Knowledge Management

Have you ever heard the saying, “Knowledge is Power?” In business, the knowledge that your organization holds can act as a competitive edge and an important asset. This is why knowledge management (KM), while a relatively nascent field, is crucial to a company’s success. KM is often defined as an integrated approach of identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets. 

What is knowledge management? 

Online community forums, learning management systems, and customer service knowledge bases are all examples of knowledge management systems. When an employee leaves an organization, they take with them their: 

• Knowledge
• Expertise
• Experience
• Contacts

This means everything from their skills to their network and relationships is gone. This loss can impact organizational output and cause a disruption in productivity. Knowledge management attempts to prevent these losses by ensuring that internal information is captured, shared, and stored across an organization. Companies lose billions of dollars each year because they fail to properly manage their knowledge structures. 

Why is knowledge management important to small businesses? 

When an organization has strong KM practices in place, they can reap the benefits of: 

• Improved decision-making: When making decisions, companies often collect pertinent information and then evaluate it to guide their thinking. When decision-makers have access to accurate, relevant, and curated data, they can make sound decisions much more quickly and confidently.
• Innovation: In order to stay competitive, companies must always be looking toward innovation. Access to historical data is the foundation of innovation — having the data around what has or has not worked in the past helps direct change for the future. Being able to share knowledge and information across the world and remotely is also necessary for brainstorming and collaborative work.
• Succession planning: When a leader leaves your organization, they take their expertise with them. Having their subject matter expertise intentionally documented in some kind of knowledge base helps with continuity when someone moves on from an organization.

Knowledge management helps codify organizational “know-how” and protects a company from significant disruptions in managing processes. 

What is the history of knowledge management? 

The concept and terminology of KM have been traced back to the early days of the management consulting community. Consulting companies were the first to build tools like: 

• Intranets
• Expert locators
• Dashboards

Realizing the value of these internal tools, consulting agencies began developing the field, tools, and best practices of knowledge management and marketing them to other organizations — and this is how KM was born in the 1990s. 

Characteristics of Knowledge Management 

An easy way to understand KM is to break it down into its four components: 

Content management 

Organizations that manage their content well will have their data readily available to internal users through: 

• Portals
• Dashboards
• Content management systems

Expertise location 

In an organization, subject matter experts hold a lot of domain and institutional knowledge. As companies become more global and remote, the organic knowledge transfer that would occur through informal conversation no longer exists. This is why a knowledge management strategy uses expertise locator systems, which help identify and locate your experts. 

Lessons learned 

This refers to an organization’s efforts at capturing instructional knowledge or “how-to” guides. An example includes knowledge bases. 

Communities of practice 

A community of practice is a group of individuals who come together frequently to share their: 

• Knowledge
• Expertise
• Lessons learned

For example, you may have a community of practice group around leadership, where leaders get together to discuss various topics, share experiences, and swap strategies with one another. 

Knowledge management and remote work 

Having proper knowledge bases for employees is more critical than ever as the world continues to work remotely. Companies need to have comprehensive information repositories to point their employees toward when they have questions. For example, new hires need to know where they can go to access pertinent information related to their first few weeks of employment. When effective structures are in place, new hires can ramp up quickly and learn to be more autonomous when they can easily find the correct information without asking their managers for help. 

But it’s not enough to simply have the tools in place. Companies must dedicate proper resources to keeping their knowledge bases up to date. Data can become obsolete without information being constantly: 

• Created
• Updated
• Indexed

For example, if your company goes through a massive transformation but your knowledge bases are not up to date, employees will lean on outdated processes and make mistakes. Companies can also help by creating intentional virtual events that facilitate knowledge-sharing practices, such as town halls, leadership roundtables, and peer-to-peer learning. 

Looking forward to knowledge management 

With 75 million Baby Boomers retiring by 2030, companies will definitely need to manage their knowledge correctly to ensure their companies are equipped for the new generation of workers.