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Highlights – Communitech Tech Leadership Day 2012

Leadership as personal narrative

The tone for this year’s Tech Leadership Day, at least the keynotes, was personal. Neil Pasricha gave us “Awesome: The Story” and Arianna Huffington gave a talk filled with anecdote and wit. A fair change from previous years.

Pasricha, who’s due to hit the #1 awesome thing later this week, was refreshingly humble and genuine in his story of how Awesome came to be. Let’s just say he had his annus horribilis and his writing came out of that – he chose to talk himself into happiness, and it appears to have worked. More formally, Pasricha talked about the 4 A’s of Awesome:

  1. Attitude: if you get the right corporate attitude, the rest will work itself out. Hint: writing a mission statement does not a culture make. Southwest Airlines (which seemed to be the go-to good example at the conference) is one of Pasricha’s favourites, due to their awesome and personal customer service (like rapping flight attendants).
  2. Awareness: this would be the “staring at bugs” approach. Look at the world like a 3 year-old and you’ll get your wonder back.
  3. Alignment: of values & principles. Pasricha talked about the Four Seasons and how they turned an 800-item list of ‘what makes Four Seasons Four Seasons’ into y principles that every person knows and lives.
  4. Authenticity: perhaps my favourite example – Mr Rosie Greer and his passion for needlepoint. Sure, you can be 300-pound football player, but can you top-stitch?

Huffington warmed up the crowd and the twitters pretty quickly with her vow to save RIM single-handedly so they can continue to support her 4 BBs. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but she was engaging and sharp, and has a great appreciation for good wit. She was very forthcoming about her age (you’re never too old to start something – her friends tried to talk her out of HuffPo), her accent (her ex-husband bought her English elocution lessons for a gift one time; they didn’t work out so well), her work/life balance (she’s a big advocate for device avoidance and full night’s sleep to keep things sane) and being one of a very few women CEOs (“maybe we’re smarter and we we’ve figured out that’s not the ultimate thing in life”).

Her personal approach shows up in her business as well. After her divorce, she added a section on Divorce to HuffPo, for as Nora Ephron quipped, “Marriage comes and goes, but divorce lasts forever.”

Highlights from her talk:

  • HuffPo Canada is doing well. As a platform for passions and interests, it’s a platform that allows communities to develop and for thought leaders to emerge. She cited studies showing Canadians are early adapters and leaders in social, which is great for commenting stats.
  • Speaking of comments, they take great pride in the pre-moderated comments approach. They’ve found that, over time, most trolls have walked away because it wasn’t worth the effort to try to get past the moderators. Keeps the communities more engaged and less fractious.
  • She’s working on a stress app, like GPS for the soul, that will help people to course-correct when work overtakes life.
  • Regarding social, “ubiquity is the new exclusivity”. Promiscuity may be bad in relationships, but it’s great online.
  • The Internet has grown up. We’ve gone from indiscriminate searches to searches for meaning (like the Book of Awesome). We want joy triggers, not a whole bunch of links.
  • Regarding politics, we need to stop dividing the world into left & right. Ipso facto the current US elections. Though the example she went to was the rallies in Quebec against higher tuition fees.
  • Good idea of the day: we’ve got parents with childcare problems and people in nursing homes with loneliness problems – like peanut butter and chocolate.

The midday keynote was presented by Nora Young of CBC’s Spark. Given the number of geeks in the audience, I don’t think the premise of her new book wasn’t earth-shattering, but she did articulate some trends in the digital space:

  1. Body performance: odometers, fitbit, sleep patterns, weight loss, mood – there’s an app for that.
  2. World experience: Yelp, Goodreads, Netflix, Twitter – you can share it.
  3. Metadata: tools that know how they are being used.

It’s that last one that is perhaps the most interesting. We’re creating a huge amount of data about us and by us, and as apps become more “aware” of how and when they are being used, it’s that data, and the aggregate data we are giving freely to vendors (evil and otherwise) that will change how governments and vendors will design the future. If you haven’t turned everything off in Facebook, you won’t believe what they know about you and what gets shared with apps you aren’t even using.

Ultimately, we’ll be in a space of “dynamic demographics” – live traffic maps with the latest roadblocks, just-i- time ads when you walk by a store, density maps that know where people are congregating (cuz we know where the cell phones are) – could be useful to site emergency water stations during a heat wave. The discussion, then, has to be about how we shape the discourse about this data – what are our values, our mores, and how do we aim for productive ends? Decisions are made even if we say nothing.

