Starting position:

In order to digitize the knowledge within the personnel office of the canton of Solothurn and make it easily accessible, the canton looked for a contemporary and market-tested knowledge management software and evaluated various solutions. The knowledge should be made available online in the form of thematically arranged articles, internally for employees of the personnel office and also for all cantonal employees. Furthermore, parts of the knowledge database articles should also be made available to the public via the cantonal website. The content should therefore be able to be used within the same knowledge database, depending on authorization, by different internal user groups, but also externally via the website by anonymous users.

 

Other important requirements of the canton of Solothurn were:

 

• Easy creation, management and maintenance, categorization and translation of an unlimited number of articles with an integrated text editor
•  Integration of various media files (e.g. screenshots, images, videos and various formats of files such as PDF, Word or Excel files)
• Evaluation of articles by users for quality assurance and corresponding reporting
• Comment functionality for internal employees
• Easy integration of the knowledge database into the cantonal website
• Connection to the Active Directory for Single Sign On (SSO) and therefore no double user administration
• Operation within the cantonal IT infrastructure with Docker technology
• Acceptance and testing through an external security audit
• Improvement of internal communication

 

Solution and project

After evaluating the suitable software and a competent partner for the integration, the canton of Solothurn chose the WISDOM Knowledge Management Platform from zehnplus. The strengths of zehnplus and the online knowledge database, compared to other solutions, convince national and international companies, organizations and authorities to repeatedly choose zehnplus as a partner in the field of knowledge management and online support. There are important reasons for this:

 

The software was developed in a very demanding environment, together with Sunrise and XING. The main goal was sharing information with employees as quickly as possible, with a high level of user-friendliness and quality, and / or answering telephone and personal inquiries from customers via the online channel and thereby saving considerable costs and offering a contemporary digital service. Thanks to the cooperation in development and advancement, the solution from zehnplus is efficient and has been tried and tested on the market.

 

At Wisdom, we have a great deal of experience in setting up and operating internal and external knowledge systems. In other words, customers not only receive software, but also our expertise for the content structure and subsequent operation and processes surrounding successful knowledge management and digital customer support. 

 

The knowledge database is used by many different customers. These bring new requests which lead to new features. These benefit all our customers. The software is continuously optimized and further developed.

 

The WISDOM Knowledge Management Platform that was implemented for the canton of Solothurn, offers many functions:

Group-based information access: 

The knowledge database can be used both internally and externally (via the website). An intersection of information is available both internally and externally. A lot more content is available internally. However, only a knowledge database is maintained. Further restrictions of the content to certain groups and departments are possible internally.

Artificial intelligence helps with the prioritization and relevance of the content:

All articles of the knowledge database have an energy level that dynamically influences the positioning in category lists or search results and changes and optimizes depending on user behavior. There are various actions that increase or decrease the energy level of articles. The energy level of an article does not remain constant and, as with the half-life of radioactivity, the energy of an article also decreases over time if no new action occurs. This algorithm ensures that the most relevant answers are given the highest relevance and priority at all times and are therefore most quickly accessible to users.

Flexible and simple content management: 

Creating and managing content for content managers is simple and intuitive. In addition to normal content, many additional elements (e.g. media types such as videos, images, any type of attachments, accordions, etc.) can be built in, which enable step-by-step instructions with images / video and text to be displayed in a structured and clear manner. Various backend user roles are also available and work processes (e.g. for approval processes in the publication of content) can be integrated as automated workflows. In urgent cases, new articles can be created and made publicly accessible in just a few minutes by content managers in the various organizational areas. 

Active Directory Integration: 

All canton employees are registered as users in the system via the AD interface and user data is automatically synchronized and added in the event of changes. The user administration is therefore not carried out twice and authentication via Single Sign On (SSO) is also implemented.

Security: 

The system has been checked by an external IT security company and is very secure. Security updates are regularly imported into the company.

Integration into the website: 

The knowledge database can be completely integrated into the existing website with very little effort and acts like a component of the website. The user experience is correspondingly high.

Interaction options: 

Users have the ability to rate content and, in the event of a negative rating, provide feedback on the reason for the rating. This direct feedback on the quality of the content helps those responsible for content to maintain the quality of the content and to continuously improve it. In addition, internal users have the opportunity to comment on articles. This facilitates and supports internal communication.

Flexible dynamic content container:

An extension module offers the possibility for content managers to generate a specific selection of articles from one or more categories in the backend. This dynamic selection of articles can then be integrated via iFrame code or as XML, JSON on any thematically appropriate content page as a dynamic article container. In this way, contextually, a dynamic content container with, for example, the 5 most important questions on a topic, can be integrated directly on a content page of the website. The content of the container is dynamic, the items with the currently highest energy level are always displayed. 

Smart search mechanism and relevance ranking: 

Smart search mechanism (auto-complete, auto-suggest, synonyms) to provide an optimal user experience. Dynamic sorting of results according to relevance based on user behavior. After the search, the results can be filtered based on the categories.

Optimized for search engines: 

meta descriptions and image titles, clean markup, fast  response times, clean URLs

The project for the personnel office of the canton of Solothurn was implemented in the desired time and with the usual high quality of Wisdom. In the first step, the knowledge database is used internally in the canton and then the content is also made available to the population via the website integration. The canton is currently examining the use of the information and communication platform for other offices.

Quote from the canton of Solothurn:

From the product presentation to the conceptual design to the implementation, the Wisdom team provided a consistently pleasant user experience. Our needs were precisely identified and realized within a reasonable timeframe. Thank you very much!

Steve Käsermann, Project Manager Knowledge Database Personnel Office of the canton of Solothurn