Shared project files: This allows everyone on a team to work on a shared document and see and make changes, even from different locations. It is commonly referred to as a living document that allows for collaboration on a project.

What Is Knowledge Management and Why Is It Important?

Knowledge management is a system that allows you to communicate vital information within a business or organization. When knowledge management is effective, it can help people find the information they need more quickly and thereby increase productivity. In this article, we explain what knowledge management is, why it’s important and we review the benefits of effective knowledge management.

Knowledge management (KM) is any developed system that assists people in a business or organization to create, distribute, access, and update knowledge and information related to the business and their responsibilities. Some types of knowledge management systems are:

Written documents

Forms filled out by patients or nurses that provide doctors with a patient health history, healthcare concerns, assist in diagnosing patients or serve as a way to communicate with other health care providers and physicians are examples of systems of sharing written documents that can serve as means of communication.

Training and cross-training programs

Programs that provide shadowing experience, training or mentoring relationships are forms of knowledge management. This method, often implemented in the education system, medical field and by many engineers, allows employees and professionals to gain business knowledge and expertise by observing others who are skilled at their work. It affords individuals the ability to build relationships and network with people in their industry.

Social network tools

These tools allow individuals to communicate and collaborate on projects in a common space. Additionally, they serve as a resource to store previous communications and access them for reference at a later time if needed.

Content management systems

Document management systems

Document management systems enable users to store, share, tag and sometimes alter documents based on access permissions. This form of knowledge management can make information easy to discover and access for users.

Chatbots

A chatbot is a computer program created to work without a human operator and which enables interaction between humans and machines. Chatbots use machine learning to offer employees answers to natural-language posed questions. They provide a primary source of instant information by doing the scanning for employees and alleviating the stress of having to search a CMS or document system.

Groupware

Types of knowledge

The definition of knowledge management also includes three types of knowledge—tacit, implicit, and explicit knowledge. These types of knowledge are largely distinguished by the codification of the information.

• Tacit knowledge: This type of knowledge is typically acquired through experience, and it is intuitively understood. As a result, it is challenging to articulate and codify, making it difficult to transfer this information to other individuals. Examples of tacit knowledge can include language, facial recognition, or leadership skills.
• Implicit knowledge: While some literature equivocates implicit knowledge to tacit knowledge, some academics break out this type separately, expressing that the definition of tactic knowledge is more nuanced. While tacit knowledge is difficult to codify, implicit knowledge does not necessarily have this problem. Instead, implicit information has yet to be documented. It tends to exist within processes, and it can be referred to as “know-how” knowledge.
• Explicit knowledge: Explicit knowledge is captured within various document types such as manuals, reports, and guides, allowing organizations to easily share knowledge across teams. This type of knowledge is perhaps the most well-known and examples of it include knowledge assets such as databases, white papers, and case studies. This form of knowledge is important to retain intellectual capital within an organization as well as facilitate successful knowledge transfer to new employees.

Knowledge management process

While some academics (PDF, 156 KB) (link resides outside of IBM) summarize the knowledge management process as involving knowledge acquisition, creation, refinement, storage, transfer, sharing and utilization. This process can be synthesized this a little further. Effective knowledge management system typically goes through three main steps:

• Document management systems act as a centralized storage system for digital documents, such as PDFs, images, and word processing files. These systems enhance employee workflows by enabling easy retrieval of documents, such as lessons learned.
• Content management systems (CMS) are applications which manage web content where end users can edit and publish content. These are commonly confused with document management systems, but CMSs can support other media types, such as audio and video.
• Intranets are private networks that exist solely within an organization, which enable the sharing of enablement, tools, and processes within internal stakeholders. While they can be time-consuming and costly to maintain, they provide a number of groupware services, such as internal directories and search, which facilitate collaboration.
• Wikis can be a popular knowledge management tool given its ease of use. They make it easy to upload and edit information, but this ease can lead to concerns about misinformation as workers may update them with incorrect or outdated information.
• Data warehouses aggregate data from different sources into a single, central, consistent data store to support data analysis, data mining, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning. Data is extracted from these repositories so that companies can derive insights, empowering employees to make data-driven decisions.

Knowledge management methods

1. Tutoring & training, communities of practice, and Q&A

Many companies value building a skills matrix that maps each employee’s expertise. This simplifies finding the employee with the most experience or knowledge in a given field. In addition, it identifies knowledge gaps within the workforce and shows areas requiring focus for specific knowledge management methods and training.

Some examples of this type of knowledge management may not require a formalized structure. For example, perhaps your company is having problems with a new project, which reminds you of a previous situation. Using the company Slack, for example, you can search for similar questions and find old threads discussing how you overcame the problem last time. Prior expertise that you may not have thought about in years is stored and discovered in old communications to help you right now.

