Making It Work

Demiral spent a lot of time working with the Level 3 agents to make their solutions less complex and streamline the review process. “We had to go through two iterations of how to organize and present the content,” Demiral says. “Customers tend to think in terms of the product and then the problem. But engineers often think about the problem first and then the product.”

The result: Customers often wouldn’t fully understand the solution. At the same time, Marconi had to work at easing Level 3 agents’ concerns that making them responsible for reviewing solution content would suddenly turn them into technical writers.

Marconi confronted cultural issues as well. “Business needs are different in different parts of the world,” says Demiral. “What may be normal business practice for Americans may not be common elsewhere.” In Europe, for example, the value of the KnowledgeBase system was not readily accepted. But once employees there saw that customers could use the system to solve some of their own problems, they got on board. Such an experience has been incorporated into how Marconi approaches KM. “We sometimes have to introduce the idea of knowledge management over time, validate it, and then move forward,” Demiral says.

To ensure that agents continue contributing new knowledge to KnowledgeBase, Marconi uses rewards. Besides bonuses, knowledge contributors receive recognition during meetings and in a newsletter. “Rewards help feed this culture,” Breit says. “Peer pressure also plays a role. Everyone wants to contribute because it’s the right thing to do. You also have to make sure that the system works well and that employees use it long enough to see it work. It has to be embedded in training and fully integrated into daily operations so that it just becomes part of how you do business.”

On the Front Line

Tactics Online complements the new system. “The data stored in KnowledgeBase are specific troubleshooting tips and hints on our various product lines,” says Zehra Demiral, manager of knowledge management systems. “Tactics Online, on the other hand, is more of a doorway for customers to come into our customer support organization. From there, customers can access KnowledgeBase or their service requests or our online training manuals.”

Technical support agents now rely on KnowledgeBase for the latest solutions to customers’ product and systems problems. Level 1 agents answer all incoming calls, solve customers’ problems when possible, record the calls in the company’s CRM system and transfer the more difficult calls up the line to Level 2 agents. Level 2 agents, meanwhile, are the heart of the organization, composing about 70 percent of the technical support organization. They handle the more difficult calls and troubleshoot and diagnose equipment and network problems. “They’re the majority of our knowledge users and contributors,” says Breit. “They write up a synopsis of the call and feed it into KnowledgeBase [on an ongoing basis] so that other agents can refer to the solution later.”

After Level 2 agents submit their knowledge “raw” to a holding queue, Level 3 agents confirm the accuracy of the information, make any necessary changes and then submit the document to Demiral. (Level 3 agents also act as consultants, helping Level 2 agents solve problems and serving as intermediaries between the agents and the company’s engineering departments.) The entire process of updating the KnowledgeBase system with a new solution typically takes between three days and two weeks.

Changing Roles

As Breit anticipated, implementing KnowledgeBase has changed the agents’ roles. Level 1 agents, for example, now do more in-depth troubleshooting because they have more information available at their fingertips. In fact, they solve twice as many calls themselves (50 percent instead of 25 percent) in a shorter time (10 minutes versus 30 minutes). Since Level 1 agents can handle more calls, this group has doubled in size during the past two years.

The transition wasn’t quite as painless, however, for the Level 2 and Level 3 agents. Indeed, their roles changed significantly. “Rather than simply submitting HTML pages to Tactics Online, they were now asked to analyze the problems in a very procedural way and create diagnostic ’trees,’” says Breit. “That’s a more analytical way to think through a problem. Most of these guys had thought in terms of ’what is the fastest way to solve a problem’ rather than ’what is the most efficient way to solve a problem.’”

With hundreds of people submitting solutions, Marconi tended to get a lot of wheel reinvention. “There can be five or six ways to solve the [same] problem, but there’s one way that’s most efficient,” Breit says. To unearth and disseminate the most efficient solutions, agents were required to flowchart each of their solutions for the first three months following KnowledgeBase’s launch. “It’s amazing how many [agents] were unconscious of their own methodologies,” says Breit. “It was somewhat painful, but they eventually felt they benefited because they understood how they solve problems.”

