Which statement best describes the purpose behind a knowledge management plan and information

Developing a clear and effective KM strategy allows you to:

• Increase internal awareness and understanding of knowledge management.
• Make a strong business case for potential benefits to your organization.
• Get buy-in from senior management.
• Obtain resources to implement your strategy.
• Clearly communicate good knowledge management practices and your current organizational KM status, goals, and plans for achieving those goals.
• Track your progress.

Top 8 types of knowledge management strategies

Communicating easy-to-understand actions that people in the organization will need to take to achieve your KM objectives helps everyone understand what needs to be done, by whom, and what benefits are in it for them. 

Here are eight types of knowledge management strategies that can guide you in planning your organization’s necessary actions:

1. Motivate Behavior: To motivate knowledge sharing, clearly communicate KM strategy and goals to stakeholders and provide incentives or rewards for achieving desired knowledge-sharing behavior.
   

1. Encourage Networking: Help your employees share knowledge by providing opportunities for collaboration across organizational silos and through the use of social software. 
   

1. Gather SME Knowledge: Keep information from SMEs flowing through your KM pipeline. Consistently capture, analyze, and codify this knowledge and then make it available for search and retrievable.
   

1. Analyze and Activate: Careful evaluation of new knowledge to ensure accuracy is key. Then, analyze the knowledge to look for patterns, trends or connections that can lead to new knowledge.
   

1. Codify: Collected knowledge should be codified to make it more searchable and enable tagging, templating, and cataloguing.
   

1. Disseminate: Captured knowledge has no value unless potential users know it’s available. Plan to notify users of new or updated knowledge and where to find it via channels those users engage with most, including email, newsletters, websites, or social networks.
   

1. Implement Demand-Driven KM: An effective KM strategy includes stimulating demand for knowledge. Encourage users to ask questions, submit queries, and search. In this way, you will be able to identify in-demand content and be more efficient in knowledge capture.
   

1. Augment Through Technology: Take your KN strategy to the next level. Consider how cognitive computing and artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance human capabilities for observation, analysis, decision making, processing, and responding to people and situations. 

How do you develop a knowledge management strategy?

An effective knowledge management strategy should:

• Contribute to overall organizational goals
• Balance people, processes, and technology
• Build timely organizational capabilities
• Use common processes and technology to encourage collaboration
• Transform the perception of KM by creating tangible results
  

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Here are five steps to follow when developing your knowledge management strategy:‍

1. Conduct a knowledge audit.

Assess your organization’s current KM capabilities to determine the actions you will need to take to establish a successful KM program in your organization. Consider the information your team uses on a daily basis and any informational silos that stand in the way; efficiencies or gaps within your organization’s processes; and how your organization shares knowledge within the context of your company’s culture. 

A critical piece of a content knowledge audit is your organization’s technology. It is important to understand all of your organization’s current systems and their functionalities, users, restrictions, and lifecycle status. Understanding all of the components involved in a knowledge audit can help you assess and effectively navigate any roadblocks along the way. 

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2. Explore business value and prioritize opportunities.

Based on your knowledge audit, identify what value an effective KM strategy could bring to your business. Then prioritize actions to deliver that value. 

3. Create a knowledge management framework.

Knowledge management frameworks are structures created to help you plan, design, optimize and scale company knowledge so information can be distributed efficiently. A knowledge management framework provides you with the process in which all of your company’s existing information will come together. When building your framework, you’ll need to decide which information is made available, how it is documented, and how it will be accessed.

4. Define your KM strategy.

Show how you plan to align KM to your organization’s overall strategy and goals. Define the value proposition for enhancing the flow of knowledge across your organization. Set clear objectives and goals that will be easily understood throughout your organization. Identify the resources and budgets you will use for developing strategic and implementation KM plans and assign governance roles and responsibilities. 

