Organizations’ most valuable asset is thought to be knowledge. Finding, acquiring, organising, and exploiting the organization’s collective know-how is a difficult, repetitive, and continual task.
Four distinct processes make up knowledge management, and each of them is essential to an organization’s capacity to compete, advance, and expand:
- Knowledge discovery
- Knowledge capture
- Knowledge sharing
- Knowledge use
Here’s how to become an expert in each one and set up your company for ongoing knowledge management.
Knowledge Management Policy
All four of the knowledge management procedures depend on good communication, just like knowledge does. A company’s policy, which provides a set of rules for developing, capturing, distributing, and using your intellectual assets, should specify what you do with all of your expertise.
The knowledge management policy of a corporation establishes guidelines for daily operations and procedures that all employees must follow. Thus, it determines how and where knowledge is stored so that it is available to everyone, as well as how and where employees use the knowledge they have acquired through their work. You can develop a knowledge map and give your knowledge management process structure with the help of a well-designed document management policy.
IT consulting services
IT consulting, also known as technology consulting, is a professional service provided by IT consultants who help organizations improve their use of information technology. IT consultants provide expert advice and guidance to businesses and organizations on how to utilize technology to meet their business objectives and solve specific problems.
IT consulting services typically include a range of activities, such as strategic planning, system implementation and integration, project management, network design and implementation, software development, security assessment, and training and support.
IT consultants work closely with clients to understand their business needs and goals, and then recommend and implement solutions that leverage technology to improve efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness. They also help clients evaluate the risks and benefits associated with different technology solutions, and ensure that technology investments align with business strategies.
Tools for Managing Applicable Knowledge
Many businesses use internal knowledge bases to organise and store their pooled information. They are a component of knowledge management software, which was created to assist organisations in controlling and mastering the discovery, capture, sharing, and application of information.
Knowledge Discovery and Creation
Practices for finding new information both inside and outside of the organisation are included in knowledge discovery, which in turn results in the creation of new knowledge. Every employee must have access to knowledge management systems, but they also need to be welcomed and encouraged to participate in research and creation.
Employees should be given the authority to convert tacit information into explicit knowledge that can be used by anybody inside the organisation as soon as they discover anything new and useful.
A company policy should include instructions on how to proceed, such as a template for adding new items to the knowledge base and established organisational and formatting standards.
Knowledge Capture
The usefulness of tacit and explicit knowledge is what separates them. While the latter can be recorded, making it simple to convey, the former is incredibly difficult to communicate and, therefore, capture and apply.
All of the information contained in your knowledge base is considered explicit knowledge, but all of the expertise and skills that your employees utilise to execute tasks and address problems are tacit knowledge.
Also, it’s important to transfer and keep tacit knowledge.
Organizations should specify the best procedures for capturing tacit knowledge in order to achieve this.
The time and resources needed for converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge by documenting an employee’s practical expertise should be allotted most importantly.
For instance, each employee should be in charge of drafting a document outlining the procedures they apply on a daily basis.
If one of your customer service representatives consistently contributes well, you should ask them to describe their working style and the procedures they follow to get the best client feedback. The same holds true for each department’s staff members.
Because all individual experience and skill will be made explicit and available to other employees in your knowledge base, prospective employee turnover won’t ever hurt your business.
Experience with successfully finished projects and problems that have been solved should be handled similarly. Reliable staff members should be entrusted with documenting the project or incident, detailing it in full, and providing the strategies, tactics, and procedures employed to carry it out or respond to it.
Knowledge Sharing
Once knowledge is documented and archived, it may be transferred more quickly and easily. Anything after that depends on maintaining the knowledge base itself. Although there is no limit to the amount of information you can put there, you must maintain it clean and organised to encourage knowledge exchange.
A trustworthy information store must, first and foremost, be easily searchable. All resources must be properly categorised and subcategorized, and they must all be searchable using the right keywords, tags, or text segments if they are to be quickly found and accessed.
Your knowledge base would be disorganised without a set of rules to establish a consistent method for adding tacit knowledge, and the resources held there would be useless.
A template for creating knowledge base articles enables all employees to record, communicate and share what they know from experience and what they have just learned in practice.
Knowledge Use
Use a variety of knowledge base resources to make knowledge more simpler to transfer and use as appropriate. Prepare multiple templates rather than just one for a variety of uses, such as the creation of FAQs, issue and how-to articles, and guidelines.
A knowledge base article of any kind should provide content in a way that is both orderly and searchable, therefore pay close attention to the structure. Break down the problem-solving process step by step, utilise bullet points to highlight potential scenarios and solutions, and use context-sensitive help to provide more information in order to accommodate users with varying levels of prior knowledge.
Make Corporate Knowledge Work for You
You can manage both explicit and tacit information with the help of a dependable knowledge management system, which will also streamline the other four key knowledge management activities. Additionally, it needs to offer resources for sub-processes like the externalisation and internalisation of learned information or guidelines and procedures for effective knowledge application. A competitive advantage can be created from company knowledge by optimising knowledge management processes, which will raise its value.
