in Washington, D.C.
Access Anytime, Anywhere
Employees "want to access
their information anywhere, anytime," said Dianne Berry, senior
vice president of market strategy at enterprise search vendor Coveo.
"The difficult thing about that is, it's not just their
information. It’s information about your company and information
outside your company."
KM can be a balancing
act between capturing institutional knowledge and sharing the
right information with the right employees at the right time, Berry
said. Companies want "sales insight, marketing insight,
services insight, product insight, risk insight," she said.
"It's all important."
But relevance
is also important, she said. Employees don't need a fire hose of
information, but they need to find specific information to help with
specific needs.
Companies want to capture
internal knowledge, but "what's important is relevance,"
she said. "Relevance is the new currency in business today."
In a digital workplace, "we
need to connect everybody with everything, but only as it's relevant
to their context," she added.
Employees Need Options
Companies setting up KM
platforms should give employees plenty of options, said Kathy Bries,
senior director of learning at Cisco Systems. Cisco's internal
knowledge sharing and training platform, which the company rolled out
as an external product earlier this year, embraces mobile access and
features traditional instructor-led classes, on-demand e-learning,
and personalized training.
The platform also focuses on
identifying internal experts and connecting their expertise with
other employees, she said. When retraining employees, "you
need to be able to spot who are the big influencers out there,"
Bries added.
Cisco's knowledge sharing and
learning platform also includes a social media element, she said.
"It's almost like a virtual water cooler," she added.
Integrating the Front Line
For many companies, a big
problem is capturing knowledge from front-line employees who interact
with customers, said Phil Verghis, CEO and co-founder of Klever, a
company providing knowledge management and knowledge sharing tools,
training and coaching.
Verghis used tech support as
an example. The overworked, often-yelled-at tech support employees
often know best about customer attitudes, but at many companies, tech
support knowledge isn’t shared as widely as it should be, he said.
And in cases where products
like software are changing frequently, companies need to do better at
capturing tech support knowledge in real time and allowing employees
to add to that knowledge, he said.
A central question in KM is
what employees can do to make the information better, he said. "Every
time somebody sees a piece of information, how do they make it better
for the next person?" he said. "It's not just about finding
a document, it's what you do with it."
Source
| http://www.cmswire.com
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Khaitan
& Co
No comments:
Post a Comment