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Choosing a Knowledge Partner

by | Jan 20, 2020

You’re in the market for a knowledge sharing platform.

While every business is unique and has different goals, there are five characteristics you should keep in mind when evaluating a solution: it’ll need to be quick, comprehensive, intuitive, agile, and future-proof. For some companies, the need for agility will outweigh the need for a quick implementation. For others, future-proof tech is non-negotiable, placing this criterion at the top of the list. 

Standards will certainly vary across industries and use cases, but if your potential knowledge partner’s solution doesn’t meet all of the following benchmarks, we would suggest finding one that can.

Quick.

At first glance, adding a knowledge sharing platform to your organization may seem like a massive undertaking, but the adoption doesn’t have to be as arduous as you might think. Any knowledge partner you’re considering should offer a solution that can go live within your org in a matter of weeks, not quarters. In short, the knowledge solution should be ready when you are—to move as fast (if not faster) as your company moves.

The Capacity knowledge sharing platform can be implemented and providing ROI in as little as one month. To ramp up, we’ll first populate your company’s knowledge base, connect to your mission-critical apps, and/or mine your docs and spreadsheets. We’ll then initiate a soft launch to begin capturing and sharing the tacit knowledge of your org. In this phase, Capacity will ask clarifying questions to be certain it’s sharing the knowledge you were searching for. It’ll also ask whether or not each response was helpful, reinforcing its learning and ensuring you’re continually satisfied. 

Again, this entire process can be carried out in a matter of a few short weeks, so your company can quickly get back to business—with the support of a secure, AI-native knowledge sharing platform.

Comprehensive.

Does your knowledge partner know where knowledge lives? If not, you might want to consider looking elsewhere for a provider who does. Organizational knowledge exists three places: in apps, docs, and in the minds of your team.

An effective knowledge sharing platform must be able to connect to your company’s mission-critical apps—both open and proprietary—to instantly retrieve and surface the knowledge your team needs to excel in their work. For a mortgage broker, this might be an open-source LOS, whereas an investment management firm will need access to their proprietary portfolio management solution. Now, connecting to the former is fairly straightforward. For the latter, that’s where Capacity’s industry-standard developer platform comes into play. Your org’s imagination is the only limit.

But what about your docs and spreadsheets? You shouldn’t have to manually input this intelligence into a knowledge base, and you don’t want your knowledge base to devolve into some bloated document repository. This is why mining is essential for any enterprise knowledge sharing platform. Capacity mines documents, spreadsheets, and web pages—automatically populating the knowledge base with answers, not documents. The best part is that these answers are evergreen, as they change when the doc, sheet, or the page changes.

And the third-place knowledge lives? But how does one tap into the minds of your team? In order to capture tacit knowledge, the knowledge sharing platform must leverage both artificial intelligence and machine learning. One way Capacity achieves this is with our Expert Finder. Anytime a team member asks a question that doesn’t already exist in the knowledge base, the platform calls upon an ensemble of algorithms to pinpoint the person in your org who is most likely to know the answer. The provided answer is then stored to empower all future inquirers.

Intuitive.

It’s critical that your knowledge sharing solution meets your team wherever their workflow may take them. So, whether via messaging platforms like Symphony, Slack, or Microsoft Teams, or apps like Google Drive, Outlook 365, or Salesforce—any platform worth its salt should seamlessly follow. You need instant access to any type of knowledge, regardless of where it or you may be.

When it comes to handling all of that vital company intelligence, the right solution should offer a holistic approach to knowledge management. No matter how well organized, knowledge is useless if it’s inaccessible, siloed off from departments and teams. This is why traditional knowledge management systems—as promising as they once were—never, ever worked. 

Turns out, the key to successful knowledge management is actually knowledge sharing. When intelligence is not only stored, but shared throughout the organization, everyone is empowered, leading to amplified productivity and boosted morale. 

Of course, Capacity delivers effortless tacit knowledge organization with folders, dialogues, or exchanges via intuitive our drag-and-drop interface. And, of course, you’ll enjoy universal, enterprise knowledge access permissions (based upon department, role, geolocation, team member, website visitor, etc.) via the toggle of a button. But with Capacity’s AI-assisted knowledge base, you’ll be doing far less managing and much more sharing. 

Agile.

Potentially just as important as the speed of implementation, it’s vital that your knowledge partner is also agile, able to quickly learn and, if necessary, pivot in order to keep up with the ever-changing needs and capabilities of your organization. Essentially, when you grow, your platform should grow long with you. You shouldn’t have to worry about the integrity of your institutional knowledge when you update or switch apps—that crucial data had better be instantly accessible no matter what your company looks like weeks, months, or even years from now.

Moreover, whether you leverage your knowledge sharing platform internally to empower your team or externally as a resource for customers and clients, your knowledge partner must be able to recognize your pain points and develop a comprehensive solution to resolve them. 

Capacity is not only robust enough to address any and all knowledge issues facing the modern organization, but flexible enough to withstand the pressures of any enterprise. It’s constantly learning and improving, just like your business.

Future-Proof.

While we’re sure that investing in and adopting a knowledge sharing platform is ultimately the right decision, it’s certainly not one to be taken lightly. A lot of organizations have been burned in the past by the enterprise tech flavor of the month (read: knowledge management systems), so it only makes sense that leadership might be somewhat wary to hop on the knowledge sharing train. A great way to mitigate this is by assuring the solution you’re investigating today is built with the technology of the future.

Nearly every other enterprise knowledge sharing platform is just now sprinkling AI on top of their products that were built with yesterday’s tech. 

Not Capacity. 

Capacity is AI-native, meaning that it was built from the ground up on artificial intelligence. We set out from day one to build an AI product, and the 40+ industry-standard and proprietary algorithms in our machine learning ensemble are a testament to this mission. 

The fact of the matter is, AI isn’t going anywhere. The need for instant access to organizational knowledge isn’t going anywhere.

What is going somewhere? The companies that capture and leverage their institution’s intelligence with the help of artificial intelligence. If you’d like to lead your company into the future of work, we would love to be your partner in that journey.