Today's post focuses on how knowledge management adds an essential layer of value to customer facing systems, which ultimately drives improved customer experiences.

Two sweeping trends have emerged in recent years: the proliferation of customer channels and the resulting explosion in the amount of data produced.

Customer relationship management has done a great job of providing a strong framework for these multi-channel interactions. Knowledge management (KM) has done an equally remarkable job by providing the brains behind the increasingly diverse network of customer contact points.

Our view of data often doesn't extend further than numbers. When you think about it, data means a percentage, a total, or something to which those numbers are attached. Furthermore, we want to act on those numbers with familiar math.

We don't act on data, we act on information, and we only act on information when it creates knowledge in our minds that enables us to make informed decisions. We might call this customer insight, but in the reality it is - data, information, and knowledge.

Companies are just now beginning to harness the power of big data for the purposes of information security and fraud prevention.

Only 50% of companies currently use some form of analytics for fraud prevention, forensics, and network traffic analysis.

Less than 20% of companies use big data analytics to identify information, predict hardware failures, ensure data integrity, or check data classification, despite the fact that by doing so, companies are able to improve their balance of risk versus reward and be in a better position to predict potential risks and incidents.

To successfully manage content and knowledge in an organization it is very important to promote a culture among the organization's employees to collaborate working on documents, share and document knowledge, comply with document control and information governance procedures.

This gets difficult when employees are disengaged from this aspect of their jobs. A recent Gallup poll found that more than 70 percent of all U.S. workers are either actively or passively disengaged from their work. It is a particularly problematic situation for contact centers, where employee turnover is much higher than in most other industries. It is imperative to ensure that employees are properly engaged in their job so that content and knowledge management initiatives could succeed.

Ontology is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that exist in a particular domain of information. Ontologies are created to limit complexity and to organize information. Ontologies are considered one of the pillars of the Semantic Web.

The term ontology has its origin in philosophy and has been applied in many different ways. The word element onto- comes from the Greek "being", "that which is". The meaning within information management is a model for describing information that consists of a set of types, properties, and relationship types. Ontologies share many structural similarities, regardless of the language in which they are expressed. Most ontologies describe individuals (instances), classes (concepts), attributes, and relations.