The Business of Knowledge

Written by QAD’s newly appointed Chief Knowledge Officer, Jim Kirkley

Creation of the role of Chief Knowledge Officer at QAD is recognition that the delivery of knowledge through our software and services is really what we are all about: We are in the Knowledge business. There is an increasing acknowledgement of the importance of Knowledge Management as a discipline and domain in the market today. It is not something new, but it is getting more important all the time. The notion of the "knowledge worker" is a common concept now, therefore the concept of Knowledge Management, which relates to the ability to share, protect, store, find, refine and acquire knowledge, is becoming critical to businesses that consider knowledge to be their stock-in-trade.

In my new role as Chief Knowledge Officer, I recognize that knowledge is not confined to one department or group within QAD. Knowledge is truly cross-functional. Nor is knowledge exclusively confined to QAD; how arrogant we would be to assume we know it all. In fact when Pam Lopker founded QAD she openly and proudly admits borrowing heavily from knowledge and know-how gleaned from her early customers. We depend on our customers today to help us define product functionality through our Development Group and Joint Development processes. However it is useful and interesting to explore how knowledge is shared within a single organization and between organizations.

I see three modes of knowledge sharing occurring at QAD, with our customers and elsewhere: ad hoc, semi-formal and formal.

• Ad hoc is a one-time occurrence. You have a question, you know who to ask, you ask and get an immediate answer. For this purpose a tool like e-mail or chat is ideal. The drawback is, this knowledge event is lost to posterity.
• The semi-formal mode involves posting your question to a message board or forum. Chances are someone has already asked the question and it has been answered. If you spend the time to search the forum you may find the answer. However many times the questions asked are vague and there may be several answers given, some of which may be wrong or misleading. But given time, you can usually find the answer. If you cannot, you may ask the question and usually within a few days (minutes on some message boards) you will get a reply or two. Forums are good because they preserve for posterity the shared knowledge. The best boards have a rating system where the best answers bubble to the top. They are still difficult to use because they are loosely organized and relatively unstructured.
• Formal modes are called knowledge bases. QAD KnowledgeBase, accessible through our ServiceLinQ Web site (support.qad.com) is such a product. A knowledge base catalogs and tags knowledge to make it easier to search and locate. Of course this takes energy and time on the part of someone. Knowledge bases are good because they make knowledge easier to find, but they tend to lag behind some of the less structured modes in the currency or freshness of the knowledge.

The ideal model is to have all three modes—ad hoc, semi-formal and formal—integrated together. Knowledge can progress "up the tree" so to speak; ad hoc queries can be captured for posterity and enshrined in the discussion forum for others to see and comment on. Forums can be combed and culled to locate excellent questions and answers that can then be edited, categorized and tagged within the knowledge base, etc.

This kind of model is useful internally for knowledge sharing within an organization and between organizations. The same tools can be used for both, with appropriate firewalling of information. This is the direction that QAD is heading. We have just introduced a new chat application within our Support organization that promises to improve the speed of response to customer questions. The next step is to create a viable and lively set of discussion forums and link them with our knowledge base.

As this effort progresses, I will keep you informed in future news letters. Meanwhile feel free to contact me at jrk@qad.com.