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Planning and Managing IT Infrastructure

Notes To recognise and respond to unexpected results, you will want to ascertain current-level metrics
for key areas, establishing baselines for measuring the success of your initiative. Before beginning
your implementation, make sure you have at least six months of data, and then use that as a
benchmark to measure what happens in the first 30 to 60 days after implementation. This
comparative data will provide early indicators for immediate corrective action. As you collect
this data over multiple deployments, it can also demonstrate that adverse consequences are
temporary and that expected improvements will begin to manifest themselves after the changes
have taken hold in the organisation.

13.3.2 Best Practice 2: Remember that Less is More

The decision to expose content to customers and prospects who visit your website can lead to
information overload. This stems from the well-meaning—but misguided—belief that the more
content you provide, the better off the customer will be. One of the primary goals of any self-
service implementation should be to provide a better overall customer experience. When it
comes to finding information, customers measure the experience primarily by how quickly and
effectively the site delivers relevant and useful answers. Think about a customer who initiates a
search for the price of a new product on your site: is bombarding them with a Google-like
results list the experience you want to deliver? With the amount of information available to
users growing at an astounding rate, exposing vast quantities of information to customers (or
agents) won’t improve their ability to find a useful answer.
The old 80/20 rule—80 percent of inquiries can be answered by 20 percent of content—is highly
relevant to a knowledge management implementation. The key to delivering a high-quality
experience is to deploy a rich subset of relevant content, focus, and structure for handling the
most frequent and common questions.
The best way to illustrate this “less is more” principle is to look at some existing Websites —
beginning with one that follows the opposite (more is better) approach. When searching for an
answer to the question “What is the price of the new BlackBerry Curve,” the site in Figure 13.1
delivers the following experience.

Figure 13.1: Too Many Unfiltered Results and Zero Offers, Pricing Information, or
Interactivity Detract from the Usability of This site’s Search Results

Source: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/getting-knowledge-managt-right-wp-
1353041.pdf

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