CHATBOTS: TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE FROM MONOLOGUE TO DIALOGUE

Knowledge monologue is pervasive  

All over the world, employees, customers and citizens are expected to read, understand and action the knowledge found in so many documents: policies, regulations, statutes, assessments, standard operating procedures, manuals and instructions. This knowledge represents a plethora of rules contained in pages and pages of content. For this medium, this knowledge is shamelessly monologue and is so pervasively engrained as the modus operandi that it is not even considered as a productivity impairment.  

Knowledge monologue is an impairment to decisions    

Within these knowledge-based documents, the plethora of rules represent the choices, pathways and outcomes. In other words, the documented policies, regulations, statutes, standard operating procedures and much more contain algorithms.  This raises a highly disturbing concern to whether documented knowledge typically contains weak or strong algorithms. After reviewing documented knowledge across many sectors such as financial services, healthcare, local government and telecommunications, to name but a few, there is little doubt that the algorithms are typically very weak and more often are incomplete. The implications are profound. As knowledge monologue is systemically weak it compromises employees, customers and citizens decisions at scale.

Knowledge monologue socioeconomic impact

Knowledge monologue is counterproductive opposing the gains made through advances in digital technology. By impairing human decisions, it leads to the growth of negligence, errors, false positives and false negatives, handoffs, rework and much more. This may all seem academic until examined in the context of specific situations. Examples in just the UK are: 1) Grenfell Tower Fire and Building Regulations; 2) NHS £56bn+ provisions for compensation; 3) £44bn+ UK pay-outs for mis-sold payment protection insurance; 4) £14.9bn UK annual costs of work-related injury. All of these can be traced back to issues with knowledge monologue.

Over reliance upon subjective decisions

Due to the poor state of knowledge monologue, it has been inadequately compensated by an increasing reliance upon subjective decisions. Because this situation has remained unchecked for so long, there is poor understanding of the permutation complexity represented by the volume of choices, pathways and outcomes. Though it is generally accepted that the permutation of rules continues to grow, the reality is that the complexity has passed the ability of the human mind to recall accurately. This goes a long way to explain why many executives are having to face unprecedented volume of unexpected problems, no matter the additional costs spent on governance, controls, compliance and risk mitigation.  Even more worrying, knowledge monologue has weakened the safeguards for employees, customers and citizens, whilst increasing operating costs for every organisation by at least 5%.  

From monologue to dialogue

There is an overwhelming need to move knowledge from monologue to dialogue. This is achievable by digitally transforming knowledge into chatbots for transparent and traceable dialogue. Such a change is a paradigm shift towards digital, working and measurable knowledge assets as a new form of intellectual property. Using chatbot dialogue enables the knowledge to be streamlined and simplified for employees, customers and citizens to make consistent, informed, and timely decisions on any digital device or channel, using text or voice, real-time language translation, from any location, and inside and outside an organisation.