Baseball is known as America’s national pastime and for over a hundred years it has been shifting along with society. One of the newest trends baseball organizations are using to improve their competitiveness is using data to field their teams, set their lineups, and even set their fielding assignments. Today, we’ll take a look at how baseball uses all this data to improve their product and how you can learn a lot for your own business.
Here, let’s discuss how to put together a knowledge base to ensure that your team has access to the information they need. The Root of All Knowledge is Data With the right data at your disposal, and a means of using it, your capability to improve your business’ many processes is substantially improved. Whether you’re considering your procurement processes, your standard operations, or your delivery and support, the right information makes all the difference. However, you need to collect this information first. How do you do that? Simple. By educating yourself through experience and analysis, you can devise improved processes for your business, ultimately boosting its productivity and its general success. Documentation Of course, for this to happen, your information needs to be in a usable, accessible format. This is where a documented knowledge base becomes key. Creating one is an important task to undertake and is a process that needs to be standardized so that others can and will follow it as needed later on. Your documentation should cover the correct procedure for completing a defined task, as well as the reason for that process and the underlying goal for doing so. Creating a knowledge base like this brings you some considerable benefits, including: More consistent service delivery—If a standardized process is followed each time an activity is carried out, your clients and customers should be able to reliably expect a certain outcome, growing their confidence in your business. Reduced time consulting support—With a reference to lean on, problems can be solved more efficiently, without needing to expend extra time or manpower pulling in an additional resource for help. Reduced training costs—With a comprehensive knowledge base, you have a tool that can help you train your employees, as well as a resource for them to refer to when needed. Establishing this knowledge base also helps you when the time comes to onboard someone new. Starting Your Knowledge Base The first step to creating a knowledge base is recognizing the need for one. If your team keeps asking the same questions repeatedly, they will likely benefit from such a resource. Once you’ve identified the need for a knowledge base, you should go through any training content or informational resources you do have to see if there are any gaps. Then, once you’ve picked a tone for your knowledge base to take (to help avoid apparent contradiction) you can put together your completed resources. After that comes the management. As circumstances change all the time—especially in business—these documents will almost certainly need updating on occasion. You also need to be sure that your documentation is in a format that makes it easy for your staff to access it and find what they are looking for. This process can help you create a knowledge base for whoever needs it, whether that means for your employees or your clients. If you need assistance with the technical side of managing a knowledge base, or any IT challenge you may be facing, reach out to SRS Networks at (831) 758-3636.
Data Equals Insights This simple equation does a good job of summarizing the benefits of analytics. Because analytics are just data-driven predictions applied to your business’ circumstances, you can infer quite a bit just from the data you collect during your normal operations. One type of analytics you may have heard of before is business analysis. By drawing out the value from massive data sets by processing the numbers, analytics can provide you with the answers to your business questions and—as a result—assist you in shaping the most effective business strategy. Data Sources The data your business uses to generate these analytics can come from a variety of sources. These sources include: Data Aggregation—Collecting and filtering through data from transactional records and data provided by your customers. Forecasting—Examining past trends and using them to form expectations for the future. Association and Sequence Identification—Identifying patterns to help predict your future needs. Properly using your data to generate such analytics has been shown to provide businesses with considerable benefits to various aspects of these organizations, including their productivity and profitability, among others. Many of your resources can be considered a gold mine for data: your CRM solution, your line of business applications, your marketing statistics, your sales opportunities, and of course, your website. Many solutions are available to help you collect and leverage the analytics that will most assist your business’ operations. SRS Networks can help you put them to use with our proactive support services. Give us a call at (831) 758-3636 to find out how we can help your business accomplish more.