As a result, agents now create technical solutions for customers in the most efficient?and logical?way possible instead of simply offering a “quick and dirty” solution. Think of the difference between simply being told what keys to strike on your PC and being taught how your software works and the logic behind executing a certain sequence of keystrokes. Once you actually understand how the product works, you can use the software more effectively and resolve more problems yourself.

Agents also had to change the way they present the solutions to customers. “We wanted to provide a collaboration tool for employees and a library source for our customers,” says Demiral. “Engineers wanted to provide a lot of detailed information yet we needed a degree of simplicity for customers. Most of the time, the immediate focus is on what a great collaboration tool this is and how it overcomes geographical distance among agents. Then I have to remind [agents] that this is a tool that we want customers to use and that they’ll have to organize, write and present the content with customers in mind.”

Acquisition Spree Leaves

Marconi in Need of

Knowledge Management (KM)

When Marconi went on a shopping spree and acquired 10 telecommunications companies over a three-year period, it faced a serious challenge: How could the $3 billion manufacturer of telecommunications equipment ensure that its technical support agents knew enough about newly acquired technology to provide quick and accurate answers to customers on the phone? And how could Marconi bring new agents up to speed on all the company’s products?

Marconi’s technical support agents?500 engineers scattered in 14 call centers around the globe?field approximately 10,000 questions every month about the company’s products. Before the acquisitions, agents had relied on Tactics Online, an extranet where they and customers could search for frequently asked questions and text documents. As new agents and products joined the company’s ranks, Marconi wanted to supplement the website with a more comprehensive knowledge management system. As engineers from the newly acquired companies came on board, however, they were hesitant to share their knowledge about the products they had been supporting. “They felt that their knowledge was a security blanket that helped guarantee their jobs,” says Dave Breit, director of technology and R&D for managed services in Warrendale, Pa. “With all of the acquisitions, it was essential that we all avoid hoarding knowledge and share it instead.”

At the same time, Marconi wanted to streamline its customer service organization by making more of its product and systems information available directly to customers and shortening the length of customer calls. “We wanted to leverage the Web for customer self-service versus increasing the number of agents,” Breit says. “We also wanted to provide our frontline engineers [who interact directly with customers] with more information more quickly so that they could resolve more calls faster.”

Building on a KM Foundation

When Marconi began evaluating knowledge management technologies in the spring of 1998, the concept of sharing knowledge among agents was nothing new. Agents were already accustomed to working in teams of three or four people, gathering in war room fashion to solve customers’ technical issues. And a year earlier, Marconi had started basing a percentage of agents’ quarterly bonuses on the amount of knowledge they submitted to Tactics Online as well as their involvement with mentoring and training other agents. “Each agent was expected to teach two training classes and write 10 FAQs to earn their full bonus,” says Breit. “When we brought new companies online, the new agents received the same bonus plan. This approach allowed us to build a very open knowledge-sharing environment.”

To augment Tactics Online, Marconi chose software from ServiceWare Technologies, in part because its technology would integrate easily with the company’s Remedy CRM system, which agents use to log incoming calls from customers and track other customer interactions. In addition, says Breit, Marconi wanted its agents to populate its existing Oracle database of product information.

Breit’s division spent six months implementing the new system and training agents. The system?dubbed KnowledgeBase?is linked to the company’s CRM system and is powered by the Oracle database. The integrated view of Marconi’s customers and products provides agents with a comprehensive history of interactions. Technical support agents can, for example, put markers in the database and immediately pick up at the point where the customer last spoke with another agent.

Built From Scratch

Marino chose this sales team as the portal pilot because it was working with a Frito-Lay client that Marino says is an industry leader in marketing, product promotions and merchandising. The sales team was dispersed across the country, making it ideal for determining whether the portal would succeed in bridging geographic boundaries when it came to sharing internal information.

