We show you how we drive knowledge management and digital collaboration in order to make Daimler Finance & Controlling ready for artificial intelligence.
Target Audience: Decision-Makers, CIOs, (AI)-Strategists
Prerequisites: none
Level: Basic
Extended Abstract
'Artificial Intelligence (AI) is hyped as a universal remedy these days. In practice, however, we find many AI applications to be of limited use. One of the main reasons according to our view is the lack of structure in many (potential) knowledge bases that AI applications (could) build upon. We therefore started our journey towards digital collaboration and systematic knowledge management at Daimler Finance & Controlling - hoping to lay the foundations for more successful AI applications in the future.
Our strategy is three-tiered. In tier 1, we pursue a broad-based digital workplace enablement in order to increase digital skills at Daimler Finance & Controlling. Offering various user trainings, we give our employees a positive hands-on experience with digital collaboration tools. Our goal is to convince them of the benefits of digital collaboration and the ideal of a paperless office. The positive side effect is that once convinced, users start making their implicit knowledge explicit by documenting it with digital tools and making it accessible. Considering the strategic importance of knowledge in modern organizations, this taken alone is already a great achievement.
In tier 2, we conduct so called digital workplace customizings, typically with whole teams or departments. We visit and observe selected employees at their workplaces. Then we develop customized digital collaboration solutions together with them, considering their individual working structures and styles. The development of suitable knowledge structures plays a decisive role. On the one hand, we use innovative UX methods such as Card Sorting in order to ensure user acceptance. On the other hand, we design the knowledge structures already in an 'AI friendly' way. That means for example that we enrich metadata, use unambiguous wording or avoid logical inconsistencies.
In tier 3, digital workplace enhancement, we finally develop particular software solutions, inter alia based on state-of-the-art AI techniques. In one of our last projects, for example, we developed a chatbot that directly built upon our previously defined knowledge structures. So far, our experience is very positive - the more clear we build our knowledge structures, the better AI-based techniques such as natural language understanding perform. There is still a lot of work for us to do. However, we are convinced that knowledge management needs to be dealt with in a strategic way. Otherwise, large organizations such as ours will find it extremely difficult to reap the benefits of AI at a large scale in the future.