Case Study: VCI Knowledge Management

Project Objectives

Volkswagen Credit has a number os disparate dbs they wanted to consolidate into one in order to facilitate their AI strategy. Our challenge was to find a common format for the content.

Discovery

Understand the information, the user and their needs

We took a phased approach and spent hours auditing all of the content. before we ever started to define the new content architecture.

Insight #1

The information is confusing, redundant, and inconsistent.

We found the content had been poorly managed, and there was very little consistency to the formatting. The content wws also very redundant, and at times contradicted itself.

Insight #2

There are too many users with access and permissions

Another big problem was there was hundreds of user types, and the permissions varied for each.

Insight #3

The content is hard to find.

The content was, in fact, so hard to find, most agents had a sheet of numbers that corresponded to the articles so they could find them.

Define

Restructure the Content, Reduce the Permissions, Revise the Taxonomy

My recommendations were to consolidate the content into easier to understand terms. Once we did this we began to restructure the top 450 articles.

Tactic 1: Re-write the articles

I created the governance plan.

Without a plan, you are planning to fail. I created guidelines of how the new articles should be edited and reconstructed. Then I shared it with the knowledge team and trained them on how to govern moving forward.

Tactic Two: Revise Access Rules

Simplify the process with fewer roles.

We reduced the roles from hundreds to five. And the permissions followed a basic pattern for the various associated roles.

Tactic Three: Reduce complexity in Taxonomy

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The classifications were the biggest obstacle, because before the information was all meant for internal employees. But VCI watnd flexibility as they consider how to move forward with AI. This meant we needed to rethink some internal phrases that customers would not understand.

Deliver

Re-write 450 articles in parallel to Salesforce Migration

We rewrote the articles as we migrated to the new Salesforce Lightning platform. VCI had a consolidated db, one format for content types, and a foundation to leverage with AI.