Information is crucial to the success of a business. Without proper management of information, there won’t be synergy among the staff, which could hurt its success. We now live in an era where staff cooperation is needed more than ever, especially as there are various means of communication and information gathering. These different means of gaining information or communication don’t translate the data into helpful knowledge. Also, it doesn’t guarantee that the knowledge gained will be shared appropriately. Knowledge management comes in here, so this post is just for you.

This post will arm you with the necessary knowledge you need to have about knowledge management and how to determine the right knowledge management strategy that will suit your business.  

What is Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is the creation, use, sharing, and management of information in any organization or business. This process involves the employees of a company and their customers. It is geared towards using knowledge to improve a company’s competitive advantage and allow it to be dominant in the market. In essence, knowledge management is making appropriate use of a business’s information.

The main areas of knowledge management are;

• Knowledge accumulation
• Knowledge storage
• Knowledge sharing

Benefits of knowledge management

• It makes it easy to access knowledge and information
• An efficient workplace
• Quicker informed decision-making
• Optimized collaboration
• It improves idea creation
• Efficient knowledge and communication network for business
• Boosts information and knowledge quality
• The improved training process for employees
• Boots employee focus and morale
• Security for business information
• Faster, better decision-making

Types of Knowledge Management

The types of knowledge management are;

Explicit Knowledge
Implicit Knowledge
Tacit knowledge

1. Explicit knowledge

Explicit is the knowledge reduced to a physical form through writing. It is the knowledge that has been codified, documented, and shared in that manner. It is the knowledge that is rigid in form. In summary, it is knowledge with a formal structure. Examples are instructions, reports, charts and other diagrams, worksheets, FAQs, office slides.

2. Implicit Knowledge

Implicit knowledge is, in essence, applied knowledge. It involves learned skills and the application of explicit knowledge to a scenario. Implicit knowledge is knowledge gained then applied to solve a problem. It consists of putting explicit knowledge to practice. For instance, using a strategy slide which is a form of explicit knowledge to a situation, would be categorized as implicit knowledge.

3. Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge is a mutually understood knowledge. It is the information that doesn’t need to be disclosed before it is understood. It doesn’t exist in a structured format, nor is it applied to a situation. It is knowledge known without being taught. This type of knowledge is informal, and it has cultural ties—for example, understanding body language.

Examples of Knowledge Management Strategy

Documentation: This strategy revolves around centralizing manually or, better still, digitally the business documents. These documents can be stored using a manual filing cabinet or a digital one. This system has the following advantages.

Document retrieval becomes easy, and it is easier when stored digitally.
It adheres to the ethics of running a business.
It helps improve workflow.
It secures document longevity as there are backup processes.
Sharing document becomes easy.

Disadvantages

The document might not be protected adequately from outsiders. For instance, if an employee exposes the password to access digital files, the company can be adversely affected by the compromise.
Documentation can be time-consuming.
The document must be appropriately organized and structured for ease of retrieval, the.
There must be a continued update of documents, or the knowledge contained becomes obsolete.

Intranets and Collaboration Environments

These are private computer networks put on easily accessible and searchable communication platforms. The advantages of this strategy are;

• They encourage cooperation among employees.
• Knowledge flows freely among employees.
• It improves internal social networking among employees.
• Innovation levels rise due to the level of cooperation among employees.
• Organized communication lines that help connect all teams.

Disadvantages;

• Free flow communication can breed distractions.
• Outsiders can easily access it.

Determining the right knowledge management strategy

In determining to use a knowledge management strategy or whether your knowledge management strategy is the right one, consider the following and use it as a guide to inform your decision.

Product Improvement

Knowledge management is not done for its sake. It has to establish something, and one of those things is whether the knowledge you have gotten from customers and other sources has caused you to notice problems with your products. Detecting these problems is a precursor to their Improvement. If your strategy is not giving you knowledge of customer experience with your products and their performance in the market, you should be changing your knowledge management strategy.

