|
Page 3 of 8
Making Customer Knowledge Management work
Michael Charney, (2005) Vice President of Professional Services for Kamoon, Inc., states that to maximise intellectual capital within an organisation a strategy is required for combining tacit (unspoken or inferred) and explicit (open or overt) knowledge management practices. Such a strategy aims to link the right people together at the right time in order to accomplish specific work with important "know-how" being transferred through mapping the right people, processes, knowledge, and technology. Stephen Denning (2000) is cited in his description of the tacit and explicit components of knowledge management. Denning writes that, "explicit knowledge is the only knowledge that is visible and so it is tempting to focus on it. And yet we know that most of our real knowledge is tacit." Truly tacit knowledge he believes, is transferred through human-to-human contact, and by sharing ideas and experiences. Effective knowledge management and thus customer knowledge regarding customers' needs, wants, and expectations of the products and services provided by an organisation consists of both tacit and explicit knowledge transfer, and needs to be managed in order to gain maximum organisational and customer impacts in the long term.
Managing customer knowledge involves a range of activities including:
- Acquiring, capturing, and storing data;
- Developing information by combining data; examining its context, employing theory;
- Creating knowledge and understanding based on this information;
- Disseminating this knowledge across the whole organisation; and
- Incorporation of new learning and ideas into day-to-day business processes.
Lesser et al, (2000) - from an IBM research team - emphasise the critical transformation that is required to take collected raw data and to turn this into valuable insights associated with innovative products and services. The strategies that they have identified to allow this move to occur include:
- Using extended dialogues between customers and organisations. Such dialogues are defined as probing, collaborative, and purposeful explorations of customers' ideas. The focus is not solely upon the purchase, or use of products, but rather on developing an understanding of customer values and what drives their decisions and actions.
- Developing internal communities which share knowledge across organisational boundaries. Customer knowledge communities help to build a unified approach to understanding customers. The focus of these communities is the development of member capabilities, building and exchanging knowledge, and creating a shared culture that is directed toward understanding customers.
- Enabling knowledge to be used at the point of customer contact. Access to well-structured information systems for both staff and customers can facilitate sharing experiential knowledge.
- Providing leadership support for customer knowledge activities. Enterprise-wide leadership is critical to maintain the investment of resources required for customer knowledge dialogues, organisational communities, and CKM information systems to succeed. Leaders can create a customer-focused operation by demonstrating the conviction that customer knowledge management is the key to implementing successful organisational performance changes.
Computer systems have also greatly assisted in simplifying the gathering and analysis of information and knowledge that has been sourced from customers, and has enabled such work to be carried our more efficiently and cost effectively. Accordingly, because the collation and analysis of information can be done in a timely manner follow up actions can be put into practice with minimal delay.
|
Home 
Management Brief Reports