2011 JanuaryDate Archive

This Knowledge Stuff Isn’t So Hard

By: David Kay 1 Comment
31 Jan
Navy Seals Holding Up A Boat

Photo Credit: Navy Seals, Rennett Stowe. Creative Commons, Some Rights Reserved

You know, we know how to do this knowledge management thing.  We all do it, every day.

  • We learn things—capture knowledge—nearly every time we do something or talk with someone
  • We keep our knowledge current in just the same way.  If we try something and it doesn’t work, we generally try to figure out what went wrong, and we learn better—improve our knowledge—in the process
  • We use our own knowledge all the time.  Generally, we do this by remembering things, or by having what we’ve learned baked in to how we do things.  Sometimes, we look at notes, emails, or books, just to make sure we get it right

In other words, we capture, improve, and reuse knowledge in the workflow of our everyday lives.  We don’t have weekly knowledge reviews where people peer into our skulls to check what we know.  We learn and self-correct as we go.  Maybe it’s not perfect, but it seems to work pretty well, actually.

It’s powerful when we do it ourselves.  Think how powerful it is when we do it as a group.

Resource Roundup

By: David Kay 2 Comments
19 Jan

Sometimes we find so many good things that we can’t help but stand back and let others speak. This is one of those weeks. So, without delay, some links we love.

1. In a recent installment of his Eye on Service blog, John Ragsdale tells a sad story that’s all the sadder because it’s so familiar. Running into technical problems when deploying two Christmas presents, he laments

“I ran into the same problem I have any time I attempt self-help–my problem doesn’t exist in the knowledgebase. It is beyond frustrating. You encounter a problem that many new customers are likely to run into, and there is nothing online to address it. Usually, you can find hundreds–or even thousands–of conversations in a forum about the problem, yet the knowledgebase contains not a single reference to the issue.” (Read more…)

Isn’t it time that we all have a single knowledgebase for internal and external use? And isn’t it time that we use KCS, or some way of making sure it’s up-to-date? This is old news to readers of the DB Kay blog, I trust, but our industry still has a ways to go.

2.  Steve Krug, author of my favorite web usability book Don’t Make Me Think, promised that he’d follow up with a more detailed book on lightweight, DIY usability testing.  Nine years later, here it is:  Rocket Surgery Made Easy. If you have anything to do with a web self-service site, or any other web experience, please buy and read these books immediately.  Oh, and while I’m recommending books about the web, check out the wonderful Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish, who provides practical and interesting coverage of the KCS topic “complete thoughts, not complete sentences.”

3.  Finally, Social Success, our paper on social support, has been published by the Consortium for Service Innovation.  This summarizes several meetings’ worth of insights from Cisco, Yahoo!, Lithium, Salesforce, EMC, and many other Consortium team members.  Read the paper…

Communicating KM to Customers: IBM does it right

By: David Kay 1 Comment
4 Jan

Our friends at IBM Information Management just shared a wonderful video they’re using to communicate about their KCS practices to their customer base. Have a look on YouTube.

Some things I love about this video:

  • It’s short.  It gets all the big ideas across in three minutes.  As someone who routinely talks about KCS for three days, I admire this.  And, I feel like I got a behind-the-scenes view of the new way support happens at IBM.
  • It’s concrete.  There are no lofty principles or busy “marketecture” diagrams here; it’s all show-don’t-tell.  Communicating this way looks easy, but it’s not.
  • It has the right style.  It’s professional, but not at all slick.  It looks IBM official, but still very human.  Wouldn’t you like to have Alessandra helping you with your support issue?  I would.
  • It explains WIIFM.  It keeps highlighting what the customer will experience, and why that’s a good thing for them.
  • It has a call to action.  By the end of the video, IBM has convinced me I ought to try the support portal first…oh, and put feedback on their articles. too.

Does your communication plan reach out to customers?  Here’s a great way to do it.  Nice work, IBM!  (HT Mary Ellen Coleman).

ps – speaking of videos, our KCS In Five Minutes just went over 1000 views.  I know that’s technically not “viral,” but if feels pretty good.  Check it out and pass it on if you like it!