The distribution of "how to" knowledge over Intranets can have a dramatic impact on daily business. BUT … implementing an Intranet and creating web-ready documents does not guarantee that your site will be successful and or safeguard against publishing inaccurate information.

In this article, I'll share some of the experience we've gained at COMPROSE about how Intranet delivery can assist with knowledge transfer. (See the sidebar "About COMPROSE" for more about who we are.) You'll take away field-tested techniques to ensure your corporate web is user-friendly: one that your readers will use, trust, rely on, and revisit.

Protecting & Sharing Organizational Knowledge

Often the least visible but most valuable asset in any organization is working knowledge. This information is typically stored and communicated in the form of business processes, standard operating procedures, corporate policies and other structured documents.

These documents - linked and cross-referenced to job descriptions, work instructions, supplementary drawings, flowcharts, forms, and other supporting information - make up your organization's knowledgebase.

Communicating "how-to" knowledge from worker to worker is one of the most essential and potentially costly undertakings in any organization. In most companies, most of the critical operating knowledge is locked up in the heads of a few subject matter experts. This becomes a problem whenever knowledgeable staff members are sick, retire, or otherwise "go offline."

How can your business protect its investment in the how-to knowledge of its workforce? How does this knowledge get shared and distributed? One of the best ways to safeguard crucial knowledge is to effectively capture it and distribute it over your company's Intranet and secure World Wide Web sites.

Managing "How To" Knowledge

If knowledgebase documentation is so valuable (and sometimes mandated by regulation), why do businesses have such trouble creating and managing this information? Why is knowledge transfer so difficult?

One reason is that the tools and techniques available to manage knowledgebases have been imperfect. Developing standardized content, distributing it, and keeping it up-to-date has been labor-intensive and error-prone, a largely manual process.

We've all seen the 500-page manual with yellowing pages used as a doorstop. It's difficult to read and hasn't been updated in years. No one reads it. It's too hard to find information quickly, and when you do finally find what you're looking for, the instructions are often out-dated and too difficult to follow. One Fortune 100 firm we've worked with provided paper policy and procedure manuals to support its 40,000 operations personnel. Upon conducting a company-wide audit, this firm concluded it was losing $2 million dollars a day due to mistakes and delays to locate "how-to" information in their hard copy manuals.

Particularly in large companies, the documentation review and approval process can be a tremendous bottleneck because policies and procedures must be reviewed and approved by several people. On average, a procedure document goes through six phases:

1. planning
2. development
3. review
4. testing
5. maintenance
6. distribution.

The document may go through a review/maintenance cycle 2-3 times before it can be released.

Tennessee Valley Authority's Brown's Ferry Nuclear Power Plant reported that revision of a typical paper procedure took an average of 24.6 hours to complete because of all the technical reviews, management reviews, filing, documentation, and comment resolution.

Distributed Knowledgebases

Intranets are enabling IT and end-user departments to speed up review cycles, streamline the distribution process, and improve information accessibility. Here's how:

• Employees can get immediate access to accurate "how-to" information directly from their computer without having to ask supervisors or find the information in cumbersome paper manuals.
• The high costs of printing and distributing paper documents can be entirely eliminated or drastically reduced.
• Changes and updates can be disseminated to thousands of readers in just a matter of seconds.
• Online procedure libraries dramatically leverage training expenditures and can reduce training time.

The larger your organization and the more locations you have, the easier it becomes to justify an Intranet knowledgebase implementation. Enterprise access to a Policy and Procedure library on an Intranet makes it possible for any authorized employee to access critical "how-to" knowledge - where ever they happen to be - in a way that is fast, efficient and practical.

The financial and productivity benefits online knowledgebases provide can be further extended by incorporating electronic forms, drawings, sound, and as network bandwidth expands, video.

For example: an employee curious about how much vacation time he has accrued could look up the Company's vacation policy, and can, should he decide it's time to take that trip to Aruba, make a vacation request simply by clicking to the related procedure and form. The completed request can then be forwarded to Human Resources without tying up a representative. Self-service applications of this type are relatively simple to implement and can offer compelling returns.

Other application examples include… Engineers can review, approve and distribute manufacturing process revisions to remote plants instantly; Quality Managers can publish ISO 9000 and other regulatory documentation online; a pharmaceutical firm can maintain an up-to-date library of FDA requirements. The potential of Intranets to enhance knowledge transfer throughout an enterprise is virtually unlimited.

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