When I started out in my first I.T.
job, I met a guy.
Let's let's call him Bob.
Bob knew everything.
If you wanted to know how a 30 year old billing system worked.
You called Bob. Network down.
Bob, you're running again.
Where the stash of the good coffee was kept.
See Bob.
And then not one month into my employment,
Bob sent out a company-wide email informing us of his imminent retirement.
No joke.
This caused management some major worries, and Bob spent his last few weeks furiously documenting everything he knew.
This is an example of a lack of recorded enterprise knowledge.
What we needed all along was a proper Knowledge
Management
System.
Now, knowledge management helps to not only create organizational memory, but also aids operational efficiencies, increase collaboration and identification of skill gaps.
Let's take a look.
So knowledge management is the process of identifying, organizing, storing and disseminating information within an organization.
When knowledge is not easily accessible, it can be incredibly costly to a business.
So where should this knowledge be harvested and stored?
Well, in something called a KMS or knowledge management system.
Supported by
a knowledge base.
But well, what is knowledge? We can probably define it into three types: tactic, implicit and explicit.
So tactic knowledge
is typically acquired through, well, experience, and it is intuitively understood.
So, for example, leadership skills or recognizing facial expressions. A tactic knowledge is difficult to codify and it's difficult to write down.
There's also implicit knowledge. And implicit knowledge is kind of the know how knowledge that has not been written down or recorded yet.
But this is the stuff that was that was in Bob's head.
While this type of knowledge may not be initially obvious, it can be captured with the right tools and with the right processes.
And unlike tactic knowledge, implicit knowledge can usually be codified.
And then finally, there's explicit knowledge.
Information that is captured within various document types, such as manuals and reports and guides, and you'll find explicit knowledge in databases, white papers and case studies.
The goal of knowledge management is to make this valuable enterprise knowledge accessible to anyone who needs it and when they need it.
In order to achieve this.
Businesses need to implement a system for capturing, storing and disseminating information through the company, and effective knowledge management system typically goes through three main stages.
So let's take a look at those.
So knowledge.
And then stage one is really the knowledge creation.
So knowledge creation is where organizations identify and document any existing or new knowledge that they want to circulate across the company.
Figure out what it is we need to store.
Speaking of that,
stage two is knowledge storage, and this is the stage that describes where an I.T.
system is used to host organizational knowledge for distribution.
Information may need to be formatted in a particular way to meet the requirements of that repository.
And then number three, we have knowledge sharing.
It's just the final stage in which processes to share their knowledge are communicated broadly across the organization.
So what knowledge management tools do we have at our disposal?
Well, there's there's a whole bunch.
We'll just cover a few of them.
And the first of those is a content management system or a CMS.
This is an application which manages web content where end users can edit and publish content and content here could be document like a FAQ.
Or it could be some other form of media, like a piece of audio or video. That CMS could be hosted on a public website,
if this is intended for customer consumption, or it can be hosted on an intranet for internal use.
Document management systems, or DMS, go beyond the web to act as a centralized storage system for digital documents such as PDFs, images and word processing files.
A great place to store how-to guides or lessons learned documents.
And while CMS and DMS systems are typically curated,
a data warehouse
is something that aggregates data from different data sources into a single central, consistent data store, often through automated collation.
A data warehouse can support data analysis, data mining, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Data is extracted from these repositories so that companies can derive insights to make data driven decisions.
We've already talked about some benefits of knowledge management, specifically maintaining enterprise knowledge.
But there are many reasons to embrace a knowledge management strategy -- like, for example, identification of skill gaps.
When teams create relevant documentation around implicit or around tactic knowledge or consolidate explicit knowledge, it can highlight gaps in core competencies across teams.
Great information to use when building a training plan or figuring out hiring new resources.
Now, knowledge management can also aid in data security.
And in this case, knowledge management systems enable organizations to customize permissions, control or
viewership control and the level of document security to ensure that information is shared only in the correct channels or with selected individuals.
And if employees know that a knowledge management system is a go-to place to find relevant information.
This will also lead to operational efficiencies
from faster decision making and improved productivity.
Knowledge management systems can be created by skilled employees and harvested through natural language processing of existing document sources.
And when employees are armed with the right tools and strategies, knowledge management practices make it easier to onboard
new employees, assist a more productive workforce who know where to look for the answers and enable customer self-service support portals.
Because, well, without one, we're exposed to the risk of losing institutional knowledge when employees are no longer around for us to ask.
And look, I know this is a long shot, but Bob, if you are watching, just where did you hide away the good coffee pods?
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