Evolution of Knowledge Management 

The fast-paced evolution of our globally interconnected economy necessitates the development of knowledge capabilities as a corporate imperative. The forebears of knowledge management devised helpful tools and methods. What they discovered is currently being used in various new business areas. 

According to the original principle of knowledge management, if knowledge is an organization's most important resource, it should be exploited and made more productive. This is still true today. However, the buzz around Knowledge management has exploded in recent years, as have its applications.

Businesses rely on a dependable knowledge management system for efficient information sharing and internal processes.

What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management is the process of gathering, storing, organizing, and disseminating information within a company. Knowledge is stored in your company's files, documents, guidelines, databases, reports, and in your employees' heads.

Leaders must allow knowledge to flow dynamically and effortlessly across all activities and departments inside the organization in a quickly shifting business landscape where taking full use of information is critical to staying competitive. The volume of unstructured data generated every day and locked away in siloed applications is the most significant difficulty in knowledge management. Emerging AI technologies will play an important role, such as natural language processing and natural language production.

These systems can categorize and organize data across several platforms, removing significant hurdles to leveraging knowledge developed within companies.

1 - Applications of AI in Knowledge Management

Unstructured content makes up more than 80% of enterprise information. Unlike structured data formats, analyzing and extracting valuable information from unstructured data such as memos, emails, text documents, films, and other forms of unstructured data. And this information is quite beneficial in the corporate world.

Knowledge mining is a new AI-driven idea that entails combining several intelligent services to quickly study data, uncover hidden insights, and discover linkages at scale. Knowledge workers will be able to access unstructured data more efficiently and make better business judgments due to this.      

2 - Chatbots powered by Knowledge Management – Knowledge bots

A knowledge bot can be built to deliver information on any topic that knowledge workers are interested in. A knowledgebot, for example, can respond to inquiries such as "Who is the senior manager for Knowmax?" "How do I upgrade my operating system?" or "What is Robin's email address?" Employees can also utilize the bot to retrieve documents from the knowledge management system, such as "Get me the sales report for 2017" or "Send me the status report for project A," etc. 

Employees can use a chatbot or a voice bot to have natural language discussions and access information via text or speech.

These bots will work as personal assistants on your intranet and in messaging apps like Teams, Skype For Business, and Skype.

3 - Quick access to personalized information with the help of a Semantic search

Cognitive enterprise search is a critical component of current information management systems and is essential forproviding individualized search experiences.

For example, a simple search on the firm's "Rebranding Directors" should not only return information on therelevant people in the company, but it should also tailor the results depending on the user's profile, such as location, geography, interests, work role, etc. Furthermore, the search should consider the language requirements of personnel all around the world.

4 - Omnichannel approach

All intranet packages will need flexibleand diversified capabilities that allow for easy cooperation. Everything elseis secondary to modern employees' preference for convenience and accessibility.

As a result, increased compatibility of intranet and knowledge base management technologies with a mobile interface are anticipated to emerge as an important knowledge management trend.

The goal is to provide employees with all the necessary tools at their fingertips, regardless of where they work.

Employees must juggle between applications,programs, and tools outside of the knowledge management system for various tasks such as project management, communication, and content creation, among others. 

The workplace apps and the knowledge management system can be brought together under one integrated digital workplace suite using intranet software. Getting into multiple programs and switching between them will be less of a challenge for an employee. 

5 - Cloud-based technologies

The software as a service (SaaS) paradigm is gaining traction in the digital workplace. Intranets with knowledge management systems are increasingly being sold as an Intranet-as-a-Service model. 

This is an appealing alternative for businesses that want flexibility and a cloud-based monthly subscription plan over a hefty upfront expenditure. This trend is also fuelled by an increased need to access information from any location.

Conclusion 

Employees will be able to access the knowledge management system more quickly and effectively if the user interface (UI) is well-designed. The staff's ability to adapt to the system is directly influenced by what they see on the screen. As a result, the backbone of an effective knowledge management system must be an appealing, compact, and adaptable interface. 

In an ever-changing business world, knowledge is power, and when effectively tapped, it allows businesses to stay relevant and innovate. A modern knowledge management system makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) to acquire, organize, and distribute business data efficiently.

Lastly, as you prepare to capitalize on these new trends, you might be tempted to overdo and choose the tools, not in line with your organization's processes. Hence, it is more important to monitor these efforts in a timely fashion.

In today's business world, innovation is key to success. Innovation is often thought of as a one-time event. But innovation should be fostered and encouraged throughout the year. One way to do this is by implementing new techniques for knowledge management. Knowledge managers have been tasked with the responsibility of providing their employees with timely information on various topics that are pertinent to their work environment. To encourage innovation, they can use these 6 techniques: 

1. Incorporate brainstorming into meetings

Create a collaborative environment where people are encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas with each other. Brainstorming sessions allow participants to come up with ideas without judgment from others. During brainstorming sessions, your team can solve problems by breaking them down into smaller, more manageable pieces. These can be done in person or via video conferencing.

