The modern workplace is increasingly spread out in many locations, with employees and expertise spread across multiple offices and areas. This makes it very difficult to know what information exists and where it is kept. 

We can make the assumption that a majority of a company’s information is stored on hard drives, content management systems, file sharing applications and in the minds and memories of employees. This creates a few problems:

• People don’t have access to the information they need to do their jobs effectively.
• The sheer amount of information becomes difficult to manage and measure.
• Information becomes stale or inaccurate because it’s not open for collaboration.
• Constant duplication of work, hampering productivity and crippling the pace of innovation.

On average, a typical employee wastes 2.3 hours per week searching for information. This can cost companies $7,000 per employee per year. Prioritizing a company-wide audit of all knowledge can help companies cut down on wasted time and allocate these resources elsewhere.
Turn Information into Knowledge
Knowledge is power, but only when it is shared. Until then, it is just information without context or meaning. The transformation of information into knowledge occurs only when it is stored in a place where people can talk about it and build upon it. Here are three ways a modern intranet can help.
Knowledge Bases
A modern Intranet supports the creation of many types of knowledge bases (KBs), including standard operating procedures, technical documentation, and best practices. This content, which would typically live in documents stored on drives, can now be published as wiki or blog articles that are easy to organize, search, and update. While a robust KB can lead to quicker decision-making and increased productivity, even the best KB is only effective if people know it is there and how to use it. The key is to make sure the structure is intuitive and that the information is searchable based on permissions so people only see what they need and can see.
Expertise Location
A people directory makes it easy for experts to share what they know with the rest of the organization. Think of it like a baseball card collection. Employees are players, their profiles are cards, and each card is tagged with stats (or an employee’s knowledge, skills, and abilities). Your collection should be searchable so it is easy to find who you are looking for, and it should allow employees to validate each other’s expertise by endorsing each other with badges or rewards. Having a full set makes it easy to trade information and expertise in your organization, and identify gaps or areas that you may need to recruit for.
Forums
Online forums give structure to typical water cooler interactions or brainstorming meetings, helping to surface the information that exists in people’s heads. These types of conversations that would typically happen behind closed doors or on email trails can now be transformed into knowledge that everyone can access. Employees can ask questions, submit ideas, or make requests, out in the open, for everyone to see. Even if they don’t initiate a conversation, employees can still participate by liking, rating, or commenting on someone else’s post. Eventually, forums develop into a library of collective knowledge built upon the exchange of information between people and teams in your company.
Example: Onboarding
To demonstrate these concepts, let’s look at a challenge that faces many growing organizations: onboarding. With a modern intranet, you can create a “newbie zone” to house everything employees need during their first few days. The space should feel warm and welcoming, and not confusing or technical. Starting a new job is overwhelming enough. Give them only what they need so they can spend their time learning about the culture, meeting new people, and acquainting themselves with the company’s products and services.

• Include a knowledge base of all company policies and guidelines that employees should be aware of, as well as any training they need to complete. Direct them to the information that is most relevant to their role and responsibilities and try to avoid overloading them with too much at once.
• Include a forum that addresses any “newbie” questions or concerns. It is a safe space for employees to get comfortable with the company, but it also allows your HR team to gather insights about what information is important to new employees and adjust their knowledge bases accordingly.
• Use the forum to introduce employees to experts, mentors, and other influencers that can teach them about the company, and its culture and processes. Invite these experts to answer new forum topics and ensure all existing topics are up to date.

Onboarding is the first opportunity to establish open knowledge sharing as a cultural norm. By using your modern intranet to demonstrate the value and benefit to your employees, it becomes a mentality that everyone adopts from day one.
The Power of Collective Wisdom
Knowledge should be treated as an internal currency with structures in place to ensure that it is managed wisely and that you are not losing any of it along the way. By continuously converting information into knowledge, you can realize a variety of benefits that will move your organization forward, including:

• Active and constant validation of company information.
• A common language that everyone understands.
• A culture of sharing and collaboration where knowledge belongs to everyone.

A modern intranet brings content and conversations together in one place, promoting active and continuous knowledge sharing across all levels of an organization. 
Galaxy Consulting works with many companies to tackle the challenges facing them, knowledge management being just one. Our goal is to help our customers capture the collective wisdom in their organizations so they can drive productivity, promote innovation, and help their business succeed.

In my last two posts about Coveo products, I described Coveo search applications - Coveo for advanced web search and Coveo for advanced enterprise search. Today, I will complete describing Coveo products with Coveo knowledge management application - Coveo for service and support.

With Coveo, knowledge required to solve cases faster can be found wherever it resides, within and beyond the knowledge base. Many companies are challenged with the proliferation of data, in multiple systems, communities, on-premise and in the cloud. Knowledge is everywhere and hard to manage.

Coveo solves this challenge by placing information from anywhere, related to the agent’s context, directly in front of them. Coveo technology automatically "reads" case information, established context, and instantly shows contextually relevant content and experts directly within the CRM such as Salesforce, or within a separate Insight Console. Coveo creates information mash-ups regardless of where the information resides, combined with advanced enterprise search and navigation abilities that bring your entire knowledge ecosystem to your agents.