Posted in Kitchener-Waterloo, Thought Leadership.

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By sherrymc – April 17, 2012

Awareness is not a goal

In internal communications, I work with a lot of different groups who want to communicate their new ‘thing’ globally. When I ask them what their goal is, I often hear, “awareness”. Some describe it as an enterprise version of “brand awareness”, and others have the idea that “if you tell them once, they will come”, or remember, or something.

But awareness, much like engagement, can be a false end. A colleague and I were discussing Engagement Ain’t Nothing’ But a Number by Brian Solis. One quote is particularly relevant:

Engagement is confused with incidents and not outcomes or influence, the ability to cause desired effect or change behavior.

In this case, awareness=engagement. What my customers want, usually, is to get someone to do something or to do something differently. And awareness won’t achieve that.

Once we start talking about outcomes, we usually come up with some better goals:

  • Employees always use the current expense report template/process.
  • Employees fill in their annual goals on time, with metrics.
  • Raise a specific amount of money for a company charity event.
  • Capture specific product knowledge so that there’s more than one person who knows the answers.

And that’s when the conversation gets interesting, and usually when we realize that a global email won’t achieve what they want to do. Instead, we can find the point at which employees will care about the “thing” and need to do the “thing”. With the new expense report/template, for example, offering up instructions at the point of usage (expense submissions) gets a much higher adoption rate.

Or for capturing specific product knowledge, setting up a community and telling people about it won’t get what you want. We all know that, or should. True success here means moving backward from the outcome (knowledge capture that people use) to the ways and means, and then making sure the ways and means can be measured against the opportunity (as Solis describes it) and not against impressions, visits or anything else.

One of the best use cases I developed when I was managing an internal community for an international Support & Services community was one where I traced a forum discussion between Service people to a specific customer problem that got solved in a few hours (versus a couple of days that it would have taken otherwise), to a new knowledgebase article that was created as a result, helping more customers without having to reinvent the answer all over again. And then I used this case to gain support from executives and increase participation within the community itself.

This real cause/effect not only met a real goal with a valuable outcome, it made everyone involved feel like there was something to this “communications” stuff.

If you catch yourself wanting to gain “awareness”, push yourself to think about outcomes, and you’ll be happier with the results.

Posted in Communicating, Enterprise knowledge management, Intranets, Thought Leadership.

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By sherrymc – February 13, 2012

Unicorns and ROI in the enterprise

Today’s Social Media Breakfast Waterloo Region (#smbwr) was a “debate” between Alan Quarry (@aquarry ) and Chris Young ( @chris_eh_young) about the need for ROI in social media.

Quarry was on the side of the unicorn, a conceit developed with the idea that un-marketers like Chris, who insist on ROI for every action, kill a unicorn every time they speak.

Their use cases focused on the retail space.  Chris poo-pooed “engagement” as a good-enough ROI for social media in this space, though he did concede the point that, like an RRSP, there may be dividends (i.e. $$) in the future. And I agree with him that you need to know what you are trying to get done and find the right way to do that (meaning social media isn’t always the right answer).

For social media in the enterprise–whether you call it the intranet, intranet 2.0, social enterprise–”engagement” is the top or near top of the list of reasons why it’s done. Itself being the sought-after ROI. This may reflect the relative immaturity of the space, or it may be indicating that inside the 4 walls, we think that conversation is an end in itself.

Like the RRSP, though, I think if you don’t have some outcome to that conversation, I’m not sure it’s worth it for the organization. Great to have virtual chats and you can count prolonged forum discussions on cats vs dogs in your stats, but ultimately, does it improve the effectiveness of the organization?

The unicorns would argue that yes, it does. It contributes to culture and to a sense of belonging within the organization. Even if you and I never meet IRL, we “know” each other and are comfortable enough to have a chat online about Maru.

Hopefully, though, when it’s time for us to get something done, our friendship will make the process faster and easier. Essentially the RRSP argument.

However, I think best-in-class organizations know that intranets need to integrate business processes, customer service and delivery tools and even ERP. Much closer to cold, hard ROI. Not that this instead of engagement, but in addition to it. In Jane McConnell’s Digital Workplace Trends 2012 report, these are still not integrated in the majority of reporting organizations. Even if quite a few have at least given them the same look and feel and made sure that they are accessible from the intranet.

