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In your organization, is there a distinct strategy behind the people side of your organizational change, or is there simply a collection of tactical communications or training activities that need to be “managed” during a rollout? Change leadership requires the courage of swimming upstream, often against the ingrained habits of your organization.

There is a difference between truly leading change and just managing it:

Our KM Consultants help organizations improve the way they capture, share, and reuse information. Many KM projects focus on managing unstructured information like documents, emails, and web pages. While this type of unstructured information is critical, it is not the full enterprise of an organization’s knowledge. What about databases, reports, and dashboards? To fully encompass an organization’s knowledge and information, both structured and unstructured information must be addressed.

I recently ran a workshop for one of EK’s clients that was designed to discover, document, and then model how their internal social network (Yammer in this case) was running in their organization. The idea was to figure out if the company could use Yammer less organically and more deliberately for communication and collaboration.

There are three key questions to ask when developing a Knowledge Management (KM) strategy: where are you, where do you want to be, and how do you ensure you get there successfully? These are the three pillars crucial for the development of a sound KM strategy. At Enterprise Knowledge (EK), we define these as the Current State, Target State, and Roadmap. As simple as these terms may sound, developing a complete understanding of each is no small challenge.

There are three key questions to ask when developing a Knowledge Management (KM) strategy: where are you, where do you want to be, and how do you ensure you get there successfully? These are the three pillars crucial for the development of a sound KM strategy. At Enterprise Knowledge (EK), we define these as the Current State, Target State, and Roadmap. As simple as these terms may sound, developing a complete understanding of each is no small challenge.

With billions spent on corporate training yearly, companies just can’t afford for employees to forget knowledge they gain. A knowledge management system is what can help organizations to anticipate forgetting and break the forgetting curve.

Zach Wahl, expert in knowledge and information management strategy, content strategy, and taxonomy design, presents a brief explanation of the importance of knowledge management and making connections.  Zach leads the Taxonomy Design Certification program at KM Institute, and is the CEO of Enterprise Knowledge, LLC.

After nearly twenty years of Knowledge Management Consulting, I’ve developed core themes to what I believe comprises good KM. EK’s definition of KM embodies many of these themes:

“Knowledge Management involves the people, culture, content, processes, and enabling technologies necessary to Capture, Manage, Share, and Find information.”

Launching their knowledge management initiatives, organizations often resemble oil extraction companies. They start to drill their knowledge wells and rub their hands in anticipation of the upcoming boost to their business. However, knowledge management often turns to be even harder than real oil extraction from the entrails of the earth. That is, even with such a sustainable resource as knowledge, only few companies succeed in making a good use of it.

Do you assume people will adopt your new knowledge management initiative, or is adoption something you are actively investing in? Resistance can be the death knell for a KM project, and can lead to technology being left unused, processes being ignored, and knowledge being hoarded.