Thought Leadership

How much information do you need?

I was recently reminded of a study that was done by Microsoft when they first put out the Vista operating system. Vista, of course, is a very large piece of software, so supporting it was not an easy task. There were over 8,000 knowledge articles written to provide support for various incidents and requests. Obviously a highly challenging, highly technical environment.

Microsoft performed an analysis of the questions that were being asked about Vista, in order to understand how many of those 8,000 articles were actually in common use. What Microsoft found was very, very interesting. 60% of all the questions being asked about Vista were being answered with only 200 knowledge articles. That's only 2.5% of all of the knowledge for the Vista domain!

This is a truly stunning finding, particularly given the size and technical complexity of the Vista operating system and the number of incidents and requests that could potentially be expected to arise for those supporting it.

I went back and looked at projects that we have done at Conversive, to determine whether the knowledge that we worked with fit into this same pattern. This is a tricky exercise for several reasons. One big difficulty is that many domains are not as thoroughly documented as Vista. The average company may not have a very clear idea about how many pieces of knowledge are required to support their products, their web site or their sales process. That makes determining an accurate denominator difficult for the purpose of establishing a percentage of the knowledge domain that actually does the lion's share of the work. Another difficulty in addressing this issue is that many of our deployments address knowledge from multiple domains. To use the Vista example, if your deployment is supporting not just Vista, but also the entire MSFT Office suite, 200 knowledge articles will no longer get you 60% results. So in my examination I had to make some decisions about how many knowledge domains we were actually supporting in a deployment. We have done deployments across multiple discrete knowledge domains that scaled into the thousands of answers, so this determination was an important one.

After all of the sorting, however, I did find some very interesting anecdotal information. Consistent with the MSFT results, we were able to determine that answering 60%, 70% or even 80%, of the questions about a domain had never taken us more than 200-400 questions. Often it was less. And even in more challenging deployments, the idea that 200 or so questions were doing the majority of the work seemed to hold.

Having concrete evidence that so much work is typically done by so few knowledge articles, even in technical domains, was a real revelation to me. I think that this evidence is actually critical to making good decisions about how to use knowledge in a support environment. I will talk about this more in my next article.

| RATE THIS ARTICLE