Customer Service: Assisted Service

Are your support personnel getting information from their customer service sessions, and how have they used that information? This is what should echo in your mind with your knowledge management strategy. The info gotten from customers through customer service sessions with them should translate to how you can help them. This knowledge of how to help them must also be shared and reused by your customer support. This suggests that there is room for collaboration in your customer support.

Customer service: Self Service.

Businesses now offer customers the ability to attend to some issues by themselves. Companies achieve this by giving customers the necessary direct knowledge. The information needed here is whether businesses share self-service knowledge on time, if customers find the knowledge enticing to read and if customers find the knowledge useful. To be sure of the impact this self-service has on a customer, businesses should provide ways to get feedback from their client. If your knowledge management does not allow you to know how impactful your self-service is, it needs to be fine-tuned or changed.

Impact on Business.

Your knowledge management must have a positive impact on your business. It would help if you got sale figures that would impress upon you the strategy you would take to improve sales. Your knowledge management has the ultimate goal of improving your business and your chances to compete in an already competitive market. If you can’t achieve this, then your knowledge management strategy isn’t as beneficial to you as it should be, and as such, you have to make changes.

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The KM framework has been constantly evolving in the past decades. The importance of managing and leveraging an organization’s intellectual knowledge capital to gain competitive advantage has been stressed enough. With the ever-changing business goals, KM is now seen more and more as an integrated mechanism to bring together functional silos rather than an independent operations to manage intellectual knowledge.  Even though a KM framework varies from organization to organization based on the business structure, goals and operations, the evolution of communities, personalization approach with stress on collaborative culture, informal meet ups are some of the trends seen across organizations with the end goal to create an environment that is cohesive to knowledge share and capture.

However, for KM to succeed and align with the changing organizational trends and business needs, comes the need to evaluate its performance and measure its success against those defined goals. This will pave the path for reinventing KM strategy and use it successfully for gaining the edge over competitors.

Find below some of the metrics you can incorporate in your own KM framework to measure its health and success:

Community usage and business value: How the KM community is faring and helping its members via community metrics dashboard and users’ survey can give a good glimpse of the health in the Community and KM practice.

-The number of visits to the KM Communities
-The number of Community members
-Number of questions asked on discussion forums and response time
-Best practices and process documents shared
-Feedback received in the regular user feedback survey
-New content added to the community and the #times downloaded

Content Harvested: One of the key components of KM is to gather knowledge, insights, success stories and lessons learnt that can be re-purposed by other employees in their work. Therefore, keeping periodical metrics to track content harvested and re-purposed can provide cleaner insights into how your KM practice is fairing.

Campaigns and participation: There are a number of campaigns you can run (few examples listed below) to support KM initiatives leading to Innovation, which is one of the KM end-goals. So doing a pre and post metric to measure success of a campaign can give you an insight into your KM success.

Innovation ideation campaigns where people come together to ideate on a specific topic and come up with innovate ideas to improve processes and applications. The number of participants, ideas generated as well as implemented can be great metrics to show the business results of KM.
Virtual cafes and learning sessions to create awareness around specific tool, application or topic are great way to connect Subject matter experts, and leadership to their team members. No of participants, questions asked and answered, lessons learnt and implemented is a great metrics to track.
Live stream sessions and panel discussions are again interesting KM channels to disseminate KM and the metrics can be easily tracked via the questions asked, topics discussed, feedback received.

Lessons learnt: From all the above, it is vital to track the lessons captured and used. How people who participated or used above channels to download knowledge, actually used it to make their work easy, or save time and money on reproducing that information is a critical metric that is aligned to the key business objective of re-purposing intellectual knowledge to achieve that business advantage.  

KM strategy needs to be agile and keep evolving with the changing customer and business needs. However, to make it effective and successful, you need to quantify and measure it continuously for it to work and achieve your business objectives and enhance customer satisfaction.