2. Documentations, guides, guidelines, FAQ, and tutorials

3. Forums, intranets, and collaboration environments

4. Learning and development environments

5. Case studies

6. Webinars

Authorship:

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/what-is-knowledge-management
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/knowledge-management
https://www.valamis.com/hub/knowledge-management
Knowledge management

Efforts to formally manage knowledge have been in place for most of the past half century. In the late 20th century, however, with the evolution of computers, organizations began implementing more reliable storage systems. In the 1990s, the Swedish financial service provider Skandia created the first Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) position, which paved the way for other companies to treat knowledge management as an integral part of their structure.

Knowledge Management 101: Knowledge Management Cycle, Processes, Strategies, and Best Practices

Regardless of industry or product, all companies rely on the knowledge of their employees to be successful. Organizations must treat knowledge as an asset, but it’s not enough to simply hire skilled employees. Instead, successful companies should build in processes to store, grow, and share knowledge to increase the knowledge base of the overall workforce. This concept is known as knowledge management.

In this article, you’ll find everything you need to know about knowledge management: what it is, types of knowledge, and the history and evolution of the field. Then, we’ll break down the benefits and challenges of implementing knowledge management, and discuss multiple models of the knowledge management life cycle. Finally, we’ll look at the rise of knowledge management systems, and offer free, downloadable templates to get you started building a knowledge management plan.

What Is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management (KM) is the process(es) used to handle and oversee all the knowledge that exists within a company. Knowledge management relies on an understanding of knowledge, which consists of discrete or intangible skills that a person possesses.

The field of knowledge management identifies two main types of knowledge. Explicit knowledge is knowledge or skills that can be easily articulated and understood, and therefore easily transferred to others (this is also called formal or codified knowledge). Anything that can be written down in a manual – instructions, mathematical equations, etc. – qualify as explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge, by contrast, is knowledge that is difficult to neatly articulate, package, and transfer to others. These are usually intuitive skillsets that are challenging to teach, such as body language, aesthetic sense, or innovative thinking. (A third knowledge type is implicit knowledge, which is information that has not yet been codified or transferred, but that would be possible to teach. Implicit knowledge is different from tacit knowledge, which is unlikely to be able to be codified. For this article, however, we will primarily discuss explicit and tacit knowledge.)

Knowledge management enables organizational learning, a concept where companies are invested not only in the reliable, expert production of a product or service, but in the knowledge that underlies these production processes. Companies devoted to organizational learning are interested in maintaining and building upon internal knowledge at an organizational level – not just helping individuals accrue special skills, but ensuring that this knowledge is available to and dispersed throughout the workforce.

As one Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) paper states, the core goal of knowledge management is to connect “knowledge nodes” – those with knowledge and those seeking knowledge – to ultimately increase the knowledge within an organization. Within that goal, the authors identify four objectives of KM: to capture knowledge, to increase knowledge access, to enhance the knowledge environment, and to manage knowledge as an asset.

Ultimately, knowledge management is an integrated system of accumulating, storing, and sharing knowledge within a team or organization. KM consists of several components, as well as strategies to implement it successfully – we’ll delve deeper into these later in the article.

What Is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management (KM) is the process(es) used to handle and oversee all the knowledge that exists within a company. Knowledge management relies on an understanding of knowledge, which consists of discrete or intangible skills that a person possesses.

The field of knowledge management identifies two main types of knowledge. Explicit knowledge is knowledge or skills that can be easily articulated and understood, and therefore easily transferred to others (this is also called formal or codified knowledge). Anything that can be written down in a manual – instructions, mathematical equations, etc. – qualify as explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge, by contrast, is knowledge that is difficult to neatly articulate, package, and transfer to others. These are usually intuitive skillsets that are challenging to teach, such as body language, aesthetic sense, or innovative thinking. (A third knowledge type is implicit knowledge, which is information that has not yet been codified or transferred, but that would be possible to teach. Implicit knowledge is different from tacit knowledge, which is unlikely to be able to be codified. For this article, however, we will primarily discuss explicit and tacit knowledge.)

Knowledge management enables organizational learning, a concept where companies are invested not only in the reliable, expert production of a product or service, but in the knowledge that underlies these production processes. Companies devoted to organizational learning are interested in maintaining and building upon internal knowledge at an organizational level – not just helping individuals accrue special skills, but ensuring that this knowledge is available to and dispersed throughout the workforce.

As one Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) paper states, the core goal of knowledge management is to connect “knowledge nodes” – those with knowledge and those seeking knowledge – to ultimately increase the knowledge within an organization. Within that goal, the authors identify four objectives of KM: to capture knowledge, to increase knowledge access, to enhance the knowledge environment, and to manage knowledge as an asset.

