Ted Cocheu, CEO of Altus Learning Systems, looks at how video-powered KM is overcoming the limitations of traditional capture and retrieval methods.

Over half of Microsoft SharePoint users are not satisfied with its search capabilities, according to recent research. One would think that any product having sold nearly 100 million seats and generating US$1 billion in revenue could do better than that. But it’s just a drop in the corporate bucket.

Recent research from IDC notes that knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information, with under half of these searches being successful. For the Fortune 500, the cost of these fruitless quests represents between $60-85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs.

Why do smart people with expensive tools spend up to 10 weeks per year looking for information when they find it less than 50% of the time? Part of the problem is that more than 80% of corporate data is unstructured, according to CIO Insight, and doesn’t reside in an indexed, organised, or easily searchable database.

When software company QCSI looked for solutions to its knowledge management challenges, it estimated that about 90% of the company’s critical knowledge resided in the heads of about 10% of the workforce. The reason people at work cannot find the information they need is that much of it exists only in people’s heads and is simply not findable.

Knowledge capture

People in organisations try to share knowledge by making presentations in a variety of settings, ranging from conference calls and sales meetings to new product seminars and classroom training. However, verbally transferred knowledge is highly problematic for a variety of reasons – many people can’t attend synchronous events, people don’t need the information at the time it’s presented, and people forget what they learn very quickly.

Studies show that most people forget two-thirds of what they learn within 24 hours, so it’s critical that knowledge is made available later in time and on-demand at the moment a person needs it for reference.

Extracting knowledge from human memory and into a searchable database is where video plays an important role. No matter how or where people verbally share their knowledge, it can be video or audio recorded. Once that knowledge is captured, digital audio or video files can be transformed into searchable data by transcribing them, synchronising the transcript with the spoken audio and adding the indexed text and timings into a database with a full-text search engine.

People speak at an average of 160-170 words per minute when presenting, meaning that a one-hour presentation has roughly 10,000 transcribed words. All this data, plus the thousand or so words from the PowerPoint deck of an average one-hour presentation, can be made searchable and accessible at the point of interest.

Vision, culture, resources and processes

A major problem that has always plagued KM strategies is that accumulating knowledge requires active methods, such as experts making an extra effort outside their normal work processes to proactively inject their knowledge into the system. Simply recording experts while they are giving presentations to share their knowledge makes their participation in the knowledge management system passive – the experts don’t have to do anything other than deliver the presentations they were already planning to make. And passive systems are much easier to maintain than active ones.

An additional benefit of using audio and video to capture expert knowledge is that the files can be transcoded into a variety of popular formats, ranging from streaming video to downloadable MP3 audio and MP4 video files. Add an RSS subscription to a category or subject area and you have instant audio podcasts or video vodcasts that people can access through iTunes to keep themselves updated.

Other valuable derivative knowledge assets can be easily added, including an indexed transcript, PowerPoint files, and even PowerPoint files with transcript segments inserted into the notes sections of the slides.

Knowledge framework

To be effective, however, any technology must fit within an overall KM framework. This must begin with a strong organisational foundation that includes vision, culture, resources and processes. Once these prerequisites are in place, video and related search capabilities can be productively employed to help capture, share and locate expert knowledge. But no system can be effective long-term unless there are steps taken to market, share, monitor, and improve it as well.

Video-powered knowledge management is being used by very large global organisations to overcome many of the limitations of traditional knowledge capture and retrieval methods. But all its capabilities can only be fully realised when video is integrated into this overall knowledge management framework.