Based on input from the pilot team, Marino’s group established three goals for the Frito-Lay portal: to streamline knowledge, exploit customer-specific data and foster team collaboration. He brought in Navigator Systems, a consultancy based in Dallas, which has worked with Frito-Lay in the past and had some experience building knowledge management portals. Navigator built a prototype in about three months using technologies previously approved by Frito-Lay’s IS department, including Lotus Domino, BusinessObjects’ WebIntelligence, Java and IBM’s DB2 database. Since there was no advanced search engine in use at the company, Navigator’s consultants recommended a tool called Autonomy, a natural language search engine that allows users to search information in different repositories such as intranet sites, PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets, says Todd Price, the principal consultant at Navigator who worked on the implementation. “The search engine enabled the person to get to all the disparate data sets through one view,” explains Marino.

Marino and Price essentially had to start from scratch when it came to populating the portal. “Never before at Frito-Lay had they tried to capture expertise systematically in one place,” notes Price. Marino and Price did an audit within the company and then created expertise profiles on the portal so that sales staff in the field would have an easy way to learn who’s who at headquarters in Plano. That way, people who have expertise in areas such as promotion planning, activity planning, costing or new product announcements can be readily tracked down and contacted for information. “In a large organization, that’s critical, because there’s a wealth of knowledge. But for someone new in the field it takes a lot of tries to figure out who they are,” Price says.

Security was also a big concern because the pilot team would be working with confidential client information. The particular customer supported by the pilot team “had custom information about sales performance that they shared with members of the Frito-Lay team, but we were contracted not to let that information get outside the team that worked with that customer,” says Marino. His group built the portal so that different sections of it were password-protected, ensuring that only the pertinent users could get to the confidential information.

The portal went live in January 2000. Since then, three additional sales teams, or customer communities as they are called internally, have been given access to the portal with different content–including research abstracts and what Marino calls performance scorecards, which evaluate account performance. “If somebody in sales or market research did a study in a particular area like private-label trends, [the user] would be able to click to that abstract and get a summary of that study.” Users access the portal, known as the Customer Community Portal (CCP), through a Netscape Navigator browser and enter their name and password on the Frito-Lay intranet.

Results

The CCP has paid off with increased sales. “What we expected to see was that the pilot team would outperform others in terms of sales and profitability,” Marino says. While he declined to give figures, he says the test team doubled the growth rate of the customer’s business in the salty snack category. “The retailer is happy because they’re doing more business in their market, and we’re doing business at a faster growth rate with this customer than with other customers,” Marino says.

It also made the sales team happier. For example, the pilot team members reside in 10 different cities, so “the tool has become extremely valuable for communication” and helps cut down on travel, says Joe Ackerman, a customer team leader in the sales division based in Portland, Ore. A year after implementing the portal, the pilot group has been able to share documents concurrently instead of having to send faxes around the country to different offices. “We have to manipulate large amounts of data, and now we can look at it online versus having to have somebody physically travel to the retail customer. It’s almost a distance learning tool as much as anything else,” he says.

The CCP has also helped foster a sense of camaraderie and relationship building. For example, the portal homepage lists the team members’ birthdays. People can also share best practices–on anything under the sun. If someone developed an effective sales presentation for a potential customer in Boston, a salesperson in San Francisco could co-opt the information. Salespeople can also find the latest news about their customers, and there’s an automatic messaging feature that informs team members who is online.

For Ackerman, the portal has also been an invaluable tool for helping him assess employee skill sets, because each salesperson is required to catalog his or her strengths and areas of expertise. “As a team leader, it helps me analyze where people’s gaps might be without having to travel to another member’s location,” he says.

The portal has also helped boost employee retention rates, says Ackerman. Turnover used to be terrible, he says, because salespeople felt pressured to find vital information and communicate with the rest of the team. Marino adds that salespeople felt frustrated and disconnected because there was no way to efficiently collaborate with the rest of their group unless they flew into a central location.

Since the portal has been in place, not one person on the 15-member team has left. Part of that can directly be attributed to the portal, says Ackerman, “because it helps build the connection.” In company surveys, salespeople previously complained about geographic constraints and how they didn’t feel connected and part of a team, he says.

