The Analytics You Need to Do Your Best Work: Introducing Benchmarks

We’re in a world where data is king. People want measurable results, hard numbers, and plenty of information to make their most important decisions. And why not? The right data can teach you so much about your organization and the way you use information.

And we’re not just talking about our work lives–we make plenty of data-informed decisions in our personal lives too! Think about the last time you chose a restaurant for a special night out. You probably looked at a combination of Yelp reviews, social media posts, and other data. You’ll rank restaurants by the quality of their reviews to see how they stack up against each other to gauge whether you’ll get the world’s best guacamole … or a not-so-great food-related outcome (yikes).

Data-informed decision-making is much easier if you add the power of analytics. Simply put, analytics adds the layer of–you guessed it–analysis to data to make it easier to understand, digest, and take action on. To go back to our Yelp example above, the analytics layer gives you the average review score, ranks reviews against each other, and otherwise helps you get from data to informed decisions much faster.

The analytics of modern work

Analytics are everywhere in the business world, and every department at your company can benefit from them. Analytics helps connect raw numbers to the things teams need to do to improve. Let’s look at some examples:

• Sales leaders need to see more than just the data of revenue. They need to see who's closing deals and how long it's taking.
• Support teams need to see more than just the data of how many service tickets are open. They need to see who's most effective at closing tickets and how much time they spend on closing them.
• HR leaders need to see more than just the number of employees. They need to understand which departments retain people and the trends around this.

You should think of your company knowledge the same way. Seeing the raw data of how many views a piece of content has can be helpful, but to learn and improve, you need to dig into the who and what of that information as well. That’s the process of true knowledge management. It’s more than just storing information and seeing if it’s getting clicked–it’s about true engagement with and improvement upon your company's collective intelligence.

This is much easier said than done. Like any business process, there’s a maturity curve to getting the most out of your data and analytics. You’ve got to learn to crawl before you can walk, and you’ve got to get good at walking before you can run. But ultimately, you’ll be off to the races!

Analytics maturity and Guru

Guru is purpose-built to support folks at all stages of analytics maturity. As your needs get more specific, our analytics experience will support you. We’ve got the basics covered and a lot of advanced features to give you just the right insight you need. As an added bonus, we’ll help you understand how your knowledge management program is performing against best practices, all within Guru’s analytics dashboards. Here’s how Guru supports you through every stage of true analytics maturity.

Stage 1: Getting a signal

Your company has a lot of knowledge stored in various places, so it can seem like a big task just to understand if anybody is even looking at any of the information that’s getting produced and shared. At first, you just want to see some numbers–any numbers–to give you an indication of what’s going on! Did anybody read the latest company newsletter? Did the sales team look at the pitch deck? Are people seeing the updated benefits information?

Basic stats like page views give you a signal that people are looking at–or not looking at what you’ve created. 150 people read the newsletter, 20 people saw the pitch deck, and 340 people saw updated benefits. You can see these stats right on every piece of Guru content, so you always know whether people are engaging with what you’ve written.

This is great… at first. But how many people are supposed to be looking at this stuff? And who are they? Your need to understand what’s going on will deepen over time. At the same time, your knowledge management implementation will get more intricate with different groups within the company using knowledge in particular ways and with differing access levels.

Stage 2: Who’s doing what?

Once you need to understand who’s doing what with company knowledge, you’ve advanced to stage two of analytics maturity. Raw stats like page views just won’t cut it at this point. And adding to the complexity, different roles and groups within the company will want to see different things:

• Managers of small teams want to see how their individual contributors are engaging with information
• Leaders want to see how groups within the organization are engaging with information
• Admins want to understand macro trends around information engagement and what areas of the business might need a little extra attention

We’ve attached these stats to each piece of Guru content right beside those initial page views, so you can easily see how individual pieces of knowledge are performing.

But this is where the analytics section of Guru will really kick in to support your needs. We’ve designed dashboards with interactive reports that let all levels of stakeholders drill into exactly what they want to learn about their teams. Here’s what that looks like:

• Your support leader can see exactly where their team is using Guru knowledge the most. She can rest easy knowing that the team is using the browser extension for faster access to trusted information.
• Your HR leader can see who’s reading–and not reading–company announcements and how announcements are performing over time.
• Admins can see popular content and slice that data by groups who are using it the most, which gives them an idea of which teams are most engaged.

Stage 3: What are your SMEs up to?

So far, we’ve focused on the “reader” side of knowledge management. That’s because information is only good if people can find and use it! But where does that knowledge come from? That’s the other side to the story: your authors and subject matter experts (SMEs). You need to understand their behavior as well.

SMEs may have relatively low page views because they’re the owners and creators of content. If you only had the data we’ve talked about so far, you might think they’re disengaged. But that’s not necessarily true–they’re probably crushing it on creating content.

Going even deeper, some of those SMEs may be creating content that’s more effective than others–what behaviors can you learn and scale from your VIPs?

Guru’s analytics have you covered here too! With our dashboards, you can see who your most popular authors are, which groups are creating the most useful content, and which of your authors are engaging with the platform and helping spread their wisdom across the company.

Stage 4: Benchmarking, best practices, and improving

So now you’ve got a good idea of who’s doing what in your knowledge management system and you’re feeling pretty good about your understanding of your company’s performance. But what does “good” actually look like in knowledge management?

This is where Guru’s analytics really shine. We’ve had years of experience helping some of the best companies in the world manage their collective knowledge, and we’ve learned a lot about what good–and even great–looks like. That’s why we’ve added benchmarks so you can understand how your team’s adoption and content freshness stack up against leaders in knowledge management.

The ultimate goal of analytics is to make improvements based on what you learn. Benchmarks make it super clear to see where you should aim. But Guru goes a step deeper and shows you specific places to make those improvements:

• Missing information: Your SMEs can’t be everywhere all at once, so providing them with a view into what people are searching for and not finding helps them prioritize their work and fill those knowledge gaps.
• Content accuracy and freshness: Guru tracks how much of your content has been verified and lets you drill down into who’s keeping their knowledge updated and places that might need help.
• Announcements engagement: We mentioned this above, but understanding how people are engaging with important company info that’s pushed to them is a good indicator of how engaged your employees are with company-wide initiatives. You can see if engagement has slipped and even drill down into where in the org people are more or less engaged with updates, so managers can take action.

The insight you need to do your best work

Over time, you’ll learn exactly what information is most important to inform your company’s knowledge management strategy. With Guru to support you, you’ll always be able to know what content is performing, identify your high performers, and see how you’re performing against best practices. Guru’s flexible, dynamic analytics help you customize your experience so as you advance up the analytics maturity curve, you’ll be covered no matter what your needs!