socialtext - Emanuele Quintarelli on Diigo

Participatory Knowledgebase

Service and Support organizations in market leaders including Symantec and Microstrategy have implemented the Participatory Knowledgebase solution in partnership with Socialtext. It enables the call center or help desk to capture & organize together knowledge from customers & internal processes. Time to resolution is reduced through unstructured search, browsing through tags and social discovery. It enables the organization to sense and respond rapidly to exceptions to business process and turbulent markets.

The Problem of Structuring Knowledge

Today, 75% of organizations' knowledge gets stored in the email inbox. Other knowledge gets stored in rigid databases, shared drives, content management systems, or published on web pages that quickly become out-of-date. For employees, finding the information they need is difficult or impossible, and with employee turnover the problem only gets worse. Wikis provide a simple-to-use structure for capturing and organizing content into rich knowledgebases where the structure of the application emerges out of use in the flow of daily work. This cuts in half the time spent by employees searching for critical information -- and fosters active participation and contribution.

Call Centers and Help Desks

Timely access to the relevant up-to-date knowledge is critical in many areas, but especially to call centers, where success is literally measured in seconds. Call center agents need to quickly put their hands on the precise knowledge required to solve a customer's problem. This is especially challenging when the calls in question deal with exceptions, and agents can't simply rely on the standard "script". Precious minutes drain away as agents try to figure out who has experience with these exceptional questions or try to solve them for the first time.

Call center managers are finding their traditional knowledge management systems increasingly poorly equipped to handle exceptions. Rigid information taxonomies, complex templates, and elaborate approva

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socialtext solutions enterprise 2.0 knowledge base call centers help desks customer service

Socialtext | Webinar Series: Sales and Marketing

Imagine always...

* Understanding what matters most to your market
* Knowing your sales tools will hit the mark
* Having competitive intelligence when and where you need it

See how marketing & sales are using business social software to gain these benefits.

With marketing and sales teams distributed across borders it is difficult for team members to learn from each other, collaborate with one another, and benefit from each other's findings and feedback.

Learn how business social software is being used by sales and marketing to:

* Ensure messaging and sales tools are informed by field insights
* Improve market and competitive intelligence
* Increase knowledge sharing, feedback loops and expertise

www.socialtext.com/...marketing_webinars.php - Preview

webinar socialtext sales marketing ross mayfield marketing 2.0 sales 2.0 case studies 2008

27 May 08

Enterprise 2.0 industry matures as businesses grapple with its potential

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enterprise 2.0 dion hinchcliffe zdnet.com socialtext maturity forecasts pull push 2008

In my studies of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, there are two major methods by which these new applications take hold. The first is the traditional model where the IT department or some part of the business decides at a high level to adopt these new tools and begins the process of evaluation, acquisition, deployment, training and adoption. This is the traditional model that most IT large-scale software acquisitions still use today.

The other model is where individuals take it upon themselves to find the best solutions to a given problem at hand and solve them creatively and collaboratively at a grassroots level. This is becoming increasingly more common, particularly in organizations that are less strongly hierarchical and I’ve identified this story in many large organizations, from AOL’s stunningly rapid viral adoption of MediaWiki (the open source platform that runs Wikipedia) to the story of a large utility company getting ready to roll out Enterprise 2.0 only to find that the majority of departments had already adopted a solution on their own.
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- This second form of adoption is one of the hallmarks of this new model for using software to solve business problems and it speaks volumes to how different they are from the previous generation of applications. So it’s worth spending a little time understanding exactly why and how they are so different. To explain this, I often refer to John Hagel’s excellent work on push vs. pull systems that goes directly to the heart of why 2.0-era software applications seem so different from the software we’ve used before to solve business problems.
  
  In other words, we seem to be coming from a push-based era of command-and-control management and are heading into an era where more and more work is being conducted using a decentralized pull-based model that’s more scalable, efficient, and leads to increasingly innovative outcomes.
- The bottom line is that regardless of what it’s called, the industry around enabling pull-based business models and Enterprise 2.0 applications is going to be growing significantly over the next half-decade. These solutions will come both from the top of the organization as well as from the edge of the organization and will often have to be disentangled at the middle as these new applications cross-over into the highly-regulated “core” infrastructure of IT. The challenge will be learning how to apply these new models effectively to business while not strangling them with the traditional aspects of enterprise software that can greatly limit their potential and have led to poor outcomes and excessive structure in the past.
  
  The good news: Most likely they will be hard to stop as Web 2.0 applications become increasingly commonplace in our organizations over the next few years. The bad news: Most organizations will take years learning how to create environments that fully allow the leverage of these tools.