Article on AI Knowledge Management Software

Title: The right KM platform makes time more valuable

Author Tagline: Scott Litman, Co-Founder, Managing Partner and CRO, Lucy

As citizens of an unprecedented information society, we are dependent on good answers. It’s the only way we can work at the level of sophistication and precision that success requires these days. This is true across job titles, departments and industries. And it’s why KM platforms are experiencing such an explosion of interest.

No matter what an organization specializes in, there are certain frustrations that show up across the board. One of the biggest we encounter is frustration at all the time that’s wasted just looking for an answer. 

It’s an intrinsically low-value activity. Just a tedious hurdle people need to jump to get to the basic resources required to start high-value work. In the best-case scenario, the looking task is finished quickly. However, that’s often not the case, particularly for large organizations or for employees seeking answers to complex questions. That low-value looking can stretch from minutes to hours, and even from hours to days. 

KM platforms were created to put an end to this problem. They can radically reduce the amount of time, resources, expertise and revenue that had been all but wasted previously. But not all KM platforms work the same. And there are some important functionalities to consider when choosing one. These functionalities can make an enormous difference when you want to free up your subject matter experts to focus on high-value work.

KM platforms are cutting edge technology. As such, many businesses find themselves uncertain how to choose the right one for their organization. What even ARE the pitfalls to watch out for? How do you even know if a KM platform is lacking a capability your organization would benefit from?

Fortunately, these four core questions can help clear things up considerably.

Does this platform address your institution’s pressing pain points?

How easy is this platform to deploy?

What does the user adoption process look like?

Where does the data live?

The following sections will highlight what a good answer to these questions should look like, as well as some concerns to watch out for.

Identifying the pressing pain points that a KM platform can alleviate is a process. That process starts before deployment and should involve comprehensive help and guidance from the team behind the platform you’ve chosen.

Different businesses, and even different departments within the same business, will have different pain points. Here are a few examples we’ve run in to at Lucy:

A national organization’s IT department regularly needed to sunset old, internally developed software. However, the experts who created it had moved on. The documentation was scattered and trying to make sense of everything was labor-intensive and inefficient.

A multi-national retailer lost vital institutional knowledge every time key employees moved on to new opportunities. Their client files, documenting the status of their work and relationships, needed to be recovered and analyzed, often leading to missed deadlines and miscommunication with valuable accounts.

One office in North America conducted an extensive, multi-million dollar market research project. Only after the research project was nearly complete did they identify a nearly identical research project that was executed by their European branch the previous year. Ultimately, millions were spent on redundant efforts.

 Each of these examples required distinct functionalities to be solved effectively. Look for a KM platform with a team that is responsive, collaborative, and capable of creating a solution that’s fully optimized for your needs. 

Deployment shouldn’t be the hard part of adopting a KM platform. If it’s going to be an arduous process just to get the thing in place and operational, that’s ultimately more low-value hours spent chasing a high-value hour dream.

Ask the team behind the platform how long deployment could roughly take. While of course, an estimate is ONLY an estimate, it can provide you with a general idea of what’s required. Some platforms need months or even years to be fully optimized, thanks to the complexity of their data ingestion processes.

That leads us to another consideration regarding ease of deployment; how much work will you and your staff have to undertake? If you’re looking for a solution that can provide accurate, comprehensive answers across the complete range of subject matter your department handles, how many documents will you need to sort through? And can it interact with every document, file type and database you currently employ? Or will you need to be regularly changing file types? 

The data grooming process is often described as “if you put trash in, you’ll get trash out”. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can instead look for a KM platform that can ingest all documents, regardless of type or quality, and analyze them for importance. Such a platform eliminates the data grooming task and makes maintaining the quality of your answers over time far easier.

As anyone who has ever tried to implement a process change knows, user adoption is where the real work begins. Trying to shift ingrained behaviors in employees is a challenge, even if everyone knows the end result will be positive. So your KM platform should be ready to help tackle this challenge head on.

First, the team behind the platform should be actively engaged in the process. Hosting trainings, providing resources, answering questions and troubleshooting problems if and when they come up.

Second, using the platform should be intuitive and rewarding. Look for features like:

Questions can be asked in natural language. Instead of restricting users with the limitations of keywords, natural language processing allows them to ask their questions just as if they’re having a conversation with a colleague.

The platform can be accessed from anywhere, any time. Cloud-based KM platforms allow users across the world to ask questions and get their answers in real time. This feature has become particularly essential over the past few years with the rapid increase in remote work.

Answers are ranked by quality. Instead of receiving an endless list of documents or the first result the platform thought seemed pertinent, your KM platform should be able to review all results and rank them by quality. 

Works across all your systems. In order to truly get the best answer, your KM platform should be able to integrate with just about every database, every dashboard and every file type your company uses. 

The platform is easy to use. The more complex the user requirements are, the less inclined users tend to be to engage. Your KM platform should replace all the interruptions and low-level questions that would normally be asked of your subject matter experts. That means it MUST be as easy as it is to send an e-mail or post a message.

When your KM platform has these features, most of the major barriers to user adoption are eliminated upfront. That means faster uptake. And the faster the uptake, the sooner high-value functions can be prioritized.

Finally, the data itself. As we’ve already mentioned, the data ingestion process can be incredibly costly if it’s not managed well. 

Some KM platforms require you to groom every document in your institution, making a file-by-file decision about what’s valuable for the platform and what’s not. That process continues even after the platform has been deployed. Decision makers need to be trained in which future documents should be included and which should be ignored. It’s ultimately time-consuming, labor-intensive, and often results in mistakes that can influence the quality of the results the platform returns.

To avoid these problems, look for a KM platform that doesn’t require any data grooming. Instead, sophisticated machine learning algorithms are used to read, watch, listen to and study every document to understand its value and rank it accordingly. Such a platform automatically filters ‘junk’ results out, while prioritizing the most thorough and up-to-date answers available.

When low-value tasks are streamlined and automated, employees are free to focus on the high-value. Work that solves problems, builds relationships, develops products and improves profitability. Think about how many minutes per day each of your subject matter experts spends on the low-value task of looking for existing answers. What does that add up to across your entire company, over months and years?

KM platforms are a game-changer when it comes to eliminating low-value hours. But for your business to see the greatest reward, the platform you choose needs to address your specific needs without introducing new challenges.

The best KM platforms will be:

Easily managed

Easily accessible

Intuitive for users

Well-supported by the team behind the platform

Easily integrated with your existing systems

And on the flip side, they will NOT:

Be burdensome to deploy

Require labor-intensive data grooming

With a KM platform in place that meets these criteria, the value is tangible. Just add up all the time you’ll no longer be spending on low-value functions. That all becomes truly profitable time. Time that can be used to make things happen and return results.