Usability, My Foot!

George Ball - June 13, 2001

Knowledge Management Lessons Learned

A couple of weeks ago I was talking to a colleague who is currently in the midst of trying to field KM via an off-the-shelf PSA application.* He has been trying to convince his superiors that it is essential that they take the time to plan and test for usability, but to no avail. Why is usability so important for KM? For the same reasons that it's important for any information system applications--without good usability, when you build it they may come, but they might not come back.

* PSA stands for "Professional Services Automation." It is the idea that, for most "services" companies, all of their internal administrative and operations management needs--everything from time keeping to business development--can be met with a new breed of integrated applications suites.

Case in point: When I was at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), it was, at the time, the largest user of Lotus Notes in the world. Notes, as I've pointed out before, was originally designed as a communications platform (i.e., e-mail) and has since morphed into a much broader "collaboration and knowledge management" platform. Andersen used Notes to warehouse its "intellectual capital" (IC): methods, templates, sample deliverables, etc. All of this IC--literally hundreds of gigabytes of stuff--was organized into a "database" architecture prescribed by Notes. These databases were very …

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Usability, My Foot!

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