One critical but challenging aspect of success for any project or program is achieving organizational alignment: keeping all key participants and stakeholders on the same page, working towards a common purpose. For many Support and Service organizations, organizational alignment is a major challenge, due to the unique role these organizations play in driving customer interactions.

As a focal customer touch point, the support organization needs to be a hub for many sources of information across various groups and departments of activity. Such information needs to be modeled and managed towards delivery of a relevant and efficient service experience. However, much of the needed information may in fact be owned by different departments and managed for different purposes. This creates a natural tension between those who may have ownership of information for one purpose, and those responsible for vending it out into specific service experiences. Even seemingly simple relationships such as those between the front-end company website and the support organization can pose major challenges in achieving alignment towards a common strategy about what knowledge should be created, and how.

Think about your own support organization, and the groups involved in ownering and developing the knowledge that drives the service experience. Ask yourself these five questions about alignment:

  1. Are there shared goals for information delivery across key knowledge creating groups? Do the groups even know or discuss their mutual and divergent goals for information, and work to rationalize how those goals can all be met concurrently? Do leaders in these groups share a defined vision about how knowledge is to be used, and what their groups’ shared responsibility is, or do they focus primarily on getting their own job done”?
  2. Are there any organizational structures that support and sustain alignment of knowledge development activities across organizations? For example, do executives in Products, Web/Marketing, Support and Sales have mechanisms to assure mutual commitment to meeting each other’s need for information? Or is each group siloed organizationally, such that knowledge sharing is at best semi-supported by mid-level people, and at worst randomly done whenever someone reaches out for some specific need?
  3. Do the people responsible for knowledge delivery tools and technologies share clear specifications and commitments for how information should be structured with those on the business side, responsible for evolving the information itself? Or does the technology group largely define content in relation to pre-defined paths and organizational methods that represent how it’s always been done?
  4. Is there clear alignment of purpose between those who CONSUME the content (such as support agents) and those who CREATE content (such as copywriters, documentation and technical writers, etc.)? Or does Support just ‘do the best it can’ with information immutably handed down from inside the business?
  5. Are the program managers, project personnel, strategic stakeholders, SME’s and technology representatives on the same page regarding specifically what knowledge is created for each evolving service knowledge delivery initiative? Or do they defer decisions on what knowledge flows through a system to one or two groups, or worse, just make their own independent decisions on how information should be modeled and used for each program?

Answering these questions honestly can uncover the biggest areas of misalignment in your organization around how knowledge is developed and used. Symptoms of misalignment can be clear but also subtle.  Each aspect of misalignment costs the organization time, money, quality, and perhaps most importantly acts as a strong inhibitor of achieving optimal delivery of knowledge to drive superior services.  Issues can include:

  1. Major delays in getting content ‘out the door’ due to missed or unclear commitments between dependent groups.
  2. Competing, conflicting or inaccurate information produced between groups around the same subject.
  3. Sub-optimization of knowledge structures due to constraints on the ability to fully model information to drive an optimal service experience.  Symptoms such as poor search results, confusing browse, overly complex scripts, etc. all arise when information is not well modeled towards the users’ knowledge access tasks.
  4. Excessive time spent re-writing or re-purposing information across departments when no clear strategy for information sharing exists.

In Part 2 of this blog we’ll examine some of the things one can do to start re-aligning the organization towards better knowledge development & delivery. It all starts from the FRONT of the organization, not the back: the SERVICE EXPERIENCE we want to deliver! Stay tuned –

 

(John Chmaj is Chief Knowledge Strategist, KANA)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related posts:

  1. 10 signs that your Search Engine’s become stupid!