3 More Signs Your Business is in Need of Knowledge Management

You might not think knowledge management has anything to do with you. After all, it’s not in your job description. Your job is to solve problems, sell your stuff, market your message, fill in the blank. But have you ever thought about how you have a key role in knowledge management? While your business may have an agenda to push knowledge management enterprise solutions, the key is, you have knowledge. You need knowledge to perform your job. You know how to do something that’s important to the life of your business, nah… many things… that are important to the life of your business. It’s why you have your job, right?

But many businesses are shooting themselves in the foot. Perhaps you identify with one or more of these scenarios.

From an earlier post, I described one of the human resource department’s biggest challenges. HR agents know that happy employees are more likely to stay with the company to grow their career. Having to replace an employee incurs costs of time and money. They could spend several months trying to hire a replacement, plus recruiter costs. Not to mention, additional time training the replacement employee in this new role. These costs could exceed the original employee’s salary five-fold. A better knowledge management system that made career development options and planning  easy to navigate and find opportunities from within could have kept the employee happy enough to remain with the company.

Scenario 1 – The irate customer who can’t get his job done because of something that’s “broken” in your system.

Charles is a customer in a senior position at his company. As one of the company’s oldest employees and nearing retirement, he barely knows how to navigate the PC and surf the web, other than using a few key functions of your company’s software. Today he is having issues with it and he is unable to retrieve several proofs of delivery (POD) from your system. He needs these PODs to counter a dispute claim from one of the large retail customers, and the deadline is coming up in 2 days.

After exhausting his local options, he has to come to your business to get the issue resolved. He goes to your company’s website and tries to find a help page. He is instantly overwhelmed with options – products, services, support, contact, about…. But no help page. Then a strange bubble pops up and asks, “Hi there! How can I help you today?” (Keep in mind, this is is strange stuff to him.. He doesn’t know it’s an automated chatbot.)

Frustrated, he ignores the chat window and clicks to the contact page and finds a phone number. He dials the toll free number. After going through several automated vocal series of “Press 1 for this, press 2 for that” he is put on hold for 20 minutes before he finally reaches Rita, a live operator and one of your company’s tech support staff. He explains his technical situation as best he can, but the support person on the other end is asking seemingly nagging questions. 


Rita: What product are you using?

Charles: What do you mean? I’m using XYZ. You know that.

Rita: And what system are you attempting to connect to?

Charles: I don’t know. I’m using XYZ.

Rita: what’s the URL you are using to connect to the system?

Charles: I don’t know what you are ell is. I don’t memorize these things!

Rita: Do you use a browser and connect to the portal?

Charles: I have no idea what you’re talking about! Your tech guy installed it on my PC last year, and all I had to do was click on the desktop button.

Rita: OK, can you open it up? Do you see a version number on the bottom right?

Charles: One moment…. 7.1.2.

Rita: OK, sir. Are you able to log in?

Charles: I’m already in, but I can’t pull up any PODs.

Rita: OK, can you log out for me, please?

Charles: Why?! I’m already in.

Rita: You still haven’t answered my question about which system you’re using.

Charles: I don’t see why this is important! Look, lady, I need to pull up PODs for a retailer immediately and I’m getting nowhere with this!! Who do I need to call to get this resolved?!!!!

Rita: Sir, please bear with me! I’m trying my best to help you, but I need more specific information from you so I can guide you with the solution.


Even though your company may have a knowledge base accessible through your customer web portal, Charles has no idea it exists. He only knew your company’s main website, but even the main page presented an overwhelming collection of links that it posed a huge obstacle for Charles. He had no idea where to navigate to, even though the customer portal was just a click away. Charles was never trained in what to do in this situation, he was completely lost. A looming deadline only added to his frustration with the technology, and ultimately to anger. 

Charles is so irritated that he is considering having his company switch to a different data storage and retrieval provider because of this experience. It doesn’t matter how good quality your knowledge base is if your customer can’t figure out how to find it and actually use it for self-service.

Scenario 2 – Incompetent tech support, or is it poor documentation?

In a mass digital IT transformation plan to cut costs, your company on-boards several cut-rate offshore contractors to log tickets and perform technical support of your systems. Your highly experienced IT support staff is asked to execute knowledge transfer and training of the newcomers in all their job responsibilities before they are ultimately laid off. After the layoff, several customers complain every single day of the same problems. Service level agreements get missed. Managers are eventually dragged into status meetings and ask for updates as the new support team scrambles to resolve the issue. It happens again and again. Customers are irate. Sales are slipping, and payments are late.

If this kind of issue happened in the past, the former support team was able to resolve it in a matter of minutes, or within a few hours, tops. But now, this is taking days or even weeks to resolve!! The new team documents the problem and write down root causes, but it’s so confusingly written that when the scenario recurs, the same mistakes are repeated.

Your company is paying them overtime to work on fixing the issues, and they are struggling to keep up. Many of them get burned out and quit the job, and the contracting company needs to assign replacements and get them trained. It’s. A. Vicious. Cycle.

Your company’s executives argue these contractors got proper training from the experienced former technical support team, but when it’s time to do it for real, they can’t get their engines started. Why is that? How about that they were never really properly trained. They might have been tested on paper but when the rubber meets the road the truck goes nowhere… or into the ditch.

Knowledge transfer was a fail, and that didn’t show up until they were forced to perform the job on their own. Maybe the former team was lousy at codifying, documentation, testing and teaching, although they always somehow managed to wing it whenever issues occurred. Maybe they just instinctively know. Maybe it’s just dumb luck. Maybe not? But, you’ll never really know because your company laid them off.

Scenario 3 – Even your top rate search engine seems to be broken.

I had this argument with my husband about knowledge management recently. He said a search engine already does a good enough job of being relevant if you choose your keywords correctly. That I’m wasting my time with this knowledge management business. Excuse me!? 

I worked in a company that uses a major search engine to search the company intranet. One day I was looking for any kind of Oracle documentation for end users in the finance department. Initially, I tried to search Oracle in the company web portal and it pulled up 192 records. The vast majority of them contained the words “Enterprise Architecture” and when I accessed these Enterprise Architecture pages, they were mostly of the same dry structure. They looked like technical system architecture documents mass generated by a script, written by an intern or a contractor in the enterprise architecture department. Duh! It certainly didn’t look like anything of use to a finance end user. 

Then I did a search on Oracle -“Enterprise Architecture” (Oracle but without the words Enterprise and Architecture) and it reduced the set to 24 records. Every single one of them came from documents that I had created for my own IT team or for users of our systems; they only happened to contain the word Oracle. They weren’t about how to use Oracle. I was neither in the enterprise architecture team nor a finance end user. There was no documentation whatsoever on how to instruct a finance end user how to use the Oracle system to perform their processing tasks.

There are 3 possibilities I can think of for why this is:

  • The documentation doesn’t exist at all. The knowledge is locked up in people’s brains
  • The documentation exists, but it’s not in the portal. It’s restricted to some internal department. It may be like a scattered jigsaw puzzle… with many pieces missing.
  • The documentation exists in the portal, but it’s not accessible to me because the owners blocked me from accessing it.

As an IT user who might possibly need to support the Oracle system for finance users, I doubt I would be forbidden access to such documentation, which leaves the former two possibilities being more plausible.

Why would a search pull up so many junk results, even with carefully chosen keywords? It’s because other people are putting tons of junk data in there and not carefully controlling the access. Your knowledge base is as only as good as the content you put in it. If you put garbage into it and search for quality bling, guess what you get? Garbage! Or nothing!!

What other examples can you come up with?

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