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What are Knowledge Management Solutions?

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The concept of knowledge management was originally conceived by Peter Drucker in the 1950’s who was famously quoted as saying “Information only becomes knowledge in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it”. Since then knowledge management has become a specialist focus area for larger organisations. 

Since the discipline of knowledge management was established in 1991 there have been many discussions as to how knowledge management can be put in to practice. One of the most popular approaches in businesses is to use a knowledge management software solution to support customer service and technical support operations such as contact / call centres, shared service centres, web self service functions and help desks including ITSM (IT Service Management) operations.

The Best Software for Knowledge Management Explained

This has involved many attempts at internal systems such as internal ‘shared drives’ to huge databases with complicated hyper-links and meta-data. Over time with more and more information being amassed it has become harder and harder to access the specific information required without a lengthy search or an intimate knowledge of where the information is stored. The best software for Knowledge Management simply indexes a wide range of information resources before filtering and prioritising into relevant knowledge, in addition to providing an internal content management function and reports to measure knowledge base usage and knowledge gaps.

Many Information Sources Available From One Central Point

The system itself indexes all the required content from all the relevant sources without the need to move any information to a central location and uses a natural language search function to allow users to access the information quickly and easily. This allows easy and timely deployment of a solution without the need to reformat or re-purpose large amounts of legacy information.

Describe the Issue – Find the Solution

Often users know how to describe what their issue is but do not know how the solution will be phrased or explained.  Using the best software for knowledge management, staff, partners and customers can describe the issue, problem or query in their own way and enter the phrase directly into a search. The knowledge management solution will identify solutions that are known to address similar issues and present these in order of relevance.

Natural Language Questions

Natural language search allows users to ask questions using the language they would normally use in conversation, rather than by typing in keywords.  Documents are often written in formal terms which does not reflect the language used when asking a question. The best software for knowledge management now includes Natural language search functionality  as one of its key features, since this allows the system  to understand the context of the question and not just the keywords which are needed for a successful search result.

This is particularly important in industries that use an industry vocabulary like for example the finance sector where a direct debit is often referred to as DD. Natural language capability can enable the use of the terms that are common to the organisation.

Self Learning to Increase Relevance

A knowledge management system has a self-learning capability which captures the constantly changing flow of information.  This continuously revises the index with the actual phrasing used in questions. New content can continue to be added following the original implementation by adding to the content repositories already in use. Self-learning also extends to users identifying the quality of the solutions presented, so solutions that are helpful are naturally presented first.

Pushing Relevant Content to Users

knowledge management solutions can also facilitate a push strategy allowing specific content to be ‘pushed’ to a specific user group when required. This ensures new information is received by the relevant people as and when required. The system reports as to who and when the information was read.

This allows administration users to identify where the people are who still need to be briefed on any new information. The system can also manage user profiles across an organisation in order to allow specific access to relevant information for each user profile. This enables knowledge to be distributed inside and outside the organisation while retaining control.

Identifying Knowledge Gaps

Knowledge management solutions also can identify knowledge gaps and refer unanswered issues and questions to content experts who can respond to the question by adding new information back in to the system. This reduces the need for the same question to be escalated to relevant experts multiple times. Tracking and responding to knowledge gaps also eliminates guesswork on where knowledge gaps might be present before creating new solutions.

Join the discussion – How would you explain the best software for Knowledge Management?

About KPS Knowledge Management Solutions

Knowledge Powered Solutions (KPS) was formed in 2004 to meet the increased need for effective access to knowledge across large organisations.  KPS software indexes vast amounts of information and enables a single point of access in a much more focused way.

Initially introduced as a part of ITSM (IT Service Management) for HP and Remedy based systems,  KPS knowledge management tools are now used as stand-alone systems and integrated with CRM and Contact Centre systems.  KPS knowledge management solutions are also used for web self service where internal and external information users can identify relevant solutions on-line.

KPS is now a leading provider of knowledge management solutions, with implementations across the world. The KPS knowledge management solution is flexible and can be deployed across a wide range of applications managing any number of users. KPS knowledge management solutions are indexing and supporting content in more than 10 different European languages.

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