There are other benefits to the knowledge community approach. Email blitz is avoided, by contrast, in the knowledge community the questions are sent to the relevant people. The community also encourages participation - people like to be seen as experts and are keen to contribute when they know the answer to a question. This, in conjunction with the software s ability to reuse previous answers if they seem appropriate, frees up the experts. The load on experts actually reduces as the community grows virally or organically, says Kallus.
Members start participating, answering questions as experts.
Producing measurements of the effectiveness of the online community is not a straightforward task - normally an organisation has several changes or programmes running concurrently that can have an effect on the top or bottom line. So, you have to look at other measurements, such as increases in productivity and efficiency. Other measurements include the decreased response time to customer queries, the reduced cycle time for reaching business decisions, more timely access to business information, etc. Many times we ll go through a pilot process where we implement for a small subset of the sales people, says Holz. We find that when we implement with those sales people they tell us that we re not allowed to take it away from them.