Ultimately, knowledge management is an integrated system of accumulating, storing, and sharing knowledge within a team or organization. KM consists of several components, as well as strategies to implement it successfully – we’ll delve deeper into these later in the article.

6 Tips for Building a Knowledge Management Strategy

1. Set Benchmarks

For example, find an area of your company that is lacking because of a knowledge deficit, create a baseline, then introduce knowledge management in that area. Take measurements before, during, and after implementation to measure benchmark the changes.

2. Keep Your Training Simple

3. Develop A Content Framework

Create a well-defined framework to make sure your employees are consistent when creating content for your knowledge management system. Set rules for when to add and update new content to your knowledge centers, and who has admin access to do so.

Without a framework for knowledge content maintenance, your entire KM strategy will grow outdated with inaccurate and old company policy and process documentation – or cluttered and disorganized with no hierarchy of knowledge structure.

4. Optimize Your Knowledge Center’s Search Function

Create a tagging system inside your main knowledge management tool to make retrieving information faster. For example, you can create a tag for every department in your company to give employees a narrower starting point when performing a search for information.

5. Segment Your Knowledge Content

Segment your content using high-level categories. This will organize your information in a way that makes information easier to sort through. If your tools allow it, go further y establish sub-categories — the more segmented your information, the faster employees will find what they’re looking for.

6. Connect Your Knowledge to Your Employees

Establish an internal knowledge base to reduce the amount of time it takes your employees to find other employees with expertise. The directory identifies your subject matter experts in areas and fields and makes them more accessible to others.

It’s critical to choose the right tools when you’re building and scaling a knowledge management system. Knowledge base software, chatbots, and community forums are all examples of knowledge management tools in action. Make sure to choose knowledge management tools and software that can be fully integrated into your existing internal and external systems and are customizable. Choose tools that are customizable, and look for vendors that will support your systems for the long term.

Authorship:

https://www.smartsheet.com/knowledge-management-101#:~:text=Knowledge%20management%20(KM)%20is%20the%20process%20(es)%20used,knowledge%20management%20identifies%20two%20main%20types%20of%20knowledge.
https://www.smartsheet.com/knowledge-management-101
https://whatfix.com/blog/knowledge-management/
Knowledge management

Knowledge Management is the process of generating, storing, sharing, and managing information. In the age of big data, we know that information can be overwhelming—yet it promises unprecedented business opportunities for those who practice Knowledge Management to perfection.

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management is normally defined as the process of creating, using, sharing, and managing the information in an organization. Knowledge management is also a set of practices to maximize the business value of an organization’s knowledge by gathering, maintaining, and delivering it at critical points in business processes.

Explicit
Explicit knowledge is knowledge that can be readily articulated, codified, stored, and accessed. What you find in your enterprise knowledge base is mostly explicit knowledge. It can be a knowledge article, PDF, blogpost, video, user’s guide. Expertise that your contact center agents, authors, and leaders capture in the knowledge management system, or user posts harnessed from social media and communities are examples of explicit knowledge.

Tacit or Implicit
Some people make a distinction between tacit knowledge and implicit knowledge while others consider them to be the same. Tacit knowledge is the opposite of explicit knowledge. It is a kind of knowledge that is difficult to express to others by writing or using words. (Schmidt and Hunter, 1993). It is not tangible or codified or immediately shareable in words or documents. Tacit or implicit knowledge is normally associated with individual experiences and is difficult to transfer except maybe through observation and association. Knowing when the dough is perfectly kneaded is tacit know-how. Being able to tell what a customer needs to feel better in a customer service scenario can also be an example of tacit or implicit knowledge.

Situational knowledge
This includes the knowhow to solve a customer’s problem by asking the right set of questions through in-flow conversational guidance and/or taking the right next steps in a process through in-flow process guidance. This kind of guidance requires the use of advanced technologies such as AI reasoning.

Push knowledge/in-flow knowledge
Push knowledge is contextual knowledge pushed to customers in the course of their journeys to help them make progress in their journeys or to contact center agents as they interact with customers in the form of conversational (next best thing to say) and process guidance (next best steps to take).

Crowdsourced knowledge
Crowdsourced knowledge is gathered from a community of contributors. An example is a tech support community, consisting of knowledgeable members, which can be focused on a certain company, product, or topic. The upside is the ability to quickly tap into the expertise of a community or the “crowd” and the possible downside is the quality of content, which is even more important in highly regulated industries.

Knowledge Management best practices

Of course, within these three Knowledge Management phases, there are plenty of best practices that can take you from beginner to expert execution of your organizational knowledge. These best practices are focuses specifically on IT service delivery, but can be incorporated into any type of knowledge management.

