KLD Research & Analytics, Inc. is the leading authority on social research and indexes for institutional investors. KLD’s research is designed for investors and money managers who integrate environmental, social and governance factors into their investment process. KLD’s research can be used for screening, company analysis, or fund creation. Investors and money managers trust KLD to be their research provider. Today over 400 money managers and institutional investors use KLD’s research products
Case 1: Global Partner Collaboration
Challenge
Collaboration with partners and prospective partners overseas was typically done over e-mail. Spreadsheets were circulated via e-mail between European, Australian, and U.S. partners. KLD research analysts found it difficult to connect over the phone to review the partner comments.
Claire Johnson, a KLD Research Analyst, evaluated 5 different wiki solutions to resolve these challenges
Solution
Near-Time hosted collaboration wiki platform replaced traditional methods of editing documents and relaying through e-mail. Partner-related data is posted in table format in the wiki and then partner comments are collected in the comment threads. KLD leveraged:
- Wikis for posting, reviewing, and relaying information globally
- Comment threads for partner feedback
- Meta-tags for rich contextualization and discovery
Results
After a training and best practices document was circulated, KLD partners began immediately commenting in the threads to replace the traditional two-way e-mail correspondence.
Now, “e-mail is used less frequently”, reported KLD Research Analyst Claire Johnson. “I was expecting a lot of confusion, but the partners were able to understand Near-Time very quickly”
KLD Research generates business value for their Partner community, Employee intranet, and Training facilities with Near-Time.
Case 2: Internal Knowledge Management
Challenge
Up to this point, there was not enough cross-sector collaboration within KLD. CITRIX Go2Meeting was commonly used to facilitate live Web meetings for offices across the country, and an asynchronous tool was needed to complement the collaboration needs
Solution
Collaboration workspaces were set up using Near-Time to share documents within an industry sector. The Basic Materials Research team might want to see resources related to the gold mining sector, for example, and using Near-Time they are able to simply search the materials uploaded to that particular workspace.
Results
Near-Time was the simplest wiki tool to use out of the 5 wikis tested by Claire. The Roles and Permissions module and Search enabled layered interaction and discovery across workspaces.
According to KLD, the adoption tipping point came after a few weeks when some content was seeded in the workspaces.
Case 3: New Employee Training
Challenge
Developing institutional memory for new KLD employees with training-related questions.
Solution
Question is categorized in Near-Time as “unanswered” and then re-categorized as “answered” when the resolution to the question is met.
Results
New employees are no longer e-mailing repetitive questions to project managers. “It’s a time saver- there are no repetitive questions.
The contextualization facilities of categories and tags within Near-Time allow for broad based FAQ repositories for harnessing and discovering critical institutional memory.
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