Appendix A: Opportunity Assessment Survey

Number of knowledge workers?  (worldwide audience for knowledge sharing/KCS)

Geographies: how many locations?  (centers with more than 6 people)

1. Locations and number of people in each?

Company employees vs. partner employees (outsourced)

1. # of company knowledge workers

2. # of outsourced knowledge workers

3. Number of partner/outsource partners

Domains - how many knowledge domains (products, services, processes) are supported? Most organizations support a variety of products or technologies and organize them into groups or families, which in turn have a certain number of knowledge workers associated with supporting a domain.

Support structure

1. How many levels of support do you have? (how many escalations happen between the customer’s first point of contact and the business owner (policy, process owners or product development?)

People and product groups (see the Adoption Planning Matrix worksheet under Adoption Plan and Road Map)

Workload

1. Number of requests  (incidents/cases) closed per month

2. % from customers

3. % internal (if applicable)

4. For internal help desk/service desk, average incidents/user/month

5. Channels of incident/case submission by customers (the total of 1-5 below should be 100%)

   1. % via web submit (click to create/submit an incident)

   2. % via chat

   3. % via email

   4. % via phone call

   5. % other (please describe, i.e. system-generated)

6. Utilization rate? (% of time knowledge workers are working on issues/requests – usually in the neighborhood of 50-65%)

   1. The timeliness of the content (time to publish)

Customer self-service model?

1. Briefly describe the kinds of self-service delivery are used:

   1. Integrated into the application user interface

   2. Automation (detect, report, repair)

   3. Portal or Web based self-service

      1. Customers sign in to use the web self-help (yes/no)

      2. Types of self-help offered? (FAQs, search KB, online docs)

      3. % of customers who use the web before opening an incident?

      4. % of time the customers find what they need on the web?

High level goals: what are the key initiatives for the company/institution this year? (at least the top three)

What is your long term vision for the organization?

How is the organization viewed by other departments within your company?  (ex: very well integrated, it is the voice of the customer, or not integrated with sales but integrated well within development).

Describe any major changes or initiatives that have occurred within the organization during the past three years and any impact on employee or customer satisfaction.

What role does the organization play in contributing to the key company initiatives?

Organizational measures: what are the executive level metrics for the organization?

Problem solving methodology

1. Training on problem solving?  (e.g. Kepner-Tregoe)

2. How is collaboration enabled?  (wikis, blogs, IM, email, phone, face to face, online via web session)

3. Technical mentoring program? (formal, informal, none)

Content development process

1. Is there a knowledge management process in place?

2. Is there a knowledge base (KB)?

3. What are the criteria for what gets put into the KB?

4. How and when is content for the KB created?

5. Is there a life cycle defined for the knowledge articles? (yes, no)

   1. Life cycle states?

6. Do the users of the content have a way to give feedback to the creators of the content?

7. How is the content in the KB kept up-to-date?

8. What measurements are in place to assess:

   1. The usefulness of the content

   2. The completeness of the content (% of what is known versus what gets published?)

Management communications:

1. Methods?

2. Effectiveness- is there a measure for the effectiveness of communications?

   1. Do people understand the goals and objectives of the organization?

   2. Do people understand how they are measured and why?

Performance assessment: how is the knowledge worker contribution measured?

Teamwork: how is teamwork encourage and assessed?

Knowledge worker rewards and recognition: what programs are in place?

Team-based rewards and recognition: what programs are in place?

Observations about the culture:

1. Is it combative/competitive or collaborative?

2. Is the leadership model focused on command and control or alignment: providing task level direction vs influence? (employee engagement, participation, and enablement)

3. To what extent is there trust between knowledge workers?

4. To what extent do the knowledge workers trust and respect their managers?

5. To what extent do the managers trust and respect the knowledge workers?

6. Do people deal with contention and conflict or it is avoided/ignored?

7. If people deal with contention/conflict is it in a constructive way?

8. To what extent are people willing to make commitments and be accountable?

Current tools

1. CRM/case management system(s)

2. Knowledge management system(s)

3. Collaboration tools

4. Other key tools the knowledge workers use