1. Know your problems

Before initiating a Knowledge Management program, understand the underlying challenges you face. Knowledge Management goes beyond investments in technology and requires organizations to facilitate the culture and process that enable effective Knowledge Management.

Some key challenges result due to common mistakes, such as an inadequate understanding of the ITIL framework or the focus on capturing knowledge. Instead of treating knowledge management as a separate activity with isolated tasks, you should integrate Knowledge Management practices within existing processes and business activities. Integrating your knowledge management ensures that the knowledge associated with all critical business operations is generated and captured at scale, without unnecessary delays or complexity of managing knowledge as a separate process.

2. Measure the metrics

As the popular business maxim goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure and if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Measuring the performance of Knowledge Management initiatives can be difficult considering that the underlying operational processes are designed, conducted, and then evaluated based on references that the organization creates internally. These references may not always present a true performance evaluation, but several alternative KPIs and references can be used instead.

For example, evaluate the KPIs for Incident Management functions related to the service knowledge management system (SKMS). Measure the activity within the SKMS—Are users able to find useful information efficiently? Does the provided knowledge solve a user request or ticket?

3. Don’t just manage knowledge—exploit It

Knowledge Management encompasses your capacity as well as the actual tasks to collect, store, and manage knowledge. However, the goal of Knowledge Management initiatives may be lost when most resources and frameworks are designed merely to manage the knowledge instead of exploiting it.

4. Make knowledge consumable and diverse

Knowledge Management can be a complex and resource-consuming job function. Especially in large enterprises that must create and manage vast knowledge resources, employees tend to struggle in identifying appropriate problem-solutions from the available pool of knowledge items.

Instead of dumping knowledge across long articles (a time-consuming process for the writer and the reader alike), present your knowledge in a more user-friendly manner. Replace long articles and explanations with short, actionable guidelines. Adopt a consistent, standardized format for all documentation to make it easier for employees to spot the answers they need urgently.

Don’t limit your knowledge documentation to text only. Diversify and complement your knowledge management platform with collaboration tools, live chat, and service desk and chatbot support. Accessing the knowledge should not require a focused effort to manually go through large repositories of long articles. Follow a consumer-centric instead of a supplier-based approach. The goal of Knowledge Management is not just to supply the data and information, but also for end-users to easily consume and apply the underlying knowledge.

Often, the purpose of accessing knowledge for an individual can be fulfilled far more efficiently by communicating and collaborating with others. In fact, this is a primary reason for the industry-wide adoption of DevOps SDLC practices that encourage shared responsibility and knowledge sharing between individuals from otherwise separate job functions working collectively on the same SDLC project pipeline.

Consider how some people learn in different ways—can you create quick videos to show an answer or process? What about a living wiki document that users can update as they find or improve knowledge and solutions?

5. Scale your knowledge sharing

Develop the necessary processes that conveniently allow users not only to create and access knowledge, but to adopt it in their routine tasks. Traditional Knowledge Management follows a one-way approach where only the IT department is responsible for producing knowledge. Employees who require a solution that’s not already documented by IT must go on a journey: finding employees who experienced the same issue, resolving the issue, and, now, holding knowledge of the appropriate solutions.

Knowledge sharing should be made convenient for employees and non-IT folks, just as they would share information using social-media channels, wikis, and mobile apps. Incentivize knowledge sharing activities as it improves the overall capacity of the organization to learn and improve by solving problems for each other efficiently instead of overwhelming the Service Desk.

Sample knowledge manager job description

If you are looking to appoint a knowledge manager role at your organization, our Sample Knowledge Manager Job Description encapsulates all the responsibilities of the role above. Whether you are looking to hire internally or externally, this sample will help you define the role and secure qualified candidates to drive your KM strategy.

Knowledge Manager Role

Job description:

The knowledge manager is responsible for overseeing all knowledge-related activities, including the management, capturing, sharing and accessibility of knowledge assets. They are required to work alongside stakeholders, internal and external, to promote and optimize the usage of the organization’s knowledge assets. Knowledge managers are expected to keep themselves and their appointed teams accountable for compliance to the company’s expectations and strategy. They are also responsible for communication, promoting collaboration and workplace harmony.

Ideal candidates possess soft skills such as great leadership, effective communication, problem-solving, coaching and teamwork skills. These skills will aid in promoting a culture of knowledge-sharing that is enabled through guidance and learning. As a knowledge manager, you will be well-equipped with the knowledge base features, functionality and be able to communicate this to teams effectively. As managers in a fast-paced and knowledge-driven environment, you will have to be able to identify concepts and ideas and come up with solutions quickly.

Authorship:

https://www.egain.com/what-is-knowledge-management/
https://www.bmc.com/blogs/knowledge-management-best-practices/
https://kipwise.com/learn/knowledge-manager-responsibilities