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"Just in time, not "just in case" is a great catch-phrase that captures our knowledge management practices here in Rational Client Support. And we thought you might be interested in learning a little more about that.
We believe that knowledge base content (in a support context) is different and should be managed differently from other types of technical content, like documentation, white papers, or manuals. Technical Support content is dynamic and needs to be created, managed and delivered for "just in time" accuracy and freshness. A piece of support content is most valuable within the first 30 days of the problem being discovered. Unfortunately, many organizations take 60-90 days to document and release new solutions, which you can see from this graph is ... sub-optimal.
Let's take a (whimsical, and totally hypothetical) example:
The Acme Co has started fielding support calls about the new bilateral destabilizer functionality, released last week. Sadly, a use case has emerged: if you plan on deploying the bilateral destabilizer underwater (like anyone would EVER do that), you need to make some adjustments in the motor housing.
Acme believes that getting this information out to their clients quickly is far more impactful than investing in a lengthy writing, editorial and review process while clients continue to struggle without this valuable knowledge nugget. Acme certainly doesn't want to continue to field calls about known issues. They want to get the knowledge as close to the clients as soon as possible, so their support engineers can be helping clients with new issues.
We believe the same is true for our business, and client surveys bear this out.
We want to fill knowledge gaps (yours and ours) as quickly as possible. We value accuracy and speed over presentation and format.
That is why we focus on "just in time", not "just in case". Content is created in the context of the issues a client is facing this minute - in the context of a PMR. We're not building an encyclopedia, we are providing solutions. And we create those solutions at the time they are being demanded. We recognize that knowledge is more accurately captured at the moment of using it, not in attempting to recollect it accurately later, which is why we ask our support engineers to capture their knowledge use in the PMR workflow. Capturing knowledge for reuse is not something we do afterwards, if we get a spare minute. It is an integral part of the core business.
Everyone in Rational Client Support is a knowledge worker. And you win.
References: Collective Wisdom, David Kay & Francoise Tournaire
