People power

With expansion plans underway in 2004, Circles recognised the importance of collaboration among its employees and developed a knowledge-sharing process. By Craig St. Clair

During the course of his day, Josh Diamond answers requests ranging from deep-sea fishing in Dominica to tickets for a Bill Clinton book signing in Beijing to driving directions from Monaco to Paris. Josh does all this over the phone and via e-mail for clients that he will never meet face to face. That’s because Josh works for Circles. Circles creates and delivers concierge services and ‘WOW’ experiences for some of the world’s leading brands. Being prepared to answer any question or arrange any imaginable service is part of what Josh – and Circles – does best.

Circles is a company that thrives on information and creative thinking. The company’s collective knowledge, needed to quickly provide information and services on a vast spectrum of subjects for different types of clients, is a core asset that it has developed through millions of interactions with its members over the past seven years. Now the company is enhancing its knowledge architecture even more, ensuring that as the company grows, its ability to capture, access and share knowledge grows too. According to Rob Murphy, Circles’s vice-president of marketing, “Circles delivers more than simple transactions; we deliver our collective experience and knowledge with each request. We need to ensure that our experience and knowledge are delivered consistently from across the organisation, and that we create value by creating personalised and meaningful experiences with every member interaction.”

From disparate knowledge sources to centralised access

In 2004, the company began executing plans to expand operations from a single office in Boston, Massachusetts, to two new locations - a new Boston headquarters and an additional office in Burlington, Ontario. In concert with its physical expansion, Circles also began to expand its knowledge management (KM) capability to a more efficient and dynamic model that reached across multiple geographies. Historically, Circles maintained disparate collections of deep category knowledge (eg, restaurant reviews, sources for tickets, gift ideas, travel resources, etc) that were accessed by service professionals who knew how to navigate a complex information architecture. With the expansion to a second site, the company knew that it needed a more unified and intuitive architecture that could be easily navigated by employees who might not be physically co-located with service professionals who understood the historical knowledge structure.

To drive the expansion effort, the company created a KM team made up of representatives from across the organisation, including product management, client development, service delivery and IT. The team looked at the existing information tools, resources and databases that had been developed over the years and came up with a plan for immediate improvements that would facilitate expansion to two locations and on-boarding of new employees. One of the first enhancements was the creation of a centralised repository for the company’s core set of tools and procedures. The team also spent time standardising the processes for maintaining the many streams of external and internal information that service professionals rely on to do their jobs.

One of the earliest models for centralised knowledge access came from an experienced service professional who had built his own web page to house links to the multiple internal knowledge sources, as well as a collection of his favorite external sources. This model was adopted by the team and led to the development of a corporate intranet that made access to seven years’ worth of collective knowledge much more intuitive and efficient. Dubbed ‘The Source’, the new intranet provided a single access point for service professionals that included well organised links to internal and external knowledge sources, product and service updates, time-sensitive business announcements, documentation of procedures, and access to shared knowledge of best practices. Rather that relying on experience or word of mouth support to find the location of enterprise knowledge, suddenly service professionals had access to all of this information from a single location – a simple but very powerful concept.

In addition to providing a unified interface to access the multiple content sources, the KM team also re-assessed the existing internal and external information that Circles distributed to its members. In order to improve content consistency and ease of use, the team consolidated a number of the data sources into in a single database. The resulting platform, called iKnow, delivers licensed content from external sources and supplements it with internally produced knowledge on dining, gifts and specialised gift ‘experiences’. “The goal for iKnow is to create and maintain consistent, current and trustworthy information that is ‘member-ready’,” says dining product manager Julie Rowe. “Service professionals need to know that information stored in iKnow is accurate, up to date and can be delivered to members without further editing.”

From centralised access to personalised environments

The current phase of Circles’s KM evolution goes beyond static repositories of information to more dynamic online environments that are easier to update, are tailored to specific users and can promote real-time collaboration and knowledge sharing. Putting all of the information in one place and making it more easily accessible across the organisation was a major step, but it didn’t allow for the type of real-time content updates and interactivity that drive greater efficiency.

The effort that is currently underway includes multiple tracks of work and involves all parts of the organisation:

Gather business requirements from across the organisation. The KM team collected business requirements by conducting a series of focus groups among service professionals as well as representatives from marketing and business development departments. Particular care was taken to ensure that the groups were representative of the employee population in terms of both roles and geographic location. The business requirements were translated into software and functional requirements that will be used to develop a next generation KM platform.
Enhance content presentation and navigation of the existing intranet. Defining various types of content and anchoring them on pages in a consistent way eases content maintenance and improves navigation throughout the site. Dividing the content by type and identifying its component attributes also paves the way for more dynamic and automated publishing that will be supported by the next-generation platform.
Upgrade to a next-generation, enterprise-wide KM system. In order to maintain content more efficiently we need to be able to distribute authoring to select individuals across the organisation, build in workflow for editing and approval, and automate publishing of content to the intranet and potentially other platforms. In addition to providing tools that will make these processes more efficient, our next generation knowledge management solution will be seamlessly integrated with existing transaction systems, driving even greater efficiencies and ease of use for our service professionals.
Build a more dynamic workspace. The user focus groups revealed the need for more flexible and dynamic workspaces for service professionals. Circles is designing a workspace environment that includes:

– The ability for service professionals to customise the presentation and arrangement of content, tools and functionality, ensuring that their most used resources are front and centre;

– Collaboration tools such as threaded discussions, bulletin boards and secure file sharing that can create virtual communities across locations based on areas of interest or expertise;

– Employee directories that contain profile information such as specific areas of domain knowledge and expertise;

– Integration of content and browser-based applications into one user interface to create a one-stop-shop;

– The ability to target specific content to specific groups of users, making sure that content is relevant to employees based on their role and product focus area.

Develop new content sources and maintain existing ones. The technical infrastructure that Circles is putting in place allows us to integrate, maintain and serve even greater amounts of content very efficiently. While the product management teams continue to investigate and develop new content sources that will make the information available to service professionals more robust, they also continue to ensure that processes for maintaining the freshness of existing content are executed. The next generation platform will provide tools to make these content maintenance processes even more efficient.
Build KM practices into people’s jobs. Technical infrastructure on its own cannot build a strong KM process. In concert with technical improvements, specific KM tasks and roles ranging from authoring, editing and approval of unstructured content to maintenance of content in databases have been further refined and explicitly incorporated into employee goals. When it makes sense, roles and tasks will be mirrored in the technical infrastructure’s security models and workflows.

When Circles started to think about expanding its KM processes they began with a central question: “Do service professionals have all the tools necessary to do their jobs?” As we have gone forward, the definition of KM tools has expanded to include not just information and best practices, but the ability to capture, target and share knowledge and business information as well. Josh Diamond needs to be able to find those driving instructions from Monaco to Paris, but he also needs to be able to reach across the organisation for information and advice, capture what he has been able find out so others can access it, and recommend for his clients hard-to-find restaurants and wineries all along the way.

Craig St. Clair is director of knowledge management at Circles. He can be reached at cstclair@circles.com