Ideally, in an integrated environment, there will be improvements to those business processes that come out of the “engagement” conversations and social collaboration  - ensuring that employees feel that the conversation is going somewhere, and providing ROI in the form of faster processes, better customer service/lower support costs and easier operations.

 

 

Posted in Enterprise knowledge management, Intranets, Thought Leadership.

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By sherrymc – February 1, 2012

When you leave

Having just recently been through a transition to a new job, I’ve been thinking about what makes a successful “transition”. It surprises me how few organizations have any kind of checklist or plan in place for this, especially in software where transitions are frequent enough.

A simple phrase is usually a good way to put something to memory, so you can categorize your transition checklist as people, places and things.

Since I was leading a knowledge-oriented team, we had the benefit of having a lot of this information already recorded in our wiki. Certainly makes it easier for everyone to know already where to look for information after you’re gone if you have that. If not, even a simple spreadsheet will do (or go crazy with all that free time from cancelled meetings and wiki your brains out before you leave).

People

  • People you work with (external): list each vendor or external company that you work with, along with how you work with them and what the work relationship is. Bonus points: email every external to let them know you are leaving, the status of current project(s), and whom their new contact is.
  • People you work with (internal): pretty much the same, only the email isn’t a bonus, it’s a necessity.
  • Customers: same again, but I think it’s also important to talk to them directly. Most of my customers are internal, so they appreciated a phone call or drop-by their desk. It’s also a nice way to say goodbye and answer any questions they have.
  • Tool contacts: for every internal tool you work with, provide your primary contact for support/questions, and any notes about how the next person can best contact them (e.g., skype address, email…). Since this is for your team’s survival, be kind and give them good contact details.
  • Meeting organizers: mostly they are covered in the first groups, but not always. Go through your calendar of recurring meetings and contact each organizer. As before, tell them your leave date, status of any project(s) and whom the new person is for the meeting. If someone is representing your team in the interim until a replacement is hired, tell them that too.
  • Your network: just before the end of your tenure or just after you start your new job, send an email to your network. This is not just to let them know where you are, but also to potentially help in the replacement process for your previous role. Assuming it wasn’t a bad breakup, helping to find your replacement is a nice thing to do.

Places

For me, places also means places to do things, as in sites, resources, and so on.

  • Where the instructions are: provide links and descriptions to every primary location where the knowledge is. This may be your team site, intranet, fileshare, whatever. Describe what they’ll find there and when to use it.
  • Where physical infrastructure is located: especially if, like me, you have hardware associated with the work you do. List the servers, where they are located, if they are shared, who the admin is and where the contract is located online.
  • Where to go with questions/requests: if it’s not documented well already, leave a list of places to “get started”, such as the IT ticket system, Finance processes, HR forms, and so on.

Things (to do)

  • Finish what you started: for any in-progress tasks, get them finished, or to a point where they can be transitioned easily. Then do an in-person handoff if you can, or leave detailed instructions. Seems like a no-brainer, but sometimes I’m surprised at the mess left behind.
  • Demo/transfer sessions: do as many as you can with the people who need them. Even if you document everything, it doesn’t beat an in-person session, even if it’s virtual.
  • Clean out your Inbox: remove recurring meetings and unbook meeting rooms (they’re gold!). Clean up the email and organize it into folders that will make sense to someone else. It’s pretty common for IT to make your Inbox available to the next person for reference, so why not make it easier for them to find stuff?
  • How things work: everyone knows that it’s not just the formal processes that matter, it’s also the informal processes, so take the time to explain them too. I documented them on the wiki. That way, it’s easy to update them when things change.
  • Standards and templates: again, if they aren’t already shared, share them and tell people where they are. For example, as a communicator, I usually have a folder in my email client with email templates, for example, so I made sure I shared those with the appropriate people.
  • Vacation/lieu days: to be honest, in most cases you’re SOL on this one. But you should know the remainder and mention it in your HR notification. You never know. Also, if you’re taking vacation days at the end of your tenure, make sure your announced end date is the real “last day in the office”.
  • Logins and passwords: this is a big one. Since I keep mine in a password safe, it was pretty easy to find them all and pass them along to the people who need them. Leaving them willy-nilly in old email trails just isn’t the same, and IT may not have them either.
  • Outstanding expenses: be kind to Finance and get them in as early as possible, along with a note telling them when your end date is, and if there are any more coming.
  • Outstanding benefit charges: similar to expenses. If you have a dental or medical charge just before you go, get it processed as soon as possible and make sure you check on the policy about processing them and how long your eligibility is in place after your end date, if at all.
  • Property and peripherals: including PDA and accessories, laptops, equipment you have at home, keys, passkeys, corporate credit card, phone card, printed papers. This may take time if you have a home office, so start early. In some cases, you can negotiate to keep some of this stuff, so it’s worthwhile reviewing your inventory with your manager or HR.
  • Stock options, ESPP or RSP contributions: you have to figure out what you want to do with these things, and then find out what paperwork is required. It’s a lot easier to get this done before you leave than after.

