A client working to justify the expense of coach training asked for a risk assessment of not training her coaches. I thought that was an excellent question. Having given it some thought, here’s my response, captured and shared in the workflow. There are three critical success factors for KCS: Engaged executive sponsorship Measuring the right […]
KCS
From Article Quality to Resolution Quality
A cornerstone KCS quality measure is the Article Quality Index (AQI.) We calculate the AQI by sampling a handful of articles captured by licensed knowledge developers and checking them against an article quality checklist. If you sample five of my articles, and there are ten criteria on the checklist, you’ve checked 50 items. If I […]
Is Your KCS Really KCS?
The good news is, KCS is getting more popular. The bad news is, lots of organizations say they’re doing KCS…but they’re actually doing something different. And, unsurprisingly, they’re not seeing the benefits they expect. Here’s a quick video that you can use to find out if you’re on track with KCS: And, here’s a printable […]
Hanging Up Your Strategic Framework: Sage Does it Right
In our KCS workshops, we say that the Strategic Framework is the deliverable that’s easiest to push aside…and yet one of the most valuable if done right. The Strategic Framework is a simple way of showing the value of KCS to the company, customers, and employees. Executives set high-level objectives for the organization: “scale the […]
Leadership in Action: The KCS Commitment
We wrapped up a KCS design workshop at Carestream Health yesterday. We closed with an exercise I love: the participants spent the last hour presenting what they’d learned, done, and planned to executives. This solidifies the learning, and it’s far more meaningful for executives to hear from the people who will be doing the work […]
New Offerings! (Or, A Blog Post That’s All About Us)
Regular readers of this space know we generally like to talk about the interesting things other people are doing in the world of knowledge management, self-service, and social support. But we’ve been busy working on a number of new offerings, and we wanted to celebrate their launch today. KCS Practices v5 Certification is now part […]
KCS is a Whiteboard
At a recent Consortium for Service Innovation team meeting, Adam Strong of Red Hat said something that really resonated with me: “KCS is a whiteboard.” I knew at once what he meant—and it’s a really powerful way of thinking and talking about KCS. I don’t know about you, but there are few things in life […]
Communicating the What and the Why: Intuit Does it Right
Effective, persistent communication is the cornerstone of KCS. Team members need to be engaged emotionally—to feel like they’re part of a big, important quest—and practically—knowing exactly what they need to do. Rather than saying anything more about this, I’m going get out of the way and let one of our customers show you. […]
Hack Your Knowledgebase
We all hate our knowledgebase tools sometimes. We might like the people we work with at the vendor, and there are those really cool features, but…seriously? I can’t just get a list of all the articles Joe has written? I can’t use bullets without ruining the formatting? I have to hit “publish” three times after […]
2012 Kickoff: What's Happening in KM and KCS
I was going to do a “New Year’s Resolutions for Knowledge Program Managers” blog post, but really, it’s the Tuesday after New Years. Who wants to be nagged? So I decided to highlight some of the things that we think are new and notable in the world of KCS and KM. KCS practitioners get industry […]