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It is heartening to note that discussion is taking place after the release of the 4th edition of the Global Knowledge Index (GKI), jointly produced by the UNDP and Dubai-based Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation. Bangladesh ranked low in GKI among 138 countries. Dr. Saleemul Huq, Director of the ICCCAD at IUB, in an op-ed in The Daily Star on December 30 rightly stressed the need for a "national consensus" to make the necessary paradigm shift to transform Bangladesh into a knowledge economy over the next decade.

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What’s the likelihood that KM solutions “stick” without a KM leadership team? Pretty slim. When you take the time to develop leaders who understand the value of knowledge management and are empowered to be creative and try new ways to solve tough organizational challenges, you create a culture of knowledge sharing, team collaboration, and personal and professional growth.

The make-up of this KM leadership team looks different in every organization because every organization is different. A KM leadership team that is designed to create positive change within their team, department, or organization’s culture has some common elements. 

Here are the top three ways to shape the KM leadership where you work by thinking about it in terms of tribes:

1. Build your tribes

Seth Godin defines a tribe as “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” Tribes need leaders and members who share a vision that they’re willing to create together. 

In KM, that might be:

• A workplace that’s fun, engaging, innovative, and bustling with smart people sharing their expertise and ideas with one another
• Easy access to all tribal knowledge so that every tribe member can focus on the service they provide to the community, rather than wasting time looking for informational resources
• Leveraging technology that enables the tribe to communicate more effectively about the topics and issues that matter within their community

In essence, individuals make up tribes, tribes make up a community, and a community defines its own culture.

2. Make sure tribe leaders and members know their roles

When you start developing your KM leadership team, you should focus on selecting committed tribe leaders who will serve your tribe members. Look for individuals of varying seniority and tenure who are willing to join the tribe and help support the other tribe leaders. These leaders should attract their tribe members rather than coerce them to join the tribe so it’s important for these leaders to be able to articulate and bring energy to their tribes shared vision.

Once you’ve identified your tribe leaders, provide them with the learning opportunities that they need in order to develop into servant leaders. Then, it’s important that the tribes and community overall recognize who they are and what their role entails. Communication is key because a tribe that doesn’t recognize or understand who is leading the way will go in every which direction.

Here’s what this tribe model might look like within an organization that understands how knowledge management can enable employees to  flourish and thrive:

Tribe Leader (Head Servant Leader): This individual has formal power and influence within the organization. They are the ultimate champion for KM and they’re willing to invest in it and endorse the efforts to build KM into their operations and strategy.

Tribe Supporters (Servant Leaders): These are the individuals who lead departments, teams, and practices within an organization. They may lead one facet of KM, such as content strategy, taxonomy design, or collaboration tool implementation.

Tribe Members: These are the “users” in user-centric design. They are the focus of the KM solutions that the Tribal Leaders are designing because they are the ones who are most impacted by the change.

Tribe Council: This is the group within the tribe that is responsible for the rules that the tribe follows. The council weighs in on the changes to the KM solutions once they’ve been implemented.

Tribe Specialists:  Lastly, these are the individuals within the tribe who are the true experts within a certain KM realm. This would be like the equivalent of a shaman who provides medicine and healing for the tribe members. In KM, this might be someone who is an expert in user experience, change management agile, methodologies, or semantic web tools.

3. Gauge the healthiness and maturity of your tribes

It’s not enough to simply choose and train leaders before you send them off on their own. You also have to set up ways to measure and evaluate their effectiveness in reaching their tribe’s objectives.

Be on the lookout for these signs of a healthy, thriving tribe and community:

• People are happy to be there and feel a part of something larger than themselves
• People are productive and work hard to build and innovate
• People are knowledgeable and share their knowledge with others

Individual growth is tied to the growth of the tribe, which results in the growth of the entire community. Individuals who belong to tribes and have a community-centric mindset will work together to create the culture that they envision. That’s how change happens.