Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

March 8, 2020

VA is the second largest federal agency with nearly 400K employees serving millions of Veterans each month. Ensuring all VA employees have access to updated information is a key to providing a consistent and exceptional customer experience.

Recently–and after more than 10 years of steady progress–VA’s Knowledge Management (KM) Solution has reached a record 100,000 users who have visited nearly 20,000 KM articles about VA benefits, services, and claims processing. KM is a key source for widely sharing accurate, consistent organizational information, as demonstrated by the more than 6,000,000 visits in the last twelve months.

KM provides information to VA staff, Veterans, beneficiaries, and the public. When current information or best practices reside only with employees’ expertise and experiences, knowledge is at risk or can even be lost entirely when employees leave or retire. This creates inaccuracy, inconsistency, and wasted time with having to either find information or recreating what already exists. The KM Solution eliminates these pain points and improves access to information.

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Knowledge is an organizational asset. Effectively managing knowledge leads to standardized records, information, and processes. It increases productivity and improves customer satisfaction and trust. Using browsing and search filtering capabilities similar to Google and Amazon, the KM Solution makes it easier and faster for users to find the information they need to help them understand VA’s many services and benefits.

For example, KM Solution has published numerous articles in preparation for the June 2019 MISSION Act. These articles provided employees and Veterans with detailed information on the MISSION Act. As a result, employees could either competently answer Veterans’ questions or quickly connect them to the subject matter expert best equipped to handle the matter.

“This kind of enterprise-wide sharing of information is what KM was built for,” said Leo Catanach, VA’s KM Solution business lead and enthusiastic KM evangelist since 2009. “We are pleased to be able to support our contact center agents as they field calls from Veterans looking to understand how the MISSION Act changes will impact their healthcare services.”

The KM program and teams will continue to work to provide an ever-increasing knowledge base and additional user capabilities to make the user’s experience even easier and satisfying. KM is an indispensable tool for VA, and at 100,000 users, it has proven its importance and worth.

Browse the constantly growing 20K articles on VA’s Knowledge Management Solution.