Things people forget

Put yourself in the place of the next person in your role. You will save them a lot of time and future agony if you cover off these items as well. Some of these are probably more specific to someone leaving a management role, but they’re still good to include in the checklist:

  • Vendor contracts, SLAs and communications. Nicely labeled on the intranet or in a shared team space would be lovely.
  • Reviews and resumes of team members if you’re a manager. If they are not stored in an ERP or central location with HR.
  • Application keys/software licenses. You know how painful it is to track these down, and IT isn’t perfect. I document them alongside the login/password and contact information for each app to make it easier.

 

 

Posted in Communicating, Intranets.

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By sherrymc – January 20, 2012

A visit to the Felt Lab

I had the pleasure of touring the Felt Lab today. Led by my intrepid host, Alan Quarry, I had a chance to try out some of the technologies and talk a bit about the program.

Felt Lab is located in the Quarry Integrated Communications building on the river in St Jacobs. The lab is being used by students in the University of Waterloo Research Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP), led by Dave Godwin (a former professor of mine and all around good guy).

Students from a wide range of disciplines do a research tour in the lab, and man, the toys! They have Christie tiles, floor-based interactive technology from GestureTek (which I saw at last year’s TedX Waterloo conference), as well as this really cool interactive table for 2D to 3D interactivity from Kommerz.

I was picturing future NOC technology, radiology interfaces, and the next wave of knowledge sharing–visual not textual. It’ll be interesting to see what the students come up with.

Posted in Interfaces, Kitchener-Waterloo, Thought Leadership.

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By sherrymc – November 4, 2011

Tacit and explicit knowledge for internal KM

At our recent Communitech P2P, we talked about tact & explicit knowledge sharing within the corporate environment. I worked up some slides to help us, with the help of some xkcd cartoons and a little Joss.

One way that we can categorize tacit and explicit knowledge is “know how” versus “know what”. In this sense, tacit knowledge is the “know how” –  the kind of knowledge that helps experienced people to get things done, though they find it hard to articulate often how they know what they know, and how to replicate it. Explicit knowledge is the “know what” – knowing the steps, so to speak, of how to get something done. Explicit knowledge is easier to share, easier to articulate (or document) and easier to replicate.

Another common way of describing it is “knowledge” versus “comprehension”. From this, it’s meant that tacit knowledge is deep knowledge, whereas explicit knowledge is comprehension. Kind of a variation on the know how/know what dichotomy.

Tacit knowledge is associated with insight and good judgement – having a “feel” for a situation and navigating to the right answer. In many organizations, when it comes to internal communications or knowledge management, the challenge is in how to get this tacit knowledge from the experienced people to everyone else.

“I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar…”

In a reasonable organization with reasonable knowledge sharing tools, explicit knowledge is “capturable” – there are lots of tools to help you and process management often drives us to get explicit knowledge into a format that others can use. Not to say it’s a no-brainer.

In my experience, some of the best tools for capturing explicit knowledge are intranet-driven. More traditional document management systems (Livelink, Sharepoint, Igloo…) offer ways to capture processes and policies easily. And because they are often organized hierarchically, they provide explicit knowledge about how the organization works, and who owns specific processes or content (which is valuable information in itself).

In recent years, wiki have come on strong for capturing explicit knowledge. In my own organization, we are capturing all kinds of explicit knowledge because there’s such a low barrier to entry for wiki. However, where wiki is held separate from the intranet, you will have a challenge in determining which content goes where, and when you require a full-on document instead of a wiki page. Policy can help, but users will still find it hard to follow the rules (and will ask for “search that works” so they don’t have to think about it).

