Enterprise Knowledge Platform, the missing part of any company’s IT architecture

Digitization strategies and IT investments are crucial for enhancing company efficiency, transforming operations, and supporting new business models. Over the past 50 years, the software industry has experienced continuous growth, driven by the expanding need for companies to upgrade their IT solutions. As a result, various software categories have emerged, each addressing a particular problem in the product lifecycle ranging from design and creation to production, sales, and after-market and customer support.

Understanding the Software Market

The graphic below illustrates several well-established product categories that correspond to the different stages of the product lifecycle for both hardware and software producers:

The upper layer of the stack regroups software solutions that deal with supporting customers in installing, adopting, using, and maintaining their products. This category merits further examination since innovation in this space is the most recent and least mature.

Unpacking the Problem

Currently, companies are implementing many tools, each addressing a specific objective and creating a new touchpoint for users such as documentation portals, help desks, LMS, FSM systems, community sites, and forums. Integrating product information created in the lower layers of the graphic (e.g., technical documentation, parts details, 3D graphics, SME knowledge) into these new tools presents a significant challenge and is often badly managed.

For example, field technicians typically access installation and maintenance guides via FSM platforms in PDF format, which is usually the only supported mechanism. However, this standard approach fails to address the challenges we all know technicians face, such as low findability of information and poor readability on mobile devices. Similarly, help desk solutions that only support static HTML articles are unfit for hosting and serving lengthy manuals, particularly when there are multiple versions and variants of each document.

Moreover, these applications create new silos of information, requiring additional efforts to effectively interconnect and cross-feed content:

The complexity of building an increasing number of information streams is growing exponentially with the number of content sources and content-consuming applications. The need to manage and convert a variety of formats, ensure security, maintain compliance, and offer traceability further compounds this challenge. Furthermore, the adoption of new technologies such as Generative AI is nearly impossible with such an approach as it is unworkable to achieve consistent integration across all provider and consumer applications.

The Enterprise Knowledge Solution

The more IT architects work on this challenge of interconnecting content and silos, the more they realize that there is a missing element in the infrastructure. It becomes obvious there is a need for an intermediate layer that will collect and unify all necessary information to feed and support front-line applications and users. This solution should also bring new capabilities, enabling people to find and read content efficiently, optimize collaboration, and capitalize on this knowledge:

By recognizing this need and introducing a Knowledge Platform — also known as a Content Delivery Platform (CDP) — into their solution portfolio, companies tackle several strategic problems at once:

• Drastically simplify the IT infrastructure by replacing custom developments with industrial information management middleware,
• Enable the rapid adoption of innovative capabilities and future-proof their content strategies,
• Enforce and take full control of security, compliance, and governance of content usage.

A Content Delivery Platform is not an ETL (Extract-Transform-Load, a bus for extracting and reloading content in each application). Rather, a CDP ingests and transforms the content from multiple sources to create a unified repository where the content resides. Applications retrieve contextually relevant content from the CDP via an API. The CDP delivers the content dynamically to the user touchpoints where and when it’s requested, managing different input and output formats. These platforms thereby benefit from enriched, organized, and consolidated content.

Likewise, the activation of Generative AI, which depends greatly on content, strongly highlights the need and benefits of having a centralized knowledge repository of data easily accessible.

Many business benefits also accompany the introduction of a Knowledge Platform:

• Empower users: By giving users access to all necessary content across all touchpoints, companies optimize self-reliance and self-service. This subsequently reduces support costs, drives better product adoption, and increases customer satisfaction.
• Augment support agents: Providing a single, up-to-date source of truth empowers support agents. As a result, companies reduce response times, increase the quality of replies, and reduce the ramp-up time of new agents.
• Enable field technicians: With access to operation instructions in the proper format on their devices, technicians can easily review and prepare maintenance work. This reduces truck rolls and improves first-time fix rates. Additionally, knowledge platforms enhance the ability of technicians to perform complex tasks and capitalize on information shared with other technicians. This enhances collaboration, improves engagement, and reduces the risk of knowledge loss. 

A Pivotal Point in Time

As it stands, we are at an interesting moment: we see the emergence of Enterprise Knowledge Platforms as a new category of software solutions. The urgency to manage content distribution challenges has never been greater as companies seek to remove unmanageable, outdated custom scripts. Many large corporations have already adopted a EKP/CDP and testify to the value these platforms create. There is no doubt that Enterprise Knowledge Platforms will become a must-have component for businesses in the coming years.