Encourage people from every level in your organisation to speak up about what is working well and not so well within their work environment. This includes encouraging individuals who are not typically seen as leaders to participate in discussions during meetings.

Brainstorming sessions also allow people who might not typically speak up at meetings to feel more comfortable doing so because they know someone will listen and take note of their idea no matter how ‘out there’ it may seem at first.

2. Be a facilitator, not an evaluator

Establish goals and objectives with your team, holding them accountable for meeting those expectations. Guide employees to excel in your company’s objective and give them clear directions. Give feedback on their performance and progress towards these goals, instead of just giving criticism. Encourage new ideas by allowing employees to share their thoughts and concerns about meeting company objectives without fear of being judged in the moment.

Some knowledge managers believe that encouraging emotional intelligence is a way to encourage innovation in the workplace. It is essential for people to feel like they are having their thoughts and feelings validated, as well as being able to voice abstract ideas without fear of judgement or retaliation.

This will provide employees with new perspectives on problems they may not have even thought about before. Encouraging creativity through praise and recognition can also foster an environment where everyone feels like their contributions are valued, which helps propel innovation forward.

3. Invest in training for employees to learn and develop their existing skills

If you build on skills that your employees already know, they'll be more invested in the training and feel like it was a worthwhile investment of their time. Hold workshops periodically in various areas such as communication skills, customer service skills, value selling and more.

This is also a good way to train people who are new to an organisation or have transferred from another department because it will help them learn about how things work at your company without getting lost in too much jargon.

Innovation thrives when knowledge workers can share ideas with one another and collaborate efficiently across different departments within organisations. Knowledge management techniques such as these provide managers with tangible ways of fostering innovation by supporting collaboration among team members while providing tools for developing new approaches for day-to-day tasks.

4. Embrace failure — it's okay if some things don't work out as planned because you can always learn from them or try again later

Be a problem-solver. Create a culture that focuses on continuous improvement as opposed to doing something right once or having one-time success stories. Have whistleblowing systems in place to easily identify when things are going wrong.

This is the most important characteristic of an innovation-friendly manager. When employees come to you with problems or ideas for improvement, demonstrate that you're willing and able to provide assistance in solving these issues. Asking them questions about how they've already tried tackling their challenge will help give them confidence that you'll be receptive to their feedback. After all, it's vital not only to listen but also act on what we hear from others if we want our workplace culture to encourage new thinking and creativity.

5. Showcase the work of others in your company

Demonstrate to your employees the need for innovation by highlighting other people's work. For example, your company can start with developing an ‘Innovation of the Week’ series.

The Innovation of the Week can be a weekly feature for your company that highlights creative and innovative projects from within your organisation. The idea behind initiatives like these is that it helps each employee think about how they are adding value to their team or solving problems in new ways, as well as making them feel appreciated for their contributions.

Develop events that encourage knowledge sharing, such as holding monthly lunches where all employees can share what they've been working on so far. You can do quarterly presentations focused around one particular theme where everyone demonstrates what they know best.

6. Avoid the echo chamber — create a culture of dissent by encouraging people to challenge ideas

Encourage people to share their perspectives and insights. Create open forums where they're allowed, even encouraged, to challenge ideas and theories.

Encourage others to provide feedback on each other's work before it is finalised; this will help generate new ideas for the project or content at hand. You can incorporate members from other divisions in your company to get more perspectives.

Invite outside speakers who can offer different points of view from those that are currently represented by staff members within an organisation. If you seek out feedback from both inside and outside the organisation on how best to do things, this will give you a better idea of what is working in an area as well as what could be improved.

Encourage employees to take risks and explore new territories for ideas, products, or services. You can do this by allowing people time during the day to explore topics that interest them without any direct involvement in projects assigned by managers so that they may develop creative solutions.

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Quite often a good story is the best way to impart knowledge (Davenport and Prusak 1998).

Storytelling is the oldest technique of knowledge transfer and has been touted as the most effective medium to pass across a message to someone since we tend to memorize stories better than dry facts and can easily link them to our personal experiences. Medical technologies have also proved that storytelling is a natural way for brain to capture and retain information.

During the recent years “power of storytelling” has garnered a lot of attention from the perspective of Knowledge Management and harnessing the tacit knowledge of an organization. In a domain that has been primarily dominated by charts and facts, storytelling has a great potential as a knowledge transfer and learning tool. Capturing tacit knowledge is a pain point for most organizations so no wonder, storytelling is fast gaining recognition as a KM tool.

