DOCUMENT Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 19)

are inherently messy and chaotic — it is very difﬁcult to describe process steps, especially when depending on experts who tap into their own knowledge and experience to come up with an answer. Transactions, however, are less ambiguous by nature: They describe something that is rules-based and structured. System designers spend much of their time understanding how people accomplish their tasks and building the algorithms to support the many possible decision scenarios and leverage structured interaction mechanisms and validation rules to guide the user down a speciﬁc deﬁned path. But what happens when a deﬁned process does not cover all possible sets of user behavior (which it cannot possibly do, as users are endlessly creative in ways they can circumvent logic and avoid common sense)? Typically, the system will throw an error and the transaction will fail. This means one of two things: lost revenue or increased costs. If a user fails to complete the task — perhaps the purchase of an item or application for insurance — he or she may abandon the transaction and never come back. If the user is unable to complete the transaction but doesn’t have the choice to “walk,” the only other choice is to pick up the phone and call the company. Assuming the automated voice response system follows similar logic to the online application (typical of account inquiry systems), the user will ﬁnally end up speaking with a live operator at signiﬁcant cost to the organization. So where does this leave collaboration? The issue here is that many times the user is forced to jump from one end of the spectrum (transaction processing/automated validation / structured workﬂow) to the other (speaking with a live operator). What Makes These “Collaborative Tools?” Are these just typical information sources that support end users, or is there something truly different about the use of collaborative tools within transaction processing? The answer to this is related to how well collaboration and knowledge mechanisms are integrated into the process. A buzzword from a couple of years back was “contextual collaboration” — the integration of structured and unstructured sources of information that allowed users to make better use of knowledge, whether those were tacit knowledge sources (people and experts) or explicit (information that is written down). Examples of this included the access to the correct expert to assist a user in making a purchase decision or providing data sources to support team and individual decision making. But the issue is the same: How do we provide the most appropriate information to a user in their speciﬁc task or work context? This is being illustrated with the latest developments in search integration. Search tools are now linking structured and unstructured data in new ways (the “Googleization” of information). People want a single place where they can enter simple search queries and magically get the answer. The problem is that information and applications have grown more complex as users’ expectations have gone the other direction — they expect simpler access to more complex information. One answer to this conundrum is better integration of collaboration into structured and transactional processes. This is in no way a silver bullet. Essentially, we are simply subterfuging the challenge. I like to say simplicity is hard — hard for the developer and system designer. It is important to think of collaboration as a set of tools that can improve the speed of getting answers — both internally and externally. Knowledge is not captured, organized and managed per se. Knowledge is a ﬂow of information into the correct places, and speeding and facilitating that ﬂow allows for improved decision making, whether on the part of the customer or on the part of people that serve the customer. Ultimately, this allows for the fundamental things that all businesses are looking for: reduced costs, increased sales or both. When considering the role of collaboration, look for ways to keep customers from getting frustrated and looking toward the competition or ways to keep them from picking up the phone and incurring additional support and service costs. These are hard results that can be measured against baselines with the correct linkage to tools and processes. Collaboration is not new, but just like there are endless ways for users to circumvent structure, there are endlessly creative ways to help them solve problems. Seth Earley is the founder and president of Earley & Associates, a consulting ﬁrm, specializing in content management and collaboration systems. For more information, please email him at seth@earley.com or visit www.earley.com. ■ The True Value of Collaboration: Call Deﬂection From the continuum example (see chart), the role of collaborative tools is call deﬂection, providing access to tools and systems that the user can apply to their particular problem before contacting the call center. We want the user to access increasingly costly avenues only after lower-cost mechanisms have been exhausted. There is still a relative cost to these tools, but general trends still remain true. For example, instant messaging support is less expensive than voice interactions, since a single support person can easily handle multiple instant message sessions. Online discussions require moderators but contain a great deal of user-generated content (a typically cited Web 2.0 example). Knowledge bases require content tagging and cleansing, FAQs (a form of knowledge base) require updates and management, etc. However, these mechanisms are all less costly than a call center. Even mundane transactional documents, such as billing and account statements, can contain access to collaborative tools for users in order to support their information and self-service needs. The more important piece of the puzzle is understanding speciﬁc user tasks and processes and performing usability tests to determine exact scenarios that need to be supported and the most effective means to support them. The Structure Continuum Live operator interaction Instant messages Online discussions Knowledge bases/ FAQs Interactive voice response Transaction/ workﬂow systems LESS STRUCTURED PROCESSES MORE STRUCTURED PROCESSES www.DOCUMENTmedia.com april.08 document 19 http://www.earley.com http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Document Magazine - April 2008

Document Magazine - April 2008 Contents Editor's View The Research Desk The Response Center BPM: Improving the Way You Process Contributing Writers Mapping Out Performance Build the Context Before You Move into the House of ECM Taking On the Big 3 The Human Connection Addressing Your Addresses Don't Call Us, We'll Call You The Mulitplying Image Recognizing Accuracy New Products Calendar Advertisers

Document Magazine - April 2008

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