5. Develop your KM strategic plan and roadmap for implementation.  

Ready to get started? It’s important to define your KM priorities and how they link to overall business priorities. Decide how you will clearly communicate critical knowledge management initiatives and measure their progress. Create and share an implementation plan and roadmap for developing capabilities that support knowledge flow, sharing, and creation. 

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Knowledge management is defined as the process of creating, identifying, and managing knowledge of an organization and structuring it for effective and efficient use among its employees and teams. This article explains what knowledge management is today, its growing relevance, strategy best practices, and trends. 

Table of Contents

Knowledge management is the process of creating, identifying, and managing knowledge of an organization and structuring it for effective and efficient usage by employees and teams. Organizational knowledge includes information, such as revenue expansion strategies, recruitment best practices, winning bids to special employee skills in certain tasks, internal IT disciplines, and legal team strategies, among others. 

Knowledge management is emerging as the most significant technology of 2020. The global knowledge management market is projected to touch $798.9 billion, with a compounded growth of 20.4%, according to ResearchandMarkets.com. The international knowledge management market is likely to expand at a CAGR of more than 22% from 2016 and 2025, says Zion Market Research.

With the ever-increasing number of COVID-19 cases, and social distancing norms bringing a paradigm shift in how businesses are conducted, it is crucial to leverage the data and information assets present in the enterprise’s systems. This approach improves organizational efficiency and builds a more collaborative organization.

Benefits of knowledge management

For enterprises, the benefits of a well-implemented knowledge management strategy are manifold and far-reaching. Here are a few advantages of having a well-defined knowledge management strategy. 

Benefits of Effective Knowledge Management

1. Encourages collaboration 

It enables collaboration and more effective exchange of ideas, leading to improved decision-making. Better and faster decision-making helps in enhancing customer experience and improving business prospects for the company. A more collaborative environment further helps in promoting innovation in the organization. As per a study conducted by the College of Business, Gachon University and College of Global Business, Korea University in January 2020, knowledge sharing was significantly and positively related to team trust and the perception of collaborative technology moderated the relationship.

2. Allows faster decision-making 

When relevant information is provided as and when required, it enables faster and more informed decision-making. A 2017 study by ResearchGate concluded that knowledge management practices significantly impact an organization’s ability to make speedy and effective decisions. 

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3. Avoids duplication of efforts

It helps firms to enhance operational efficiency and save time and effort. A crucial benefit of knowledge management is the elimination of replication of efforts. For instance, let’s consider that your customer support executive is finding it hard to help a customer who has raised a query for a rarely-used feature. 

In normal circumstances, the customer support executive will spend a considerable amount of time finding the information and might even annoy or frustrate customers. However, with knowledge management, the customer support executive can quickly locate any past instance of a similar query and use it to address the present inquiry. This way, it helps the organization avoid making the same mistake again. 

4. Leverages existing expertise 

A well-defined knowledge management process enables the organization to effectively take advantage of its team members’ existing skills and expertise. Let’s say a few colleagues are experts in a new and developing complementary area. A formalized knowledge management program will help other members leverage these members’ skills and expertise to build competency in a new area.

5. Prepares for crisis 

Organizations with a structured and formalized knowledge management program are better prepared to face challenges as they benefit from the learnings of dealing with a crisis. 

6 . Enables digital transformation 

As organizations quicken the pace of digitalization, they have a plethora of structured and unstructured data. A well-defined knowledge management program allows them to use this information for their growth and benefit.

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Process of knowledge management

Knowledge and expertise of employees and their learnings from organizational operations is a crucial asset for the company. For instance, there may be a regional sales team that has tested and implemented a key sales strategy in their local sales region, perhaps even in a local language. 

The knowledge management process should report this event and its related documents to the regional company leadership, who can escalate it for company-wide testing and use. The essential documents proving the case study need to be centrally stored and accessible online to required employees and leaders. 

