When I turn on the dishwasher the display shows E-22. Instead of the duration of the program I have chosen. Two things cross my mind. The dishwasher isn’t even a half year old and broken already? Immediately followed by: I do not feel like having to do the dishes by hand. Because I have no clue what this code means, I try to remember where I have put the manual to find a solution in it.
No doubt that it ended up in the box with all other manuals. And that box most probably is on the attic somewhere – I guess. That’s why I first search the Internet. On the combination of the brand and the code I get 6.960 results. Saves me a trip to the attic. Someone has been kind enough to demonstrate in a YouTube video how to solve this malfunction. It turns out to be a filter that needs to be cleaned. And by playing the video I just learned how to solve this. Malfunction solved and saved from doing the dishes by hand.
Nowadays, every minute of the day about 500 hours (!) of video is added to YouTube. Each month about 15 million ‘creators’ are responsible for 80 million new videos (
Tubular Labs – September 2019). If you have a (free) account and your content meets the
community guidelines you are able to contribute. Your content is immediately placed and available for viewing. Enabling everybody to see how to prevent E-22.
These ‘how-to’-videos are ideal for helping users to perform their tasks. They also prevent these types of questions from being asked to the helpdesk, key users or administrators. Of course, I do not recommend putting your business logic and secrets openly on YouTube. After all, excellent solutions are available for creating, publishing and managing content.
Still, developing relevant new content and keeping existing content up to date is proving difficult in most organizations. If the project has been successfully brought live and the project team has been dissolved, no one seems to want to bother anymore.
I think organizations can learn a lot from YouTube's business model. In which everyone can create and upload content. Why should we leave the development of support materials to a select group, while we can benefit from the knowledge of all employees? All you have to do is familiarize them with the necessary tools. And maybe coach them when developing content. How many potential creators are there in your organization?
Want to know more about this topic? I would be happy to answer your questions via a virtual meeting.
This blog also appeared in Dutch on
blogs.sap.nl
