What does knowledge management mean

Explicit knowledge is knowledge and information that can be easily codified and taught, such as how to change the toner in a printer and mathematical equations. Why is knowledge management important? Companies begin the knowledge management process for many different reasons. A merger or acquisition could spur the need for codifying knowledge and encouraging teams to share their expertise.

The imminent retirement of key employees could demonstrate the need to capture their knowledge. An upcoming recruitment drive shows the wisdom in using knowledge management to assist in the training of new employees. Benefits of knowledge management More efficient workplace Faster, better decision making Increased collaboration Building organizational knowledge Employee onboarding and training process is optimized Increased employee happiness and retention, due to the valuing of knowledge, training, and innovation Knowledge management is an important tool in any company that wants to increase their bottom line and market share.

Knowledge management process In organizing the knowledge management for an organization, there is a four-step knowledge management process that can be followed. Discovery How will knowledge inside the organization be discovered?

In every organization, there are multiple sources of knowledge. Capture How will new and existing knowledge be stored? This can include scanning documents, using metadata and indexing. Process How best can this knowledge be synthesized and incorporated? This step involves a deep analysis of the knowledge gathered in the previous two steps. Share and benefit How best can individuals within the organization access this knowledge?

The point of knowledge management is to enable easy access to knowledge within the organization. Knowledge management methods Depending on what the company needs, their knowledge management will look different.

Below we have listed the most common types of knowledge management examples: 1. Documentations, guides, guidelines, FAQ and tutorials These written communications are great for storing and transferring knowledge.

In many cases, metadata is a great help for this. Forums, intranets and collaboration environments These online resources spark conversation and bring many knowledge holders into the same place. Pros: Collaboration drives innovation Many experts can be brought together into one place, no matter their location globally Facilitating contact with remote teams helps teamwork and knowledge transfer Cons: Can be a chaotic, noisy environment Knowledge is not actively being vetted as it is added to discussions Searching through many messages and threads for relevant answers is time-consuming Messages and threads might not be archived 4.

Learning and development environments Creating an environment where learning is considered an asset will drive employees to continuously educate themselves. Pros: Motivated employees can develop themselves at will Training pathways can be set out The structure allows for easier discovery of subjects Cons: Requires a lot of effort to build and maintain Content must be created and continually updated 5.

Case studies These in-depth studies into particular subjects serve as complete guides to a subject. Pros: Allow for full documentation and archiving of lessons learned Easily shareable Efficient for communicating complex information Cons: Take a lot of time and skill to create Can be too specialized to apply the knowledge broadly 6. Webinars These online seminars can be very helpful in widely disseminating ideas throughout teams, branches or the entire company.

Pros: Can be recorded and reused Easy for all interested employees to attend Cons: Take time and effort to plan, write and deliver Requires organization Knowledge management best practices 1. Sharing knowledge must be built into the company's DNA Knowledge management must be prioritized within the company, and an ethos of sharing knowledge must be built into the DNA of the company and incentivized. Establish a clear process There needs to be a clear system for all steps of knowledge management, while also leaving room for innovation.

Use technology to boost it Technology supports knowledge management, allowing knowledge to be searched for, found, and accessed within knowledge management systems. What are knowledge management systems? How do you defend and protect yourself? The first step is to be alert and to establish good situational awareness.

From there the phrase entered the KM vocabulary. The role of KM is to create the capability for the organization to establish excellent situational awareness and consequently to make the right decisions. A few years after the Davenport definition, the Gartner Group created another definition of KM, which has become the most frequently cited one Duhon, , and it is given below:. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.

KM as conceived now, and this expansion arrived early on, includes relevant information assets from wherever relevant. Both definitions share a very organizational and corporate orientation. KM, historically at least, was primarily about managing the knowledge of and in organizations. Rather quickly, however, the concept of KM became much broader than that.

What is still probably the best graphic to try to set forth what constitutes KM, is the graphic developed by IBM for the use of their own KM consultants. It is based upon the distinction between collecting stuff content and connecting people. The presentation here includes some minor modifications, but the captivating C, E, and H mnemonics are entirely IBM's:.

In short, what are the operational components of a KM system? This is, in a way, the most straightforward way of explaining what KM is—to delineate what the operational components are that constitute what people have in mind when they talk about a KM system. So what is involved in KM? The most obvious is the making of the organization's data and information available to the members of the organization through dashboards, portals, and with the use of content management systems.

For a wonderful graphic snapshot of the content management domain go to realstorygroup. The term most often used for this is Enterprise Search. This is now not just a stream within the annual KMWorld Conference, but has become an overlapping conference in its own right. Since knowledge resides in people, often the best way to acquire the expertise that you need is to talk with an expert.

Locating the right expert with the knowledge that you need, though, can be a problem, particularly if, for example, the expert is in another country. The basic function of an expertise locator system is straightforward: it is to identify and locate those persons within an organization who have expertise in a particular area. These systems are now commonly known as expertise location systems.

There are typically three sources from which to supply data for an expertise locator system: 1 employee resumes, 2 employee self-identification of areas of expertise typically by being requested to fill out a form online , and 3 algorithmic analysis of electronic communications from and to the employee. The latter approach is typically based on email traffic but can include other social networking communications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

Several commercial software packages to match queries with expertise are available. Most of them have load-balancing schemes so as not to overload any particular expert. Typically such systems rank the degree of presumed expertise and will shift a query down the expertise ranking when the higher choices appear to be overloaded.