Let us see below how the role of storytelling in a KM framework.

Fostering collaboration – In an organization people often come together as teams, groups, communities. Using narrative techniques during these sessions help people collaborate and learn from each other’s experiences as they have a context missing in the traditional form of meetings.

Transfer of tacit knowledge and understanding - Stories allow tacit knowledge to be shared more easily as stories provide context and focus on issues relevant to the listener. Storytelling allows a seamless leap from information to knowledge.

Ideation leading to Innovation – Ideas pave the way for Innovation. Employees have hands on experience with processes, clients, products, and customers. When they collaborate to share their stories while collaborating formally or informally, they create a new paradigm by introducing new ideas with potential for improvement and innovation.

Organic way to learn - The wider purpose of any KM framework is to equip employees with knowledge for greater good of the organization, and the medium of learning is vital. Various studies have proved that story telling is most effective in imparting and capturing of knowledge. Tacit knowledge from experienced members and outgoing employees can be embedded in narratives to help inexperienced employees learn and upskill.

If the question is why stories work so well in knowledge management, then the answer–simply–is that “our brains seem to be wired to easily and almost automatically organize information into stories” (Reamy, 2002).

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Social Innovation can be defined as “the systematic disruption of social norms to effect social change.” As knowledge managers, we are quick to learn that much of the work we do involves not simply designing better processes and using technology advantageously, but disrupting the social and behavioral norms of people in our organizations in ways that enable their successful participation in new processes and technology related changes. Try as we might to introduce smarter and better ways to do business, we could not do business without people - more specifically the socially reinforced behaviors of people.  As a career technologist, knowledge strategist, and the owner of masters of science degrees in both Information Systems and Information and Knowledge Strategy, it was this revelation about behavior that led me to pursue what some might consider an unusual next step toward a Doctor of Social Work.  

Why would someone who once built web applications for universities and helped design decision making displays for Navy commanders decide to enter the field of social work at the doctoral level? Three reasons: (1) To understand how and why social innovation solves problems for our nation’s most vulnerable populations, (2) to offer my skill set to the design of new innovations in social work, and (3) to help knowledge managers and strategists discover a different set of research, science, and frameworks that can lead to innovation in the business world where interest in social enterprise and behavioral values like respect, trust, dignity, and integrity - long-standing tenets of the social work code of ethics - have continued to rise.

As my first term in the University of Southern California’s Doctor of Social Work program comes to an end, I thought I would share a helpful framework called Innovation Dynamics with our knowledge management community. This framework was designed by Andrew Benedict-Nelson and Jeff Leitner and is available in an easily digestible format in their book, See Think Solve: A Simple Way to Tackle Tough Problems. The information in quotations for the remainder of this article are taken from this book unless otherwise noted. In this blog post, we’ll walk through Benedict-Nelson and Leitner’s SEE, THINK, SOLVE approach, applying it to what one might consider a typical knowledge management (KM) problem.  First, we will identify the problem, and then rethink the problem in observable, behavioral terms using their framework.

Imagine:

Your senior leadership is fully on board with a new digital transformation initiative. Not only will you be tasked with moving the organization’s information into a new portal, but you’ll also be moving communication processes that are currently managed in another system, and heavily enabled by email, into a Slack-like tool designed to be used on desktop and mobile. Rather than waiting 24-48 hours for responses to trouble tickets, employees will have access to a searchable database and instant live support via their mobile devices. When this new tool set is finally unveiled, it is a hit! People love the design and the senior leaders love that the organization looks and functions in a more modern way. But you notice something interesting after the first two weeks. Usage has slowed and worse, some departments aren’t using your amazing troubleshooting system at all. Because the portal was a significant financial investment, senior leaders request a report out on its usage at their monthly meetings and you are dreading reporting this frustrating trend. What do you do?

Thanks to user analytics, you know the problem here is that user engagement with our new portal has measurably slowed or ceased. Your job as the knowledge manager is to determine why this is happening and design a solution that will make usage go up so your senior leaders feel like they are getting a return on their investment. Since all systems seem to be functioning as designed, this appears to be a behavioral problem in that users are not interacting as you anticipated they would with the new portal system.

