Knowledge Management, Part 2

Jon Udell wrote an interesting article on the (in)ability for vendors to invest in
basic web pages for knowledge management and allow a collaborative
community based approach for knowledge gardening.

I blogged about this here a while ago.

There seem to be a few basic problems here:
a. Vendors are highly skeptical of trusting knowledge outside of the boundaries of their own company - although it has been repeatedly proven otherwise
b. Vendors do not have a correct strategy to reward the contributors
meaningfully.Vendors, however have talked internally about tracking via points that
can be exchanged for training credits, marketing goodies etc. Reputation management is a key here to sustain the contributions.
c. Message Boarding - by this, I mean the perpetual fear that there would be an outpouring of negative feedback on the products that would overwhelm the site admins and would add unnecessary overhead on the maintenance of the site.

Knowledge management is very much a fundamental part of CRM and self
service is on the priority list for every large customer I have worked
with - but in a very limited way. Until the fundamental perception of
how a community can change the support costs can be communicated,
companies will continue to do business the same old way - if you have
a problem call 1-800-help!