The portal has proven so successful that its use has now become a PepsiCo initiative, says Marino. That means it will soon have added functionality so that employees across all three divisions–including Tropicana–can take advantage of product performance information on a jointly shared customer like a supermarket, he says. Marino says the different PepsiCo divisions will have the ability to copromote and comerchandise multiple products that are consumed together–such as carbonated beverages and salty snacks–to drive greater sales internally, naturally and for its customer. That’s talking more than just peanuts

Case Study:

Frito-Lay Sales Force Sells More

Through Information

Collaboration.

It takes more than good flavor and a heartY crunch to sell the salty snacks churned out at Frito-Lay. Corporate executives knew that capturing best practices and corporate information would give employees something they could sink their teeth into. But information was scattered around the company in disparate systems, and there was no easy way for the geographically dispersed sales force to get at it.

“We had knowledge trapped in files everywhere,” says Mike Marino, vice president of customer development at Frito-Lay, an $8.5 billion division of PepsiCo in Plano, Texas. Marino says that he knew if the 15-member sales team could only access the same information, it would solve its ongoing problems with information sharing and communication.

For example, multiple salespeople would ask the corporate sales, marketing and operations staff for the same types of information and data, such as current private-label trends in their snack category or research on people’s shopping behavior, he says. The result? Frito-Lay’s support staff ended up performing the same tasks over and over. If that information lived in a central, easily accessible spot, the salespeople could access it as needed.

Additionally, Marino says, much valuable knowledge was squirreled away on each salesperson’s system. There were many idiosyncratic methods of capturing information, “none of which were terribly efficient,” he says.

Marino says the sales team also lacked a place for brainstorming and collaboration online. “If somebody got a piece of research and wanted to get input from account executives in Baltimore and Los Angeles, the ability to collaborate [online] just wasn’t there,” he says.

The answer, Marino’s group realized, was to build a knowledge management portal on the corporate intranet. A KM portal is a single point of access to multiple sources of information and provides personalized access. Companies are starting to pay attention to portals because they offer an efficient way to capture information, says Carl Frappaolo, executive vice president and cofounder of the Delphi Group, a consultancy in Boston. A KM portal at Frito-Lay would give the sales department a central location for all sales-related customer and corporate information and cut down on the time it took to find and share research. In addition to different types of information about the team’s customers–including sales, analysis and the latest news–the portal would contain profiles on who’s who in the corporation, making finding an internal expert a snap.

A Big Bang for Education

Talk about a KM explosion at Tufts. Although there is little quantitative evidence so far that the system is directly improving students’ comprehension or increasing exam scores, anecdotal evidence abounds that the project is creating value. Lee says students report they’re learning material faster and more easily. Faculty say that lectures have become more interactive. The system also seems to be transforming traditional, didactic medical education at Tufts into a model of self-directed study more common in other graduate school programs. “That’s what’s so exciting about this,” says Anthony Schwartz, associate dean for academic and outreach programs at the veterinary school. “Students learn best when you provide them with this kind of structure—with links to where you would like them to go—and then turn them loose. They’re not only going to learn what they need to get through school, but they’re going to explore areas they couldn’t otherwise.”

Tufts is the only health sciences school in the country that has integrated its curricula so that students can transcend course-, discipline- and profession-specific boundaries. “The interdisciplinary implications of this system are very powerful,” Schwartz says. For example, medical students studying salmonella in humans can link to veterinary school material to learn about the source of the bacteria, its effect on chickens and cattle, ways it is transmitted to humans, prevention and treatment. “These kinds of concepts can be taught not by new courses, but by cross-disciplinary linkages so that students have a direct understanding,” he adds.

More than 100,000 connections between courses and atoms of content within the system help students understand. Because the data is entered in Lego-block-like chunks, changing or updating course material is much easier than manually re-creating entire courses on paper. “If you’re teaching Shakespeare, you don’t have to worry about Shakespeare becoming obsolete,” Metz says. “But medical and science [information] could have a short half-life, so that when it’s time to update course material, it makes sense to do so in a modular, digital form.”

The beauty of the database is its flexibility, says Lee. “The model allows you to take chunks of information, manipulate it, reuse it and put it together in a way that suits your own unique needs. I think that’s what’s going to be so attractive to other schools.”