If we use Benedict-Nelson and Leitner’s Innovation Dynamics framework, we can begin to understand how to SOLVE the problem, but first we need to SEE the problem through six innovation lenses. The lenses through which we will make our behavioral observations are as follows:

1. Actors: These are the people or groups of people involved in the problem. First order, second order, and missing actors all play a role here and it is your job to identify who they are. First order actors in our KM problem are people in departments that do not seem to be using the system. Second order actors might be the peers of those people in other departments or the supervisors and managers of those users. Missing actors might be trainers or customer support people who have not reviewed the new tools with the first order actors.
2. History: According to Benedict-Nelson and Leitner, “history is a collection of stories about the problem’s past - the official stories, the unofficial stories, the half-truths, and the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me stories.” In our KM problem’s past, people used different systems to get support and do their work before we switched to the new portal. Some people loved the old way of getting things done - maybe the 24-48 hour wait bought them time to do more or maybe they enjoyed a different way of interacting with support. You will have to uncover those stories that influence the behaviors leading to use patterns you are seeing in a particular department.
3. Limits: These are the “formal, explicit rules that influence how people behave in relation to a problem”. Could it be that in a department that isn’t using your new portal there is a rule against the use of mobile devices? Are users only able to access the portal at certain times in the day because they work outside of the office? Is there a supervisor who has created a rule that interferes with the use the new portal? These formal, explicit rules, or limits, are worth investigating, if you want to determine how to change the behavior of low or no portal usage.
4. Future: “The collection of people’s expectations about how a problem will turn out”. In our KM problem, some users think that if enough people keep using the old system they won’t be forced to use the new system because they assume the company will sustain the older resources.  Some users may not believe the information in the portal will be valuable to them and that using it will not make a difference in their own job performance. How do expectations about the future keep your problem in place?
5. Configuration: This is how people make sense of things using labels and categories. In the case of our KM problem, do the people who are not using the new portal organize their tasks or work in a certain way? What can we learn about how they organize themselves or their information that can inform why they are not using the portal? Have they categorized the portal itself as an optional tool or a must have? These are questions of configuration that can illuminate how people make sense of the portal’s use or non use in their work life.
6. Parthood: This sixth and final lens tells us that most problems are often related to, or are a part of, other problems. Might a lack of use of the new portal stem from a problem that some users don’t have computers or mobile devices? Could it be because users in a certain part of the organization have not been empowered to do their work in this new way? Discovering the other problems that might exist in relationship to our KM problem can shed light on how and where we need to change behaviors.

Now that we SEE our KM problem through these lenses, we are asked to THINK about the problem in terms of both social norms and deviance.

• Social norms are “unspoken, informal rules that tell everybody how to behave in social situations.” Here, our social situation is the workplace and we use the six lenses to look at the behaviors in our KM problem to find the norms. For example, if we see the problem (user engagement with our new portal has measurably slowed or ceased) through the lenses of actors and limits, we can identify specific people who are not using our new portal system, and, after speaking confidentially but candidly with those people, learn that that their supervisors have explicitly discouraged users from engaging in the new portal because they themselves are not using it. The social norm here would therefore be that users in department x do not engage in the use of the new portal and the six lenses help us see this is because a supervisor does not use it. This problem might seem “obvious”, but what the innovation framework does is empower us as knowledge managers to explore the problem more deeply, allowing us to engage and observe people in our organization using a more structured set of questions that can help us identify opportunities for innovation.
• Deviance “is a behavior with the potential to subvert a social norm.” Benedict-Nelson and Leitner insist that deviance not only break the rules and disrupt a social norm, but that it change the rules altogether. Understand the social norm, understand the behaviors that could unseat the rules that keep it in place. Once you identify areas and opportunities for behavioral change, you can begin to ideate on solutions and create a deviant.

This leads us to the SOLVE portion of Benedict-Nelson and Leitner’s framework. How we solve our KM problem requires us to create a deviant, not BE deviants in the traditional sense, but design mechanisms that encourage a deviant behavior in an innovation sense. If we take the problem, (user engagement with our new portal has measurably slowed or ceased), use the lenses to SEE a social norm (users in department x do not engage in the use of the new portal because a supervisor does not use it), we can posit that a deviance would be the supervisor changing his or her behavior to increase portal use within their department. But as Benedict-Nelson and Leitner emphasize, we not only want to disrupt the social norm, we want to change the rules holding that norm in place altogether. We want to understand what makes the supervisor NOT want to use the new portal and how can we change the rules around THIS behavior so that ALL supervisors will be incentivized to use the portal. One deviant innovation might be designing a recognition system that rewards supervisors directly for high departmental use and collaboration, maybe at those monthly meetings where you have to report out to the senior leadership. Perhaps another deviant innovation would be designing a questionnaire or conducting an interview that helps you tailor the new portal to each supervisor’s specific needs, addressing the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) more directly.  

Whatever your proposed innovation, or deviance, it is likely to get the support you need to execute it if you can show that you have investigated your problem using an innovation framework that has been applied, proven, well-researched, and costs nothing to your organization. I hope you will consider Benedict-Nelson and Leitner’s Innovation Dynamics and SEE THINK SOLVE when diagnosing your next major KM problem.