By Constant Ondo
This article was born from a sentence uttered by a user of PICC. When asked what he thought was the strength of our platform, he answered as if blatant: “the organization of knowledge in the form of problems and solutions. These two words, problem and solution, are our daily life. They sum up industrial life.”
Problem, solution: two words that sum up industrial life
We should always start our demos with this sentence. Because it highlights our main difference compared to other knowledge management and/or collective intelligence platforms. A difference which is also the main factor in the adoption of PICC by users, whatever their profile.
Yes, PICC will fundamentally change the way you query your knowledge base. And it is precisely this change that will boost the ROI of your knowledge management tools.
Because the problem/solution couple is:
- the most natural search logic for the human mind,
- the search logic that leads most quickly to an actionable solution,
- the structure that best stimulates the willingness to contribute,
- the structure that most effectively links pieces of knowledge together,
- the structure that best guides the use of knowledge.
The missing link in knowledge management projects
We see this problem/solution structure as the missing link in knowledge management projects. The link between knowledge capitalization and knowledge use. Without this link, it is only possible to offer the users a library of documents organized by theme. Who, in a company, has the time to go through a library to find an answer? No one.
When they are only libraries, knowledge management databases are hardly ever used except in order to find a document that the user knows is in there (a quality procedure for example), or in the context of a project, when research is part of the job.
What happens with daily problems? Users either figure them out on their own, even if it means wasting a lot of time reinventing the wheel, or they call on the experts they know. And neither the users nor the experts consider it useful to report their exchanges in a shared system. The identification and sharing of good practices immediately takes a big hit.
A new way to read knowledge…
The main advantage of a solution like PICC is that you can organize all your documented knowledge in the form of problems and solutions, without having to modify existing documents.
It is actually the artificial intelligence that will do the work. It will read all of your documents and identify everything that is a problem and everything that is a solution. The relevant search engine that users need is built automatically. All that’s left to do is to use it.
… and a new way to use it.
On a daily basis, in the workshop :
A problem/solution structure associated with a fine granularity allows to filter the query results according to a multitude of criteria. The user only sees what can be really useful in the situation he is facing, and saves precious time.
He can query the knowledge base on his smartphone or on a tablet, in front of the machine and react immediately to what is proposed:
- was the solution useful?
- did it generate a new problem?
- if yes, add a photo, an audio description, a video…
- if the solution did not work, possibility to suggest another one.
Knowledge is fueled in real-time, through experience feedback.
In project mode, to solve complex problems:
All the problems and solutions extracted from the available knowledge are linked to each other and displayed on a single map. This allows, for continuous improvement or process innovation projects for example, to get an overview of the situation and of the levers on which to act. Comprehensiveness is what is sought here, for its capacity to highlight unidentified cause-and-effect relationships.
The problem/solution structure makes it possible to deal with ordinary, recurring situations, as well as with situations that appear unsolvable. It can be used in an infinite number of use cases which are revealed through regular use and feeding of the knowledge database.
Curious to discover how our knowledge management missing link is working?
Don’t hesitate to ask us for a demo.