However, companies cannot take complete advantage of this knowledge if it is not reported via the set channels, and documented or made readily available to required teams and its members. Many times, businesses suffer when a crucial team member quits or retires. An employee amasses a lot of experience during their stint at a company. If the required knowledge is not documented and managed, the continuity within teams and functions suffer when the employee leaves. Having a knowledge management strategy can prevent this and protect the company’s intellectual property. 

Knowledge management is not just about deploying software or a digital tool to capture the information or data in the company’s system. It involves a fundamental change in the workforce’s mindset to foster a culture of sharing and collaboration across the organization. This can be easily facilitated through set policies and guidelines. The success of a knowledge management system depends on how the management ensures that employees and particularly team leads, document, and share newly identified knowledge regularly. 

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The process of knowledge management can be captured in five steps. It starts with discovering valuable knowledge, identifying it, structuring it, analyzing, sharing, and finally making it available to employees.

1. Discovering knowledge

Knowledge can be discovered accidentally by team members or done with deliberation. An example of accidental knowledge is discovering a critical step that greatly improves the organization’s process, even if that was not the intention of the task. An example of intentional knowledge discovery/creation could be an A/B testing project to find the best conversation optimization strategies for a company’s website. 

2. Identifying knowledge

The next step is to identify the knowledge where the team needs to ensure two things. One, that indeed this is unique knowledge previously undocumented in the organization. And two, it helps the organization meet its ultimate objectives, even if it is in a small contribution.

3. Documenting knowledge

The next critical step will be to document the knowledge in its most accurate form. For example, when documenting a successful sales strategy, every step and customer case study must be documented

4. Flagging new knowledge

Flagging new knowledge requires team leaders to report new knowledge via the right chain of command for the organization. Many companies also hold townhall and company-wide meetings, where selected new knowledge discoveries are shared with the entire company with due credits. 

This also encourages new knowledge discovery by other employees. Once the functional head or leadership or knowledge management team is made aware of the new discovery, the next step involves reviewing it. Once its validity is approved, the knowledge will need to be stored, organized, and shared with relevant teams. 

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5. Organizing and storing knowledge

Once knowledge is successfully discovered and approved, companies need to structure and store this knowledge in an easily understandable format. It should be stored on a platform that is readily accessible, yet secure. With the rise of work-from-home policies during the COVID-19 shutdown, more and more companies are opting for cloud storage for secured and remote access to company files and documents. 

A substantial part of an enterprise’s knowledge is unstructured, including company memos, emails, research, and social media posts. The company must set the right storage standards for each knowledge type to be structured and ready for access. 

6. Sharing knowledge

Knowledge should be shared by authorized people in a set structured format. It should be shared with the required teams based on who should and can use the knowledge to meet organizational goals. Knowledge sharing is the crux of a knowledge management strategy. 

All previous efforts prove fruitless if the knowledge is not effectively shared among all stakeholders and not used when needed. In this step, businesses create a technology-enabled platform to make learning accessible. It also involves training employees to use the knowledge to make informed decisions. 

7. Utilizing knowledge

The final and most crucial step is putting the acquired knowledge to good use. Any employee looking for relevant information should be able to access the right information based on access and security clearance and utilize the knowledge to make quick decisions. 

For example, a regional logistics manager is looking for a faster and more efficient way of doing inventories. Instead of spending time on new trial and error from scratch, he could look up successful tests conducted by other territory managers and emulate their method. It saves time and facilitates a more efficient way of utilizing organizational resources.

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5 Key Components of Knowledge Management

There are multiple cogs in the engine that make a knowledge management platform work. Let’s look at five key components of knowledge management. 

1. Strategy

A knowledge management strategy is a well-documented source of direction for the company. Essentially, it is the blueprint of the goals of the organization in terms of identification, storage, and sharing of existing and new knowledge, which include the business challenges that need to be solved across departments.

The knowledge management strategy should focus on identifying and addressing a knowledge gap in the organization. For instance, if an insurance firm identifies the general insurance division as a growth area, the other departments should learn more from this division to realize organizational goals.

