Initiating effective knowledge management in your organization often seems like a timely and complex procedure, but done right it can lead to powerful efficiency across all departments. However, this process often requires the confrontation of a number of significant challenges and there are common pitfalls that can ensure a project. Here are 5 mistakes that can cost your organization significantly when implementing knowledge management - awareness will enable you to prevent falling into these traps.

1) Doing Too Much At Once

When you’re taking on knowledge management in your organization it’s natural to shoot for the stars. You want to optimize every aspect of knowledge management to achieve the best possible outcomes for your business. However, by taking on too much you’ll often undermine your core goals, leading to worse outcomes overall.

There are a number of risks entailed in taking on too much when you approach knowledge management. A protracted process of knowledge management implementation risks alienating key stakeholders from your aims, and sometimes a quick victory with measurable outcomes builds momentum. When you set off on your knowledge management journey, phase your strategy with short term goals and realistic aims for the beginning period.

2) Failing To Identify Measurable Goals

Knowledge management, when it’s implemented effectively, provides your organization with strategic insights and solutions that are targeted to certain problems. It is not, as some understand it, a productive background operation, but a highly specific process. When you begin to implement knowledge management in your institution, it needs to be accompanied by specific goals to have an impact.

“Choosing the right goals for knowledge management should be the first step, along with identifying the key metrics that will enable you to track these goals,” says Steven Frost, a KM expert at PaperFellows and OXEssays. “Whether you’re trying to decrease the handling time of clients or improve compliance across the board, targeting and tracking goals will lead to better outcomes.”

3) Forgetting About End Users

When it comes to implementing a new technology across the hierarchies of your organization, and especially when that technology is built around the complexities of knowledge management, it’s easy for architects of these systems to get caught up in the details. However, once implemented, your knowledge management system will be living and breathing through the end users, so ensuring that this practice guides your design is key to a successful system.

Throughout the process, pause at regular intervals to identify the pain points of your end users and proactively address these issues. Even small concerns of end users can snowball if they’re left unresolved, leading to significant inefficiencies as an end result.

4) Enforcing A One Size Fits All Approach

Successfully implementing knowledge management across your business requires building a system of access that works for all employees, regardless of their background, skills and styles. Building a functional system that doesn’t assume one was of thinking makes knowledge accessible to your whole organization, democratizing information and optimizing workflow.

To this end, knowledge should be available in a number of ways. Search terms should work both with specialized keywords and natural language and knowledge hierarchies should be built to be multifaceted, allowing access from a variety of directions. Building a range of paths to knowledge allows it to be distributed effectively and doesn’t presume one approach to accessing information.

5) Ignoring Feedback

“Any knowledge management infrastructure needs to find a way of collecting, incorporating and actioning feedback,” says Mona Hodge, a writer at State Of Writing and Essay Writer. “Feedback is itself a form of knowledge and it’s vital that as your organization starts producing knowledge that your users feel heard and recognized.”

Enable qualitative feedback to be issued from end users to article owners within your knowledge management infrastructure as well as identifying space for quantitative surveys of user experience. As these feed into the knowledge management system you’ll ultimately create an effective platform for all the users across your organization.

Signing Off

Knowledge management is a complex problem for organizations and there are a number of pitfalls that can doom a knowledge management project. However, by improving access to knowledge across your organization you can increase performance in every department. By avoiding these costly mistakes you’ll find a new level of efficiency within your business, and strive towards greater profits.
 

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Katherine Rundell is a business expert and writer at Academized.com and Ukwritings Reviews. She gained her MBA at the University of Colombia and has been consulting with businesses of all sizes on optimization and efficiency for five years. She is also a proofreader at Write My Essay writing service.