Image Image member login  |  privacy policy  |  contact us
      Home  |  FAQ  |  Awards  |  Reports  |  Forum  |  Jobs  |  Chapters  |  Join  |  Order
  Forum Questions
Have a question?
Send it to
          Jane Farber.

    www.ASPonline.com

ASP Forum


Capturing Outsourcer Knowledge?

"We have a very talented outsourcing team, but I've just realized that whenever they solve a tough problem the solution should be added to our knowledgebase. How can we make this happen? I don't want to pay them to write tech notes that duplicate what we already have."

—Yolanda from Yorktown                           


Yolanda—

This is close to the dilemma many support organizations have when they decide to give their own reps a quota for knowledge base solutions: without some kind of a quality check you may get lots of stuff, but not necessarily good stuff.

If you have a system through which you review each and every solution you can simply use the system to validate the submissions and only pay for those solutions that pass the review. Naturally, you will also have to review swiftly so you can make payments swiftly (this is great discipline in any case.)

If you have no review system in place and you simply post solutions as they are written, you can adopt an audit system through which you check a small proportion of the solutions and you apply the percentage of “good” solutions to the payment. If you use an audit you must make sure that it’s truly random so there’s no chance of predicting when a solution will be audited, hence no chance of gaming the system.

A critical piece is how to handle updates: in a mature knowledge base the most important part of knowledge management is updating existing solutions, not creating new ones. You can use a similar approach (either full reviews or audits) to ensure that updates are significant before you pay for them.

Good luck!

—Françoise Tourniaire
    FT Works
    650 559 9826
    FT@ftworks.com





[If you have any other advice on this question, please send an email to membership director Jane Farber at jfarber@asponline.com, and we'll post your feedback.]