2. Process

A clear and well-defined process for identifying, storing, and sharing knowledge is a vital component of every successful knowledge management initiative. The process of knowledge management includes various steps, such as creating knowledge, structuring it, reviewing and sharing it before it can be used, and applied by other teams.

The processes you set up should be designed to ensure accuracy in identifying, managing, sharing information, especially in a secure way. The purpose of knowledge management is counter-intuitive if the wrong information is shared or if it is shared with the wrong person. 

3. Technology

Technology is a crucial element behind the success of any knowledge management project. The systems and software should also enable easy and secure access for authorized employees to relevant information as and when required. Technology solutions bring together all the components — process, people, and information — required to build an organization’s knowledge management system. 

Typically, dedicated knowledge management platforms utilize big data and document analysis to provide business intelligence as well. These platforms are increasingly tapping into AI enablers for more sophisticated and customizable analytics.

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4. People

People include top management, team leaders who motivate their members, the core knowledge management team who guide the implementation, and finally, employees who contribute and use the system. 

Knowledge management must be prioritized within the company. The top management needs to lead by example and encourage and incentivize the sharing of information. Rewarding and motivating people to regularly use the system to share their insights will go a long way in ensuring the knowledge management program’s success.

5. Improvement

Knowledge management is not a one-time initiative. It is a dynamic exercise that has to become a part of the company culture. It needs regular reviewing, tweaking, and improvement to meet the goals defined in the strategy. 

The company should regularly revisit its knowledge management strategy to see what is working and what’s not. Further, knowledge management plans are intrinsically linked to the organization’s goals and objectives. Sometimes the goals themselves change, thus making it necessary to reevaluate the knowledge management policies and plans. 

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Top 6 Knowledge Management Strategy Best Practices for 2021

Enterprises across business verticals need to maximize the harness of organizational knowledge to gain an edge in today’s competitive global marketplace. So how can they leverage it? The answer lies in building a robust knowledge management strategy. Here are some key best practices to help you develop your knowledge management strategy.

1. Identify your goals

The purpose of the knowledge management initiative should be well-defined. For instance, you may have an overall organizational goal to improve customer experience across all touchpoints. This goal needs to be documented and related to functional, and team heads since customer experience has several touchpoints and verticals.

Identifying the purpose will help you involve the right people and resources to acquire the knowledge and meet the objective. You may even need to revise or update your goals. It is crucial to get key members of your team involved in defining your knowledge management initiative.

2. Create a knowledge sharing policy

Typically, organizations suffer when key employees, who had been working with them for a long time, decide to leave. This is when the knowledge gathered by this employee is not documented, leading to key lapses and potential losses for the business. A formal knowledge-sharing policy is vital to ensure that information gathered stays in the company irrespective of talent churn. 

Furthermore, a knowledge management policy helps in capturing tacit knowledge in the organization. Such a policy mandates employees to share their expertise and experience gained while working in the company with their respective team leads for efficient use across the organization.

3. Share knowledge across the organization

A key benefit of knowledge sharing is gaining from the experience of other departments in the organization. It is imperative to share knowledge across the board for maximum benefit. This means not only sharing challenges and solutions with your team members, but also with different departments of the company. 

For instance, the sales team may face a problem similar to what the operations team has faced in the past. If knowledge is shared, the sales team can learn from the operations team’s mistakes or simply adopt the solution that worked for them. This way, the company stands to save time, money, and resources rather than reinvent the wheel. 

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4. Appoint a knowledge management implementation officer

A strategy is just half the battle won. The other half is making it work for the employees and the company at large. As this would require a significant change in the organizational process and possibly culture, you will need someone experienced to steer the boat. 

Ideally, this person should understand the company and the objective of the knowledge management initiative and guide its implementation. This also includes ensuring compliance with each team. If an organization cannot afford to allocate or recruit a full-time employee, they can utilize a shared HR personal or administrator.

