Video-Powered Knowledge Management: Part 1

In immediate violation of my promise to focus on specifics vs. general topics, I submit this blog entry. It is Part 1 of a short article I wrote recently for The Knowledge Board that discusses the Altusw approach to KM 2.0. Although written in the general case for this site, it is a thinly veiled overview of the power of the Altus Collaborative Knowledge Sharing solution.

I recently read with interest that 52.6% of Microsoft SharePoint users are not satisfied with it’s search capabilities. One would think that any product that has reportedly sold nearly 100 million seats and has generated $1B in revenue could do better than that. But, the $1 billion frustratingly spent on SharePoint is actually just a drop in the corporate bucket. According to research from IDC:
“…knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time. For the Fortune 500, the cost of fruitless searches represents between $60 and $85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs"

And why is it that smart people with expensive tools each spend upwards of 10 weeks per year looking for the information they need and find it less than half the time? According to CIO Insight: “...over 80% of corporate data is unstructured, or does not reside in an indexed, organized, or easily searchable database.” And when software company QCSI looked into solving their knowledge management problem, they estimated, “About 90% of the company’s critical knowledge resided in the heads of about 10 percent of its workforce.” The reason people at work cannot find the information they are looking for is that much of it exists only in people’s heads and is not findable.

People in organizations try to share their knowledge by making presentations in a variety of settings, ranging from conference calls and sales meetings to new product seminars and classroom training. But, verbally transferred knowledge is highly problematic for a variety of reasons: many people can’t attend synchronous events; people don’t need the information at that time it’s presented; and people forget what they learn very quickly. Since studies show that people forget two-thirds of what they learn within twenty-four hours, it’s critical that the knowledge be made available later on-demand when people need to refer to it.

Getting that knowledge out of people’s heads and into a searchable database is where video can play an important role. No matter how or where people share their knowledge, it can be video or audio recorded. Once the knowledge is captured, the audio/video can be transformed into searchable data by transcribing it, timing the transcript with the audio, and putting the indexed text and timings in a database with a full-text search engine. People speak on average at 160-170 words per minute when presenting, which means that a one-hour presentation has roughly 10,000 transcribed words. All this data, plus the 1,000 or so words from the PowerPoint deck of an average one-hour presentation can all be made searchable and accessible at the point of interest.