Nav Chakravarti, vice president of product marketing at InQuira, reveals the critical differences between knowledge management systems and content management systems, and shows why true KM capabilities are so vital to compete in today’s markets.

In today’s knowledge economy, companies differentiate themselves by their capabilities for managing information. Success today is predicated on a company’s ability to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time, and by its ability to leverage information to improve services, sales and productivity.

While the capture and distribution of knowledge has traditionally been a strictly controlled process, this new market environment calls for more flexibility and greater collaboration, both within an organisation and with customers and partners. To foster this collaboration, organisations need new ways of producing, authoring, capturing, disseminating, and assessing knowledge.

Companies often use web-based content management systems (CMS) to manage knowledge-based processes and sites. However, CMS were not designed for knowledge management and because of several critical gaps in product capabilities, many organisations are failing in their efforts to foster greater collaboration. At first glance, it might seem the fundamental characteristics of CMS and knowledge management systems (KMS) are essentially the same, given that both deal with creating, managing and publishing information. However, there are a several fundamental differences between a typical CMS and a KMS, specifically with regard to how information flows through development and publishing processes. Understanding these differences will help inform which type of solution best fits your organisation’s needs.

Granular snippets of knowledge

The absence of discrete pieces of unstructured information – essentially snippets of knowledge – is often what stops us from completing the task at hand. The kind of how-to information varies based on industry or type of job. For example, an accountant may ask: “What account should I post a chargeback to?” A software administrator may ask: “What is the sequence of patches to apply in delivering this workaround?” A consumer may ask: “How do I set the alarm clock on my iPod?” These pieces of information are not likely to be easily found in product or training manuals, assuming someone would actually even take the trouble to dig through the documentation in the first place. 

CMS are geared toward managing projects, web pages and websites; information that is typically not granular in nature. KMS, on the other hand, are geared toward efficiently managing snippets of information such as how-to, procedures and solutions, which are inherently more granular and more directly relevant to the tasks at hand. 

Knowledge is dynamic and has a shelf-life. For example, the account to which a chargeback should be posted might change over time or when a new software release is delivered, the information about applying patches becomes moot. Or as a new iPod becomes available, the old information is outdated. So today’s business-critical knowledge needs to be captured, reviewed and published quickly, as well as updated and culled frequently. 

The information discussed here is tacit knowledge. This is shared only when someone is asked a question about that particular topic, whether on a phonecall, over a cubicle wall, in an email or on a forum/blog post. To capture this tacit information, it is critical to make knowledge capture easy. Further, this knowledge capture needs to be done as part of the work process and not as a separate document or content publishing task that an employee might or might not engage in some day.

Tacit knowledge is not restricted to a few in-house experts. For example, customers might develop greater expertise for a particular product than the company representatives with whom they interact. This means the notion of authorship expands to a much wider variety of people – from dedicated authors and publishers to product experts, rank and file employees, and even customers participating on blogs and forums. In fact, to extract tacit knowledge, it makes more sense to involve more people than less.

The process implications

It is important to understand the implications of these new demands on recognised workflow processes. Instead of the more static create/manage/publish flow that embodies most CMS, organisations need to embrace a more fluid capture/route/convert workflow and be able to cohesively measure the entire process from within one KMS.

It is clear that business-critical knowledge needs to be captured as a by-product of daily work interactions, versus created as part of a dedicated process. The capture of this information can only succeed if it is easy to create content as part of one’s work process and cleanly integrated with existing systems. A customer service agent, for example, could request or author a new solution from within the customer relationship management (CRM) environment they typically use to answer calls. Similarly, email threads and forum posts could be systematically harvested to create new knowledge.

Information management is important but in an environment that emphasises knowledge capture, the ability to route information to the right individual or teams for verification and approval takes on even more importance. To facilitate this process, organisations need to harness category-based permissions, which allow for authoring and technical reviews based upon pre-assigned skills and specific team member responsibilities.

Organisations that place a premium on quickly publishing information from multiple authors need a system that supports authoring, routing and publishing in a production environment. Given the specific business needs that dynamic, knowledge-rich sites serve, it is important to associate KM processes with the 'conversion' goals of the organisation.

Conversions can be broadly defined but, generally, imply a discrete outcome – i.e. a purchase transaction, a closed service request, a business referral or a completed loan application. In addition, organisations should offer proactive and reactive methods for finding information. Options could include alerts and subscriptions or integrated search and retrieval mechanisms.

The ability to holistically monitor and measure critical elements of the entire workflow process is a fundamental difference between a KMS and a CMS. The following are some of the core elements to measure:

Capture effectiveness. Tracking contributions of authors and the value of those contributions for rewards and recognition is critical so that authors have an incentive to divulge the tacit knowledge in their heads and take the time and effort to document it. This also helps discourage information hoarding since, in the old model, information was power. Given there is widespread authorship, it becomes critical to distinguish the expert authors from the beginners. This is especially true in self-publishing environments, such as blogs and forums.

Route efficiencies. In the route process, it becomes critical to measure time in the workflow and identify approval bottlenecks. Given that knowledge has a shelf-life, it also becomes critical to measure the speed of knowledge updates and ensure a timely flow.

Conversion success. In the convert process, the whole objective is to drive the user to the best solution for his or her needs. This is only possible by providing a means for capturing feedback from users and customers, such as ratings and comments, discussions on content or surveys. Further, document ratings need to be captured and automated review tasks need to be initiated for documents that receive poor ratings.

Proactive delivery

We live in a world where information is created and consumed more quickly than ever before. Business-critical web presences need to deliver targeted, business-critical information in a timely manner so that customers can either serve themselves or receive fast, effective service from company representatives. Instead of being just content or data, this information now embodies the critical knowledge people need to perform their jobs. This knowledge changes constantly and has a shelf life.

This knowledge is egalitarian in nature; instead of residing in the hands of a few content creators, it is generated by employees, partners, distributors and customers. Given the sheer volume of information, critical knowledge needs to be easily found or, better yet, proactively delivered to those most likely to use it. The value and usefulness of knowledge needs to be measured and knowledge that is no longer useful needs to be culled, while new contributions need to be monitored and encouraged. The process must evolve from a more static create/manage/publish process to a more dynamic and holistic capture/route/convert/measure process.

These are the realities that differentiate content driven websites from conversion-focused, knowledge-based web applications.