Such knowledge availability decreases case resolution time, increases first contact resolution, and empowers lower level agents to become productive faster and to solve more complex cases. The results show dramatic impact on contact center capacity and customer satisfaction.

Features

Solutions and experts from anywhere - Coveo automatically presents 360° views of customer, case, or product information and communications, as well as experts who can help. Using advanced data enrichment, solutions and customer insight can stem from multiple sources, across enterprise, community, and social content.

Advanced enterprise search and navigation - expanded views enable deep, broad, knowledge exploration for cases, securely, across any enterprise content.

United indexing - Coveo federates searches and mash-ups from cloud, enterprise, and social data securely and in real time—regardless of format or source. It indexes source data from Salesforce, SharePoint, databases, file shares, Exchange, Dropbox, Lithium, Gmail, etc.

Expertise finding - dynamically, through context and topics, from internal colleagues to external experts, Coveo locates people with experience relevant to each case and customer.

Customer is in the center - Coveo cuts across departmental and system silos and enriches cases with sales or engineering content, thus providing richer and more relevant customer interactions. Conversely, other departments benefit from information generated by agents to inform product development and sales.

Virtual interaction - consolidates all customer and prospect communication and interactions from any channel, bringing together opportunities, cases, transactions, e-mails, events, cases, calls, tweets, etc.

Customization - The intuitive admin interface enables customization of any objects and combinations of information, including custom fields.

OpenText Knowledge Management (formerly Livelink ECM - Knowledge Management) is a comprehensive knowledge management solution that enables organizations to search, classify, navigate, and collect all of their corporate knowledge in a single, secure, web based repository. 

OpenText Knowledge Management works with OpenText Document Management or OpenText Content Lifecycle Management, leveraging the power of these content repositories and adding functionality that manages all knowledge from a single interface, regardless of originating source. Open Text Knowledge Management is a completely integrated, web based solution that delivers end-to-end, closed-loop management for all of your corporate knowledge assets.

Knowledge Management enables employees to perform their daily work more efficiently and accurately. The benefits of a centralized knowledge repository and library services ensures that you are working with the most up-to-date information. Specialized tools enable you to identify topic experts; quickly finding the best information resources from anywhere in your organization.

Powerful search, classification and navigation tools to help you find and manage an unlimited number of documents: from files, documents and objects, to project logs, search queries, discussion items, tasks, workflow maps and more in an organized, hierarchical structure.

You can identify subject matter experts and harvest their knowledge from the centralized knowledge repository. Open Text Knowledge Management extends the functionality of Open Text document management foundations - Open Text Document Management and Open Text Content Lifecycle Management. Open Text document management solutions fit your existing security framework, ensuring protection of content through permissions based access rules. Authorized users benefit from full access to all functionality from a single, secure web browser, and the flexibility of Open Text document management foundations allows for configuration of permissions on a group or individual level.

Features

Organize and share knowledge: Knowledge Management manages any type of electronic document in any file format. You can organize electronic documents into hierarchies of folders and compound documents within three types of workspaces that reflect the different ways in which people work: the Enterprise Workspace; Project Workspaces; and Personal Workspaces.

Capture knowledge automatically: Knowledge Management allows you to associate metadata with documents. Metadata is indexed and can be used to more easily find, retrieve, and generate reports on documents based on your custom criteria. Each piece of metadata information is an attribute, and sets of attributes can be grouped into categories that can be associated with any document.

Classify and categorize knowledge assets: multiple taxonomic classifications can be associated with documents in their original locations. This enables you to browse and search documents in the knowledge management repository according to taxonomies that differ from the one implied by the folder structure without having to create multiple copies of documents. You can organize information placed in Open Text Document Management or Open Text Content Lifecycle Management repositories via manual, assisted, or automatic means. Streamline browsing and improve search precision.

Automate knowledge management processes: Knowledge Management's graphical Workflow Designer tool enables you to automate document management processes, such as document change requests and document review and approval processes, to ensure that they are carried out accurately and consistently. You can design processes according to your own requirements or those imposed by regulatory agencies.

Discover knowledge with prospective queries: Knowledge Management provides prospective searching capabilities. You can create special queries to monitor various data sources, including the OpenText Document Management or OpenText Content Lifecycle Management repositories, shared network drives, external web sites and any integrated databases. When new information is discovered, you are immediately notified.

Single point of information access: federated search enables you to query multiple repositories and brings disparate information sources together. Use powerful search tools to quickly information access locate the right information. View results on a single page in a sorted, clustered format. Show hit highlights, document summaries, relevance rankings and result themes to improve fidelity.

Dynamic, multi-dimensional navigation: create dynamic, virtual folder structures built on pre-defined information taxonomies and document attributes; no pre-defined hierarchy is required. Often, metadata is not visible or navigable when you browse for information. Using taxonomies for browsing and additional context, you can decide which dimension is best to find required documents. Drill down the hierarchy using associated metadata to refine values and corresponding documents.

Optimize taxonomy creation and maintenance: analyze and cluster related documents, and extract and generate key concepts. Create suggested taxonomy nodes based on analyses; import and export in many common formats.

Automatically collect and extract information: crawl multiple Web-based information sources including intranets, extranets, web sites, and more. Create personal entries for crawling, search specific sites and search from the Document Management or Content Lifecycle Management user interface.