5. Lead by example to bring a cultural shift

Rather than dictating employees to use the knowledge management system, it will work well if the top management leads them by example. This means knowledge management should start at the top of the hierarchical structure and then move towards the bottom to be truly effective. 

Adopting a knowledge management strategy is a major cultural shift, and it will work best if employees see the CXO suite actively do it and emulate them. 

6. Incentivize employees

Many times, the knowledge management system doesn’t see traction because employees don’t have much to gain. By withholding information, they also feel they are valuable and indispensable to the company. It might help to motivate employees to participate in the knowledge management strategy. They can be incentivized with rewards, recognition, benefits, or bonuses. 

The success of a knowledge management initiative depends on how well your workforce adopts it. The benefits and gains of the initiative should be clearly communicated to employees at the individual level. Once they understand the benefits, the chances of adoption, and success of the knowledge management initiative increase manifold. 

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Top 5 Knowledge Management Trends in 2021

As more and more businesses digitize their operations during COVID-19, they realize that knowledge management can enhance their efficiency and productivity. More importantly, knowledge management allows them to serve their customers better, even as traditional business methods and practices are rendered ineffective. Here are the top five knowledge management trends for 2021: 

1. Acceptance of knowledge management as a crucial growth enabler

Enterprises no longer doubt the relevance of knowledge management as a critical success factor. For several years organizations avoided focusing on knowledge management because it was not perceived as essential for growth. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it crucial for organizations to allow easy and access to relevant information to the remote workforce, and this, in turn, has accelerated the development and a wider acceptance of knowledge management as a growth enabler.

2. Adoption of knowledge management to pave the way for AI

A growing number of organizations are realizing that knowledge management is a great way to pave the way to eventually leverage artificial intelligence. The upcoming AI technology promises to play a crucial role in the curation, accessibility, and distribution of knowledge. 

Having a well-defined knowledge management strategy allows organizations to capture knowledge, both structured and unstructured, making it easier to automate processes for business gains. AI allows organizations to not only tag and organize information but also to generate contextual metadata. This makes it easier for people to access and leverage and use available data. 

3. Technology to drive knowledge management adoption

Today’s technological advancements support the evolution of knowledge management from a small initiative to a forceful contributor to the organizations’ growth. Tech solutions make it easier and more effective for organizations to capture the data.

The other aspect is that an increasing number of organizations are digitizing their operations and, in the process, capturing a mammoth amount of data. In this context, they need knowledge management to process the available data effectively.

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4. A better understanding of knowledge management benefits

Knowledge and information provide incredible power and insights to the organizations to make informed decisions and serve their customers better. There is a growing understanding among the enterprises that they need to systematically consolidate their information and data assets to be in a position to gain insights and leverage their knowledge.

5. Gig economy to accelerate knowledge management

The workforce is increasingly moving towards the gig economy, with people taking up several jobs simultaneously. There is a growing need for organizations to provide their workforce with the necessary knowledge resources to complete tasks successfully. Generally, gig economy workers are not part of the organizations’ employee infrastructure, so they don’t usually have access to the company knowledge assets. This, along with the growing base of remote workers, will push the firms to adopt a formal knowledge management program. 

In Closing

Knowledge management has become critical for organizations from industries of all sizes. The benefits are there for all to see. Most successful businesses already have a robust model in place, and it is your turn to follow in their footsteps. A knowledge management platform takes years to perfect. So the time to commence your journey is now. 

As knowledge management systems mature, we will see knowledge management platforms evolve to become more dynamic, secure, and customizable. Knowledge management software and solutions can empower your organization to improve productivity and operational efficiency. More importantly, they help in providing a better customer experience leading to reduced churn. 

By enabling your workforce to access the right information at the right time, knowledge management allows them to make well-informed decisions. Adopting best practices and being aware of trends maximizes the returns of a knowledge management initiative. 

Are you exploring how to better manage the underlying knowledge in your organization? Was this article helpful? Comment below or let us know on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We’d love to hear from you!