Written with Sagit Salmon
The simple answer to the question "End Users – Customers or Partners?" is both. End users are both the customers of the system and its partners in its establishment.
We are all aware of this, we all act this way, and it seems self-evident. It is a condition for success.
But sometimes, something goes wrong along the way...
The Customers
When establishing a knowledge management system, we first decide who our customers are. Who is that end user for whom we are designing the system, whose daily work we want to simplify and optimize?
Partners on the Journey
When we begin to establish the system, we do so with a wide variety of partners: from the business perspective, professional perspective, legal perspective, and so on.
These partners provide immense value in establishing the system, and their knowledge is invaluable. Usually, they have been in the organization for a long time, so they have a more extensive organizational memory than most employees – from work procedures not everyone knows, to legal nuances about what employees can and cannot say to customers. They are defined as content experts.
But we also have additional partners – the end users. Sometimes, during the system's establishment, we forget to treat them as such: whether due to time constraints, out of an assumption that we know what's best for them, or believing that content experts represent them.
Here, the significant gap between partners – content experts, and partners – end users, becomes evident.
The Gap and Bridging It
The Gap
It is important to remember that content experts are not the system's natural users. They are focused on their expertise, not on the day-to-day fieldwork, and their view of end users' work differs significantly from how users experience it.
As a result, they represent the professional world more, and end users – our customers – less.
This gap can lead to presenting materials in a non-optimal way that doesn't suit users, adding irrelevant content, or omitting content that users consider essential.
Bridging
Here are some recommendations for steps to take to bridge the above-described gap, ensuring that end users are indeed partners:
Establishing a Heterogeneous Team: The team of people we rely on for information gathering should include employees from all levels. Alongside veteran organization employees, we should talk to new employees (with a few months/weeks of tenure), and alongside senior employees in key roles, consult with employees in more junior positions (primarily customer service workers, telephone representatives, etc.).
"Going out into the Field": One of the best ways to understand end users' needs is to "experience" their work as much as possible. To do this, we must be together with them, see how their work operates, where the difficulties lie, what is on their daily agenda, and of course, talk to them during their work, if possible, and without disrupting their normal workflow. All this is aimed at better understanding the professional gaps.
Practical Validation: When we finish writing a knowledge item, and sometimes even during the writing process, we pass the item for review and validation by various entities: from professional and business departments to legal departments. At this stage of the process, it is recommended to integrate the end users for whom that item is intended. The user can then examine the item and provide feedback on its structure, the information it contains, its coherence, and even whether it is truly required for their work or can be entirely omitted. This feedback can reduce the likelihood that the item will be useless – either because users do not need it or because its accessibility does not match their needs.
In Summary
In the process of establishing a knowledge management system and writing its content, it is not enough to define the employees for whom we are designing the system. It is crucial to remember that they are not just customers – they are partners. It is important to leverage their input to adapt the system to their genuine needs. We must remember that employees with different tenures and roles have diverse needs, and part of our job is to ensure the system provides an appropriate response for everyone.
In today's fast-paced information world, we already know that knowledge management systems are not just efficient but essential for proper and professional work. However, a system that does not provide the optimal response to end users will quickly become irrelevant and ineffective.
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