Regardless, for explicit knowledge sharing to be successful, it’s best if it’s “just in time”–located exactly where and when users will need it. So, if you want better requirements content, for example, key reference templates and instructions as someone is submitting a requirement will help them to be complete, and probably offer suggestions for how to provide useful information. And they’ll know better for next time.

Tacit knowledge is a little harder to catch. But tools like blogs, and wiki along with internal social media offer channels for communicating stories, which give others insight into how tacit knowledge holders think through a problem when it’s presented. It’s not step-by-step, but as many studies have shown, storytelling is an excellent way to learn. For example, salespeople use “war stories” to expose successful and failing strategies all the time. The trick is to get them to do it in an internal channel that others have access to (and developers can learn a lot from sales stories).

For tacit knowledge to be successful, it needs context. Users need to be able to transfer what they are hearing to their own set of skills. Internalize it. However, because storytelling and conversation are so prominent in tacit knowledge sharing, sometimes it’s a slow build–making it harder to measure and harder to pin down when it is successful. Some ways you may see the results are in how consistent certain programs are, or how intense the forum discussions get for a particularly complex challenge (and when that happens, that’s a good day).

Toolkit for explicit knowledge:

  • Reference content: glossaries, guides, standards
  • Instructions: steps, guides, wizards, decision trees
  • FAQs: factual, policy, “standard approach”
  • Contact profiles: to help people know who knows the answer, or who owns the process.

Toolkit for tacit knowledge:

  • How I fish conversations: forums, blogs – told from the first person and walking through a challenge or problem
  • Storytelling: forums, blogs, video, use cases, playacting
  • Conceptual content: research, theory, big pictures, mindmaps
  • Contact profiles: to encourage cross-functional discussion, especially if profiles are customizable and tied to internal social media.

 

 

Posted in Communicating, Enterprise knowledge management, Intranets, Thought Leadership.

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By sherrymc – October 24, 2011

The human O/S

We all know that technology is generational. Our ability to follow new interactions or new-fangled ways of doing things fades a bit as we get older, and we are faster and more efficient in those environments where we have long familiarity.

This explains why I will always be a paper book girl. And why this next generation will be closer to “paperless” than ever before. Secondary bet is she will also wonder what our obsession is with “the mouse”.

This interface does not work

Posted in Communicating, Interfaces.

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By sherrymc – October 14, 2011

#searchthis

hashtag

#hashtagftw

You know what’s wonderful about hash tags? They’re just text, so you can use them in interesting places. For free.

For many companies who are using a mish-mash of tools for their intranet solution, there are challenges with search keywords. Either there isn’t a set way of being able to add them to content, or there are different ways, or you’re getting by right now with none at all.

Because hashtags are just text, you can take advantage of the fact that most people (at least in high tech) already understand what they are and how to use them.

Where you might use hashtags:

  • Wiki: At my company, the wiki doesn’t accommodate keywords. But, it’s really simple to add a line in a page with hashtags. Search using hashtags returns a smaller set of results with more relevancy.
  • Forums: Sometimes the number of forums and entries gets prohibitive to finding a very specific topic. Hashtags can help with keywords, especially if you use them as unique identifiers, rather than general categories (which, presumably, you’re handling via the forum names or groups).
  • Intranet: Again, easy way to add keywords to pages and no special tools needed.

Hashtags can add great value even if/especially if you deploy some type of indexed search. This is because enterprise search tools often prioritize page/doc names and repeated keywords over other types of references. However, this means searches on common product names or processes return many results across several sites–and unfortunately what you hear back is “search sucks”. With hashtags, you can help to differentiate content, and at the same time, get around any content or indexing differences that may show up based on how content is presented in the different channels. So, win-win.

Like anything else, this cheap and cheerful approach would benefit from a taxonomy strategy–at the very basic level, an index of agreed-upon hashtags to help categorize content across different channels. Then supplement those with unique keywords that will set one piece of content apart from others.

 

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By sherrymc – July 19, 2011

Joe needs help

J Boriss went to a mall recently to do some browser user testing for Firefox. That’s where she ran into Joe, a 60 year-old man who’s never used a computer, in San Francisco no less.

What happened was 3 hours of some pretty interesting research for her, though I’m not sure Joe felt like it was all that rewarding (except for maybe getting some free bread).

