Knowledge Management Tools overview — WIP
I need to take a look at what’s happening in knowledge management and what’s new, cool is happening in that sector of tech. So I took around 10–15 products on the market which are working with knowledge management. The selection was done based on the most promising, growing products; established already products. I used sources such as market reviews done by other companies, and few online sources G2, wiki.com to finding the list.
List of products reviewed: Confluence, Mediawiki, Guru, Zoho, Inkling, MindTouch, Notion Labs, SABIO, Tettra, Silly Moose (KnowledgeOwl), PanvivaBlue Mango LS( ScreenSteps), Slite, Slab, Wikijs, Kipwise
I was particularly interested to see:
- strengths / opportunities? what the solution does best? for who? why companies even invest in this? is this only for enterprises or for SMB? what're the new cool things are being done now?
- weaknesses/threats? what solution does worst? what are the complaints in support? what is the strategy of the company which builds the solution? what people don’t like? what was cool before but now it isn’t?
The reason I was looking at the companies strategies and PR: I was curious to see what would be the next steps are companies gaining trust from investors; will they be supporting the solution further (will the bugs be fixed as priority, or company focus on something else i.e. Confluence is not a top product for Atlassian); I also was looking through support forums, twitter looking for mentionings of the company to understand how users like or dislike it (if any), how long company on the market; how easy is the support; how stable is the solution. The snapshot of work is below (unfortunately there is no way to embed this table here in an easy way).
Tech trends which impact KM
The tech seems to come easy for most of us — now everyone can build a bot, or a small service (i.e. Sheetsu.com that embedded table into this post). Providing people with easy access to technical or business expertise without extensive (and costly) training is something that builds concepts around online training, customer support bots that resolve issues before those arise. Conversational AI becomes a legitimate interface a report on Market Research Future predicts that the chatbot market will witness considerable growth of nearly USD 6 Billion and register a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 37% between 2017 and 2023. The Voice assistant market is expected to grow at nearly USD 7.8 Billion by 2023 at 39.27% of CAGR between 2017 and 2023.
Customer trends
The less is more consumer According to research from design consultancy Siegel+Gale’s 2017 Global Brand Simplicity Index, brands that provide simple and fewer choices tend to increase revenue, brand advocacy and engagement. The consumer goes mindful The request for responsible business missions is increasing, demanding companies to offer more transparency in today’s more competitive business environment. The self-sufficient customer The rise in app usage, personalization services, and technology has allowed consumers to become more self-sufficient. We can relate also to the “no-code movement”, enabling people to create tools and apps without programming.The I want it now consumer As technology has driven us to a society that is more productive, more frenetic and more demanding, consumers are looking to spend more on products and services that save them time. The champion consumer Many consumers are now more skeptical about the ability of big brands to keep their promises ending up trusting more their peers, consumer reviews and independent experts than brand marketing.
Cool things found in new tools
- Smart assistive AI across ad hoc cross-app usage and workflows
- AI to Duplicate Detection — managed those hundred versions of the document. Example with GetGuru.com
- AI suggestions in real-time based on the voice conversations you’re having though a call.
- AI tags and organize the content. i.e. Project Cortex by Microsoft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8MAn0754wk
- Browser extensions. i.e. GetGuru allows you to search documents, add something to your knowledge base directly from browser with a plug-in to Chrome.
- BI / Reporting/ Analysis of usage tools. i.e. GetGuru, Zoho allows you to send the presentation review to your piers and you will get a report back who went through review, who didn’t with the possibility to drill down to those reports.
- Search across integration (must-have IMHO)
- Smart Assistant AI across ad hoc cross-app usage and workflows
This was a cool part of this overview. Now back to boring, we are still here things. Most of the tools mentioned above are in beta-version, or not released yet.
Pricing review
Back to boring stuff — Most all of the companies have a freemium model which basically is a nice touch to get engaged with your users and let them try new shiny things. The price range for paid versions goes from $5 to $24 per user. The most bonuses and new tech things you want to use, the better UX, the more you will pay.
Common use cases which are solved
It looks like a lot of companies are trying to find the best use cases they can solve with the tool. These are the use cases I saw:
- technical document management (subjective :) bias view)
- sales/marketing
- onboarding/ training / specific training scenarios/ hiring training
- FAQ/support
UX review
This is really subjective review of all the things I was looking at. My key finding — Confluence is outdated. It’s not modern anymore and confirmed finding — the mobile version is really hard to use when compared to other (below tools). A lot of times I ended using browser version instead of mobile, just because there were not enough features, or search was working really in a weird way (note: this is not feedback to Confluence so it’s not actionable, just to save the time :)).
Summary so far
You need to know which use cases you want to treat to make a good selection for the knowledge management tool for your organization. The better you will know who will use it and for what, the better the chances to spend budget wisely. The other thing to consider — you can easily move away from Confluence, or open-source tools unless you’re huge. There are many more tools now in the market, and the market is growing, which allows you to select new tools, with better UX, targeted to a specific customer use case, with less or the same money that you would pay while buying a package/platform solution.
