6 Tips For Developing A Powerful Knowledge Management Strategy

ACCORDING TO IDC RESEARCH, IN THE 2010-2020 DECADE, THE WORLD’S DATA WILL GROW BY 50X, I.E., FROM ABOUT 1ZB IN 2010 TO ABOUT 50ZB IN 2020.

Every enterprise has vast stores of knowledge that are inaccessible and unleveraged. With the advanced growth and outspread of data, it is taking longer for employees, partners, customers or prospects to find the information that they seek.

Addressing this enormous drag on employee productivity caused by poor access to information can be best resolved with the help of an effective knowledge management (KM) system. Fast retrieval of the right information saves the employees some time leaving more room for productive work.

Gartner Group defines knowledge management as: “a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets.”

To set the context, KM is critical in formulating a strategy for addressing the pain points of an organization. A successful KM strategy is comprised of people, processes and technology.

The initial step towards leveraging knowledge within an organization is to define a killer knowledge management strategy that is specifically tailored to the needs of your employees.

A knowledge management strategy is an organized programme that describes how an organization is to manage business information, data, and knowledge to enhance productivity and efficiency.

It requires exceptional consideration to develop a system that best fits your organization. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to implement a knowledge base, there are plenty of things you can do to stay on track.

Here Are a Few Tips to Develop a Killer Knowledge Management Strategy

Segment Your Information

How many times have you searched through the entire knowledge base just to find the document or piece of content that you were looking for? Due to the fast-paced digital evolution of the organization, it is bound to happen quite frequently. To simplify the overall search mechanism, divide your information into different segments.

A knowledge management software enables you to create different segments especially for projects, teams, or group of documents. It restricts information overload and helps you to find the required information easily when you need it.

Segmenting your information according to department, task, product or service can make content navigation, retrieving and accessing information easier and quicker for your employees using your KMS.

Set Benchmarks On A Monthly Basis

Introducing new software and losing the track of improvement is one of the most common observations in an organisation. Situations like this arise due to a lack of understanding about the measuring metrics.

By introducing monthly benchmarks into their knowledge management strategy, organizations have the ability to track the activities within their KMS and enhance productivity.

Setting-up benchmarks and milestones help in measuring short-term success, but their ultimate effectiveness depends on their alignment with the overall strategy.

Benchmarks provide consecutive goals for your team to achieve. Their flexibility of adapting to changing priorities elevates the awareness of success and the value of KM systems.

Enable Dynamic Search Function

Search is everything! Enabling a robust enterprise search will save employees’ time, especially when the job involves searching for information on a regular basis.

By 2018, the ability to rapidly create and retrieve relevant content (knowledge) will be a key attribute of leading enterprises

A search function is a vital part of knowledge management strategies. Although it takes effort from an organisation to make it really work in their favour it helps them to find the relevant content easily on their social intranet by skipping over things they don’t need to see.

Enhancing search is all about holding proper archiving standards. When you upload a file or a document to your knowledge management system, it should be tagged and attached to specific search terms. Tagging makes future retrieving of the document a simple, straightforward process for all the MS users.

Keep Training Procedures Simple

Onboarding new employees and training them can be a time-consuming job for the management team regardless of how long they have been doing it.

Basically, managers have their own approach to train their new hires. But if they have a handful of new employees to monitor, they will hardly have any time to do their regular set of activities. KMS, here, can come to your rescue by delivering contextual knowledge to your new hires.

The best practice is to keep your KMS up to date with all the documents, records, training materials etc., that you’ve collected over the years. New hires can quickly access it and the managers can have a basic Q&A session. This saves countless hours of your management team and also fosters intranet adoption rate.

Develop A Framework For Content Creation

With a strong framework, organizations can ensure that employees maintain consistency in content creation.

For example, if you are assigning tasks involving content creation for blogs, wikis, articles etc., to 5 different people, you may end up receiving 5 different formats for each task. This will have an impact on the overall content consistency. With the help of a framework, organizations can streamline the content creation process by aligning it to a standard format.

Keeping consistency in the content creation will help your employees have a wealth of information to engage and collaborate with the intranet regularly boosting the adoption rate.

Leverage Social Elements

KMS is a simple enabler of knowledge culture across the organization. Imbibing it with social elements encourages collaboration and increases productivity. Using enterprise networking platforms like Yammer enables social features like tag, comment, share and like the content.

Modern KMS are powerhouses of information which are essentially social networks leveraging your employee’s skills and experience by encouraging them to organize, create, and manage the content.

This feature will enhance your knowledge management system, regardless of your organization’s size. Make sure that all employees know their knowledge sharing contributions are valued and vital.

The Bottom Line

Knowledge Management will always be an on-going challenge, requiring high-end collaboration tools. KM cuts across all parts of the enterprise involving people, processes and technology.

Properly planned KM initiatives show a tremendous value that more than justify the cost of the initiative. Getting a comprehensive understanding of the present state of your KM is paramount for the KM strategy development process.

Knowledge delivered more speedily achieves two goals: it builds employee satisfaction and experience and maximizes employee productivity.

Leverage an intranet solution which helps you to create an efficient knowledge management system and provide your organization with a global pool of information to meet the challenge.

Schedule a demo to know how to create a robust resource center with the help of knowledge management software and make knowledge accessible to all your employees.

Want to create a centre for knowledge? Try Mesh – An Intelligent Intranet Solution which not only helps you to build a centralized knowledge hub but also provides an open platform for employees to create, manage and share information across the intranet smoothly.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.