Read her summary here: http://jboriss.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/user-testing-in-the-wild-joes-first-computer-encounter/

Joe didn’t know you have to click in text boxes to fill them in, and wasn’t too sure about the “mouse” thing. I think we’re past the time when we need to engineer sites for Joe. He’s admittedly a rare breed. But what was interesting to me is that he instinctively went for things that said “Help” or text with words like “suggested” in it. He absolutely ignored images and icons.

But think about when users “don’t know where to start” or “don’t know where the answer is” (whether that’s lost scentibility, too many categories or in a hurry). Do you give them something to hang on to?

Does “Help” tell them about the browser, the site or where to get started? Or, even better, get them to an IM session where they can just ask a question. Does “suggested” give the same categories as the navigation? Advertising? or does it give a series of FAQs, maybe, that can get them on the trail of where they want to go?

It’s good to think about WWJW (what would Joe want?) once in a while.

Posted in Communicating, Service & support.

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By sherrymc – July 12, 2011

Key words and hot topics

Search don’t mean a thing if you can’t float what people are looking for to the top.

But for as long as search engines have been around within the DMS/CMS space, none are really that good at helping you to figure out what people are looking for. Some engines offer extensions or specialty apps meant to analyse search traffic; some will give you “top searches”. Unfortunately, it’s really hard work from there to aggregate synonyms, or provide a context, such as time, for what is being searched.

But the hard work is worth it. If you find yourself with limited tools and you want to know what the search behaviours are, there are some things you can do.

  1. Get hold of intranet search logs. It will be a big file that potentially ties up system resources, but see if you can get a month’s worth of data to start. Then you roll up your sleeves in a spreadsheet. Put same or similar searches in a group and just keep a count of how many searches are associated with that group. Within the row, record all of the variations in the group (e.g., blueberry, blueberries, berries). Then take a look at the search strings – do people searching use mostly single terms? phrases? nouns? verbs?. Look at the search activity in time as well – is there a big surge on a specific error message one week? Maybe you’ve found a great topic for an FAQ, or even a webinar.
  2. Check on internal searches at specific targets, like forums, or the company wiki. Sad truth that the search tools for these are usually separate from your intranet search. Do the same types of analysis as you did for the intranet. With forums, you have the added dimension of frequency. A hot forum topic should be converted to more formal content.
  3. Take a close look at forum/discussion content on hot topics. And even non-hot topics if you have time. Posts and conversations are excellent places to figure out which terms people actually use (as opposed to what your company standards are), which acronyms are relevant, and even how key concepts are related. Lurking is a good thing. Blogs may also fall into this category, depending on how they are used at your company.
  4. Find out what’s liked. If you are fortunate to have some kind of voting on your internal content & communities, pay attention to it. I know of more than one company that got the “feedback” tool installed and then never looked at the results. Instead, they use it only to percolate dynamically generated “top content” lists.

Once you have some intelligence on key words and hot topics, here’s what you can do:

  • Create/update a terminology database. Cheap version is a spreadsheet, but there are tools out there as well. You want to track: standard term, “do not use” terms, related terms and synonyms, as well as a history of how the standard term was determined (to avoid opening up discussions in the future). The idea is that your interfaces and content follow standard terminology, but your indices, search keywords and cross-references use the non-standard terms as well.
  • Tweak search, if at all possible. The bad news is that for many a search tool, what you can tweak is minimal, buried way down in the code, and/or your IT department doesn’t actually know where it is. However, in most cases there are a least a few parameters that you can adjust. Highly advised that you do so in a beta environment and test the results with several real search strings.
  • Create/update your internal FAQs. If people are searching for it or talking about it, why not make it easier for them to find it. FAQs work especially well for development or services content, but there’s no reason you can’t apply the same principle to HR policies or anything else that gets a lot of search activity.
  • Transfer content to more formal delivery channels, like your Support site. If it’s a hot topic internally, there’s a good chance that’s because it’s a hot topic externally. Some of the best “user-focused” content comes to light because it triggers internal discussions on forums or wiki pages. Related to this is if you have a lot of searches on specific error messages from the product–usually this means no one inside or outside knows what it means. So the quick win is to find out, rewrite the error message in the code if it’s not clear, and get it added to your troubleshooting content.

This kind of work isn’t fancy, but key words and hot topics can really help you to deliver the content that’s needed most.

 

Posted in Enterprise knowledge management, Intranets, Service & support.

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By sherrymc – June 19, 2011