Dozens of universities from as far away as South Africa have visited Tufts to see demonstrations of the system and its potential applications for medical education. The AAMC is exploring the idea of creating a national database of health sciences information, which would be available to all U.S. medical schools, based on Tufts’ system. “It doesn’t make any sense to have every medical school in the country replicate this,” says Dr. Michael E. Whitcomb, senior vice president of the division of medical education, AAMC. “If we could develop something that all medical schools could use, it would be a tremendous advantage.”

Eaton, Lee and Metz are thrilled that what began as a grassroots effort may benefit not only Tufts, but also the greater scientific community. “Part of our mission is to go beyond what we do on our campus and to make a contribution to the world,” says Metz. “So we’re very committed to the beginnings of a movement to use the system as a national model. It’s part of what our mission is about.”

Bullitt, who is in the middle of a clinical rotation in adult internal medicine this semester, continues to rely on the Health Sciences Database website for long-distance learning—and to cure any future spells of medical student amnesia. Even after she graduates in 2002, she and other Tufts graduates can continue to use the system if they are staff members at any of Tufts’ affiliated institutions. One of the most important lessons she has learned at Tufts, she says, is how to use technology as a tool to continue her education—a lifelong task for medical professionals.

“That’s the world we live in,” she says. “You take what you’ve learned from your education and constantly add to it, and it’s nice to build that habit now. This system isn’t going to be a textbook I’m going to throw out in a couple of years because it’s no longer accurate. It’s always evolving.”

© 2008 CXO Media Inc.

Down from the Ivory Tower

Call Elizabeth Eaton a pioneer, but she prides herself on being a pragmatist. The director of Tufts’ health sciences library learned in the late 1980s of a new project by the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Md., to explore the use of technology in library information management at medical schools. Her mission: to get Tufts’ foot in the door. The project meant obtaining the backing of two of the nation’s most powerful medical organizations. It also meant money—big money. Eaton wanted Tufts to stake its claim to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in NLM grants.

Eaton got what she was after. Tufts received its first $241,000 grant in 1990. The medical school also chipped in startup funds. To decide how to use the money, she convened a planning team, including members from the health sciences library, the educational dean’s office, IS and administration. The team held a marathon of more than three dozen focus-group sessions with faculty and students to find out how technology could help them teach and learn. From the long wish list, one item leapt out: a library of digital images of laboratory slides that faculty use to teach students how to identify cells, tissues and microorganisms.

Each semester, demand for these slides created chaos, especially just before exams, when hundreds of students would descend on the library to view the only two slide carousels that the university could afford to create. Faculty members were also distraught because over the years many slides—some of them rare and more than a century old—had been destroyed, misfiled or had disappeared from the library altogether.

The decision was unanimous: They would build a digital image library. The team chose to use database technology to build the system—a decision that would prove to be prescient. “One of the most important things that we did was think database in terms of organizing the information,” Eaton says. “Of course, librarians have been thinking that way for a hundred years, so it’s not hard to understand how we got to that point. But a lot of schools didn’t do that.”

Choosing the right technology wasn’t Tufts’ biggest challenge. The greatest hurdle was changing organizational culture. When asked for her opinion about the database, Mary Y. Lee, a physician and the medical school’s dean of educational affairs, told Eaton, “The students will not use the system unless it’s connected to the curriculum.” Eaton now had doctor’s orders: create content, content, content.

And there was plenty of content to be had. In Lee’s office suite towers a 6-foot-high by 4-foot-wide bookshelf, crammed end to end with three-ring binders stuffed with course materials for the first two years of medical school. The keepers of this information trove? The faculty. Handing over their slides to be digitized was one thing, but turning over their course materials was another. “Initially we had a lot of faculty—screaming is too strong a word, but close to screaming at me—saying that I was going to replace them,” Lee says. “I was ruining medical education by replacing them with machines.”

Winning faculty buy-in took a tag-team effort. Lee reassured faculty the system was not intended to replace traditional medical education methods. Metz explained how IT could help alleviate larger economic pressures facing Tufts by reducing costs and increasing efficiency. But Metz closed the deal by telling them the system could improve their effectiveness in the classroom. “In higher education, people have been teaching the same way for centuries,” he says. “The truth is that they’ve been doing it very well. But to point out that a new model of education can work with a higher level of quality—that gets people’s attention.” The team found instructors who had been using the Internet since its early days and were eager to put their material online. Then, other faculty wanted to try the system too. Soon instructors began collaborating to create and integrate course content. “Initially, we had some very strong opponents who became extremely strong proponents after they started using it,” Lee says.

