Business Challenges
When your company can share expertise and know-how across the organization, help practitioners find, use, prioritize and share information, manage content securely, and make the social web available, you turn information and expertise into saleable knowledge.
Effective knowledge management allows people in your organization to collaborate, communicate, and stay connected and up-to-date on relevant information in your field. Some challenges in knowledge management for Professional Services include
Finding and connecting expertise – Difficulty in making real-time connections with experts inhibits value delivery and slows decision making. Professional turnover and an aging workforce can make finding the right resource even more difficult.
Too much information, not enough context – It’s hard to find relevant case information without reliable sources, duplication and content silos. Practitioners may make better use of information when the information is organized effectively.
Secure information sharing – Content leakage and ineffective retention poses a risk for the firm. Content needs to be protected as records with flexible compliance tools to handle multiple schemes for retention, disposition, and legal holds.
Common insights – Geographic distances and conflicting taxonomies impede collaboration between teams and across organizations. For example, in construction, a “Framed Roof” in one part of an organization may mean “Rafters” in another part of the organization. Having tools that deliver results based on relativity and concepts help deliver and cross that divide.
Solutions
To address these challenges, you need ways to manage expertise and make finding that expertise easy. Having a secure, definitive source to go to ensures a common approach to finding the right person with the right skills. The right search tools can use information to help refine information, which makes it easier to get to the right content. Microsoft Knowledge Management solutions enable professional service organizations to share expertise and know-how, help practitioners manage information, share information securely, and make the social web real with:
FAST™ Search Server for expertise and content search.
- - Document preview
- Federated search
- People search
Office Improved ability to navigate, retain and share content from within the authoring environment.
- - Backstage
- Document information panel
- Rights management
SharePoint Server to easily navigate, retain and share content
- Colleagues
- Dynamic social communities
- Enterprise content management
- Managed Metadata (Term Store)
- Mysites
- Role based access
- Tag clo
- Knowledge Management in the Cloud – The cloud provides improved ability to access information sources, manage information and store content; examples include improved data accessibility (e.g., Dallas/Pinpoint Services) and taking advantage of the proliferation of social tools and interoperating with business applications (e.g., Facebook connector for Outlook).
