Knowledge Management in a Digital World
The term "knowledge management" is new to me. When I read the word the first time, I thought it was how to manage all that I'm learning in my brain.
Then I watch a YouTube video by IBM. The presenter, Martin Keen, a Master Inventor of IBM Cloud, broke down the definition of knowledge management into simple terms. We all know that one employee who knows everything about the company or the organization. Then, what happens when that employee, with all that knowledge decides to leave or retire? The company scrambles to get that employee to make lists and descriptions of what all they know.
As Keen said this is an example of a "lack of recorded enterprise knowledge," and what was needed all along was a proper "knowledge management system."
IBM Technology YouTube
What is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge management (KM) is the process of identifying, organizing, storing and disseminating information within an organization (IBM, n.d.). It's a way of sharing, using, and managing the knowledge and information of an organization (Troconis-Rodell, 2020).
High-level business benefits of KM include (Troconis-Rodell, 2020):
- Increased operational efficiency and reduced operational costs – because support staff and employees can get to the required solutions more quickly and with less lost productivity.
- A superior employee experience – thanks to not only speedier resolutions but also better-informed decisions that result in higher quality outcomes.
- Better use of scarce support resources and the productivity of the employees they serve – through support staff augmentation and employee empowerment via self-help , which we will expand upon in the next sections, and self-care.
- Reduced duplication of effort – thanks to having known solutions readily available to people rather than them having to rediscover what needs to be done.
- Less risk with staff turnover – because knowledge management minimizes the impact of leavers and makes the onboarding of new staff both easier and swifter.
- Speeding up the delivery, and improving the quality, of AI-based capabilities – as outlined in the next section.
- Document management systems act as a centralized storage system for digital documents, such as PDFs, images, and word processing files. These systems enhance employee workflows by enabling easy retrieval of documents, such as lessons learned.
- Content management systems (CMS) are applications which manage web content where end users can edit and publish content. These are commonly confused with document management systems, but CMSs can support other media types, such as audio and video.
- Intranets are private networks that exist solely within an organization, which enable the sharing of enablement, tools, and processes within internal stakeholders. While they can be time-consuming and costly to maintain, they provide a number of groupware services, such as internal directories and search, which facilitate collaboration.
- Wikis can be a popular knowledge management tool given its ease of use. They make it easy to upload and edit information, but this ease can lead to concerns about misinformation as workers may update them with incorrect or outdated information.
- Data warehouses aggregate data from different sources into a single, central, consistent data store to support data analysis, data mining, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning. Data is extracted from these repositories so that companies can derive insights, empowering employees to make data-driven decisions.
Knowledge Management Sites Researched
KM Institute - KM Institute is dedicated to researching, defining, publishing and sharing KM knowledge in a variety of formats truly suited to learner needs. People can take courses and even become certified in knowledge management.
IBM - IBM needs no introduction, but on it's website and IBM Technology YouTube channel it promotes knowledge management and it's AI-powered program IBM Watson Discovery.
EasyVista - EasyVista is a company that promises to streamline companies and organizations IT departments and provide fully integrated platforms that allow organizations to maximize their business value. They have a blog on their site where they discuss knowledge management, as well as tools and software.
Knowledge Management Tools
Evernote - One of my personal favorites, Evernote is a note-taking and task-management application developed by the Evernote Corporation. It is intended for archiving and creating notes with embedded photos, audio, and saved web content. Notes are stored in virtual "notebooks" and can be tagged, annotated, edited, searched, and exported.
Guru - Guru is an AI-powered knowledge management platform best suited for organizations that want to centralize their company's collective knowledge and make it easily accessible to employees. It helps teams capture, organize, update, and share information more efficiently, enhancing collaboration and productivity.
Slack - Slack is a productivity platform that empowers everyone with no-code automation and AI, makes search and knowledge sharing seamless, and keeps teams connected and engaged.
Knowledge Management and ID
Knowledge management is one of the most recent trends to have affected the field of instructional design (Reiser, 2001). Knowledge management involves identifying, documenting, and disseminating explicit and tacit knowledge within an organization in order to improve the performance of that organization (Reiser, 2001).
- Tacit knowledge: This type of knowledge is typically acquired through experience, and it is intuitively understood. As a result, it is challenging to articulate and codify, making it difficult to transfer this information to other individuals. Examples of tacit knowledge can include language, facial recognition, or leadership skills.
- Implicit knowledge: While some literature equivocates implicit knowledge to tacit knowledge, some academics break out this type separately, expressing that the definition of tactic knowledge is more nuanced. While tacit knowledge is difficult to codify, implicit knowledge does not necessarily have this problem. Instead, implicit information has yet to be documented. It tends to exist within processes, and it can be referred to as “know-how” knowledge.
- Explicit knowledge: Explicit knowledge is captured within various document types such as manuals, reports, and guides, allowing organizations to easily share knowledge across teams. This type of knowledge is perhaps the most well-known and examples of it include knowledge assets such as databases, white papers, and case studies. This form of knowledge is important to retain intellectual capital within an organization as well as facilitate successful knowledge transfer to new employees.
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