Helping your business survive for the long haul has never been easy. To survive, you have to navigate the endless volatility of the market, the persistent threats posed by your nearest competitors, and the ever-changing needs of your customers.

That’s a tall order in the best of circumstances. Today, however, the challenges business leaders face in ensuring their company survives and thrives are perhaps greater than ever before. The market is increasingly crowded and global economic conditions are fraught at best.

But there is hope, and it lies in the immense power of knowledge to drive business excellence across all domains. This article examines the vital role that knowledge management plays in supporting business longevity.

Efficiency Optimization

Let’s face it: Your company is not going to achieve long-term success if it’s hemorrhaging resources. Effective knowledge management helps project managers and decision-makers understand what attributes of the team in particular and the organization as a whole are working well. It also enables them to pinpoint specific areas where they are not.

For instance, a comprehensive performance analysis of your organization can help you identify redundancies that are wasting both your employees’ time and your project’s budget. This, in turn, enables you to formulate an evidence-based mitigation plan to ensure you are managing resources more effectively through organizational streamlining.

Your internal analyses can also help you recognize and capitalize on once-hidden assets. You might find, for example, that employee productivity surges at specific times, locations, and conditions. Armed with this information, you may implement scheduling strategies and working conditions to galvanize productivity.

Knowledge management provides the data you need to institute informed management practices. Make data-based decisions, and you can zero in on and eliminate (or at least substantially reduce) internal weaknesses. At the same time, knowledge management facilitates operational resiliency by defining and amplifying organizational strengths.

Optimizing Customer Experience

No matter what your particular industry is, the key to your company’s long-term survival is the capacity to provide your customers with a consistently exceptional experience.

Maintaining a high level of service excellence is a formidable challenge, no matter the field. However, the task can be more daunting in some industries than in others.

The healthcare industry, for example, is characterized by surging demand, shrinking budgets, and worsening labor shortages. In the face of such obstacles, patients and families may find themselves underserved and unsatisfied.

Knowledge management, though, can provide the essential insights needed to understand and redress clients’ grievances while building on their affirmations. Long wait times, for instance, are a common complaint of healthcare consumers, a complaint which may lead them to switch care providers or delay care.

Knowledge management can help healthcare administrators identify and remediate the root causes of extended wait times. Managers may, for instance, institute changes in patient scheduling or automate patient check-ins to expedite patient care. The result is not only a better patient experience but also improved patient loyalty and more consistent care.

Fostering Internal Communications

One of the most important attributes of sound knowledge management is that it precludes the possibility of knowledge hoarding. As every good project manager knows, knowledge is your best tool for optimizing outcomes. After all, project leaders can’t lead if they don’t have the information they need to make informed decisions.

And that’s why optimizing internal communications is the cornerstone of successful knowledge management. This is because good knowledge management isn’t just about getting the information one needs. It’s also about disseminating that information to the team members and stakeholders who need it.

This prevents the development of damaging information silos that substantially increase the risk of errors, redundancies, and inefficiencies. At the same time, enhancing internal communication through the strategic, efficient, and transparent flow of information helps to foster organizational cohesion.

As opposed to segmenting into discrete departments and divisions, interdepartmental collaboration prevails in the face of effective knowledge management. This, consequently, contributes to longevity by making the company as a whole more agile.

For example, as operating conditions evolve, managers may find themselves transitioning employees to other functions, roles, or divisions to support changing company needs. Sound knowledge management makes that process more efficient and more effective. This ensures that team members remain ever-attuned to the needs, functions, and processes of the company as a whole and of the various departments in it. 

The Takeaway

Knowledge is your company’s greatest weapon against challenging markets, rising competitors, and capricious customers. For this reason, sound knowledge management is essential to your company’s ability to survive and thrive in the long term.

Effective knowledge management can help you remediate inefficiencies while optimizing your use of resources. Knowledge management also drives loyalty and growth by increasing your teams’ capacity to provide a consistently exceptional experience to your customers.

Likewise, knowledge management promotes organizational cohesion and interdepartmental information-sharing. This is essential to driving resiliency and performance no matter the operating conditions — and there’s perhaps no better way to support longevity than that!

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Amanda Winstead is a writer from the Northwest US with a background in communications and a passion for telling stories.  She has been following Knowledge Management for several years and it's one of her favorite topics to explore.  Along with writing she enjoys traveling, reading, working out, and going to concerts.

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