When the site made its debut in September 1997, students raved to their instructors about having around-the-clock access to course material on the Web. “The great thing was being able to look at the slides at home,” says Bullitt, who lives 20 miles from the downtown Boston campus. Using the website as a personal knowledge management system, she organized her course materials into her own folders and made frequent electronic notes. “It’s like having an annotated textbook that I could use anywhere, anytime,” she says.

In a sort of collective “aha!” faculty and students realized that the system could do much more than digitally duplicate textbooks and lab slides. Ideas for new applications and features snowballed. Eaton’s development team worked nonstop to keep up with requests to put content online, including post-course evaluations by students and class schedules.

Despite the momentum—and more grants—the development team recognized that the system could not survive indefinitely on grants alone. So in 1999, the team began drumming up support from Tufts’ veterinary and dental schools, adding some of their course materials to the database as a trial and proposing a budget in which all three schools would support the system.

Today, the system contains approximately 70 percent of the medical school curriculum and a smaller percentage of veterinary and dental school courses. It has evolved from a simple digital image library to a knowledge management system that integrates complex layers and levels of medical information across many disciplines. “It’s more than just throwing a bunch of images into a file,” says Richard Jakowski, a professor at Tufts’ veterinary school. “You have to integrate them with text, put them in the right spot and make them mean something. Otherwise, you’re getting a pop when you can make an atomic bomb.”

TUFTS UNIVERSITY :

Prescription Learning

Ethel Bullitt had a severe case of medical student amnesia. After two years of cramming her brain with thousands of new biomedical terms, images of cells, symptoms of diseases and drug interactions, her memory had turned to mush. In a few days, the 25-year-old Tufts University medical student would have to report to her first clinical rotation in surgery. Her worst fear: forgetting everything she’d ever learned.

Bullitt began second-guessing herself: What is the proper way to listen to a patient’s heart and lungs? What are the proper steps in examining the knee? So before she ever stepped into a teaching hospital, Bullitt went to her school’s website and logged on to the Health Sciences Database—a virtual medical student’s brain containing lectures, lab slides, anatomy illustrations and her own notes—and reviewed physical diagnosis procedures. “It’s great to be able to have this kind of backup when you’re feeling a little shaky, because surgery rotation is a grueling experience,” she says. “You have to determine how the patient is doing, and you need to be sure you are right. The surgeons are basing some of their decisions on what you tell them.”

Bullitt’s experience is one example of how the Health Sciences Database is transforming the way Tufts trains physicians, dentists and veterinarians. No other medical school in the country—and Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston is among the top-ranked—has created this kind of KM system for students and faculty. Tufts credits the system with helping students to master course material more easily, keeping the curriculum up-to-date and increasing organizational efficiency. The system is becoming a national model for medical education.

Not only did Tufts put together a model system, it did so at a time when medical schools and teaching hospitals face tremendous pressures. The demands of managed care have squeezed faculty time. Declining insurance reimbursements for patient care services have cut into revenue. And federal and state funding for treatment and research has diminished. Yet the system evolved in a culture of innovation and creativity at Tufts that stayed focused on continually improving education. “The challenge now is for IT to provide the tools to develop a potentially more effective model for educating medical students,” says Bruce Metz, vice president of information technology at Tufts.

CIO awarded Tufts a 2001 Enterprise Value Award because its contribution to medicine far exceeds mere financial return on investment. “Educational institutions need role models, and Tufts is one,” says John Glaser, vice president and CIO at Partners HealthCare System in Boston, one of this year’s judges. “In training physicians and health-care professionals in a complex, volatile industry that is less amenable to time restraints, managing and keeping course material current and integrated is crucial. Tufts has taken on a very messy educational challenge, done an extraordinary job of sizing up that challenge and is doing some pioneering work.”