Turning Information Into Action
The Client's Challenge
A Fortune 20 consumer packaged goods company was having difficulty proactively identifying, understanding, preparing for, and managing issues that impacted the company. The client asked DMA Associates to diagnose its problem and implement a solution.
The Diagnosis
We found the company's existing enterprise knowledge management processes and systems were circulating inconsistent, incomplete, and stale information about industry issues. In most cases, the format of the information made it difficult for different staff to glean the information they needed for decision-making.
In addition, few employees knew of or leveraged the key personnel who were experts on specific issues, so there was widespread duplication of effort at the corporate and subsidiary levels. Because none of the knowledge generated was captured, past efforts were rarely leveraged when identifying and managing new issues.
Collectively, these problems fostered a widespread misunderstanding and prevented the company from quickly responding to industry challenges as a single, fully-informed entity.
How DMA Associates Helped
We led the development of an online issues management system leveraging ContextUs and KnowledgeConnect. Together, the two products enabled not only information gathering and organization, but customized the presentation of information for each user. For the first time, employees found information about emerging issues in the context of their job requirements.
Additionally, the system enabled in-house experts to share their knowledge online. Through a web-based system, employees could direct questions to relevant experts. Collaborative components of the system captured online question and answer sessions, automatically organizing and archiving them as FAQ pages.
The ContextUs software's adaptive intelligence capabilities enable a system that presented relevant live corporate information and experts to users. It gave users broad views of issues and provided them the ability to quickly drill-down to specific points of interest. ContextUs correlated how similar issues have been handled and how effective past measures were. This helped employees quickly understand an issue in the context of their job function and promoted speedy, informed action.
Finally, our project team realized that some key users of the system were unlikely to shift from a paper environment to a digital one. To serve this audience, we created a function that generates and prints newsletters on issues relevant to these users.
The DMA Associates software suite has enabled the staff to succinctly get up-to-speed on emerging issues. The solution lets employees at all levels within the company, from senior management to consultants, quickly make decisions and take action together.