Such systems also often have a feature by which the requester can flag the request as a priority, and the system can then match high priority to high expertise rank. In the KM context, the emphasis is upon capturing knowledge embedded in personal expertise and making it explicit. The lessons learned concept or practice is one that might be described as having been birthed by KM, as there is very little in the way of a direct antecedent.

Early in the KM movement, the phrase most often used was "best practices," but that phrase was soon replaced with "lessons learned. What might be a best practice in North American culture, for example, might well not be a best practice in another culture. The major international consulting firms were very aware of this and led the movement to substitute the new more appropriate term. The idea of capturing expertise, particularly hard-won expertise, is not a new idea. Gathering military intelligence was the primary purpose, but a clear and recognized secondary purpose was to identify lessons learned, though they were not so named, to pass on to other pilots and instructors.

Similarly, the U. Navy Submarine Service, after a very embarrassing and lengthy experience of torpedoes that failed to detonate on target, and an even more embarrassing failure to follow up on consistent reports by submarine captains of torpedo detonation failure, instituted a mandatory system of widely disseminated "Captain's Patrol Reports. The Captain's Patrol Reports, however, were very clearly designed to encourage analytical reporting, with reasoned analyses of the reasons for operational failure and success.

It was emphasized that a key purpose of the report was both to make recommendations about strategy for senior officers to mull over, and recommendations about tactics for other skippers and submariners to take advantage of McInerney and Koenig, The military has become an avid proponent of the lessons learned concept. The phrase the military uses is "After Action Reports. There will almost always be too many things immediately demanding that person's attention after an action. There must be a system whereby someone, typically someone in KM, is assigned the responsibility to do the debriefing, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to create the report, and then to ensure that the lessons learned are captured and disseminated.

The experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have made this process almost automatic in the military. The concept is by no means limited to the military. Larry Prusak maintains that in the corporate world the most common cause of KM implementation failure is that so often the project team is disbanded and the team members almost immediately reassigned elsewhere before there is any debriefing or after-action report assembled.

Any organization where work is often centered on projects or teams needs to pay very close attention to this issue and set up an after-action mechanism with clearly delineated responsibility for its implementation. A particularly instructive example of a "lesson learned" is one recounted by Mark Mazzie , a well known KM consultant. The story comes from his experience in the KM department at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. Wyeth had recently introduced a new pharmaceutical agent intended primarily for pediatric use.

Wyeth expected it to be a notable success because, unlike its morning, noon, and night competitors, it needed to be administered only once a day, and that would make it much easier for the caregiver to ensure that the child followed the drug regimen, and it would be less onerous for the child.

Sales of the drug commenced well but soon flagged. One sales rep what the pharmaceutical industry used to call detail men , however, by chatting with her customers, discovered the reason for the disappointing sales and also recognized the solution. The problem was that kids objected strenuously to the taste of the drug, and caregivers were reporting to prescribing physicians that they couldn't get their kid to continue taking the drug, so the old stand-by would be substituted. The simple solution was orange juice, a swig of which quite effectively masked the offensive taste.

If the sales rep were to explain to the physician that the therapy should be conveyed to the caregiver as the pill and a glass of orange juice taken simultaneously at breakfast, then there was no dissatisfaction and sales were fine. The obvious question that arises is what is there to encourage the sales rep to share this knowledge?

The sales rep is compensated based on salary small , and bonus large. If she shares the knowledge, she jeopardizes the size of her bonus, which is based on her comparative performance. This raises the issue, discussed below, that KM is much more than content management. The implementation of a lessons learned system is complex both politically and operationally.

Many of the questions surrounding such a system are difficult to answer. Are employees free to submit to the system un-vetted? Who, if anyone, is to decide what constitutes a worthwhile lesson learned?

Most successful lessons learned implementations have concluded that such a system needs to be monitored and that there needs to be a vetting and approval mechanism for items that are posted as lessons learned. How long do items stay in the system? Who decides when an item is no longer salient and timely? Most successful lessons learned systems have an active weeding or stratification process.

Without a clearly designed process for weeding, the proportion of new and crisp items inevitably declines, the system begins to look stale, and usage and utility falls. Deletion, of course, is not necessarily loss and destruction. Unlike tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge can be readily articulated, codified, stored and accessed. Explicit knowledge within an organization is easy for employees to access and co-workers to exchange. Explicit knowledge can range from company handbooks, to sales scripts to how-to videos on a Learning Management Platform.

Accumulating, storing and effectively sharing knowledge allows you to create a culture that can significantly improve efficiency and employee happiness. But ineffective knowledge management impacts the financial front and employee satisfaction levels.

This failure to document and store knowledge results in wasted time, recreated solutions, lost productivity, repeated mistakes and the same questions answered repeatedly. In comparison, however, effective knowledge management has quantifiable benefits. These are just a small snapshot of the benefits. According to a Gallup study, effective knowledge management boosts employee happiness and output. Plus, this wider spread of knowledge means more effective decision making from the top to the bottom of the organization.

There needs to be a knowledge management process in place that's followed organization-wide to unlock these and other benefits. Intelligent knowledge management platforms can provide access to the most powerful resource on earth, human intelligence. Implementing an intelligence platform is vital to gaining an edge on your competition, improving productivity and making your teams happier. Learn how you can effectively implement a knowledge management system backed by AI in your organization.

Image Credit. Blog post. Tacit: Tacit knowledge encompasses everything a person knows how to do but does not necessarily know how to explain.