What is Knowledge Management? By definition it is “the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.” It is the systematic handling of all the information, data, and knowledge assets held by an organization with the purpose of creating value and meeting both strategic and tactical goals and targets, such as employee productivity and/or exceptional customer service.
The typical benefits achieved with effective Knowledge Management are:
- Employees feel empowered as they can quickly share tacit knowledge previously hidden from colleagues
- An increase in employee productivity as content that is needed to perform a task is accessible quickly
- Increased customer satisfaction when used in a customer service setting as users can quickly and easily find the content to help solve customer problems
Knowledge Management is not just the implementation of technology, it brings together people, processes, content and technology. An effective knowledge management implementation will use a knowledge management system which allows business process to be mapped into the technology, not the other way round. It will allow the automation of content delivery, through functionality to alert users to important information and tasks which should be completed.
Knowledge Management is therefore a multi-disciplinary approach, Knowledge Management is not, on its own, the implementation of a system but a process which is facilitated by IT.
Knowledge management includes the collection, analysis, dissemination, and general management of all information that is possessed by an organization. A Knowledge Management System carries out these functions and follows best practices to deliver optimal results for the organization using it in an efficient and effective manner. By definition, a Knowledge Management System (KMS) is a system for applying and using knowledge management principles to typically enable employees and customers to create, share and find relevant information quickly. Typical functionality includes;
- Content capture/upload and/or leveraging of existing content sources
- Advanced searching, including natural language, keyword and parameter led
- The ability to effectively capture tacit knowledge
- Insights into content use, knowledge gaps and user adoption levels
Therefore, a Knowledge Management System facilitates, supports and automates key areas of the knowledge management process by providing data capture functionality, configurable processes, and the means to analyze, monitor, and share data, information, and organizational knowledge.
Functionally, a knowledge management system will collect, store, and retrieve knowledge, find sources of knowledge, monitor knowledge use and needs. It helps automate the knowledge management process and creates efficiencies by providing key players with more time to spend learning from and applying data insights, information, and knowledge.
Knowledge management as a discipline seeks to accomplish effective use of a company’s knowledge assets, to increase productivity, improve staff morale and transform service delivery.
A successful Knowledge Management System implementation will provide the following benefits:
- Promote collaboration within and between teams
- Quickly share tacit knowledge previously hidden from colleagues
- Increase employee productivity
- Quickly and easy find the content to help solve problems
- Make use of existing content as the KMS will do the hard work to find the nuggets of valuable information
The benefits of developing a knowledge sharing culture in any industry facilitates the transfer of invaluable tacit knowledge from experienced employees and make it available to all those who need it. The benefits of knowledge sharing are to effectively leverage your intellectual capital, the biggest asset for any company.
Enabling a process, particularly through the use of a knowledge management platform, allows employees to provide feedback, suggest edits or request new knowledge, ensuring all employees feel valued. Those with the tacit knowledge can be recognised for their efforts in providing much needed information to all that require it, empowering them to continue the good work.
Knowledge exchange can only be effective if a single platform is utilised, otherwise information and knowledge will be missed, or information duplicated. This creates an unnecessary administration over head at best or provides incorrect or incomplete information at worst and if your organisation is customer facing, the implications of providing incorrect information can be far reaching.
Remote working and hybrid working has pushed the knowledge sharing requirement to the fore, relying on a colleague’s instant knowledge and availability is not practical, a knowledge sharing platform and culture must be implemented to ensure employees can do their jobs and customers can be well served.
Universal Knowledge allows you to both leverage existing content and index this in-situ or upload content to be stored and managed directly within the Knowledge Management system, or a combination of the two. The main benefit of leveraging content is that you can quickly deploy your Knowledge Management system providing access to multiple repositories from a single platform. Content is still edited, and version controlled on your source system such as SharePoint, but Universal Knowledge will allow you to search this content more efficiently and provide valuable usage data through its comprehensive insights.
To take full advantage of everything Universal Knowledge has to offer, migrated or uploading content allows you to not only search content but also manage the content. Features include;
- Full audit trails
- Revision histories
- Comparisons between revisions
- Configurable review and approval cycles
- Reverting back to previous revision
- In-line edits
- Change management through rework requests from users
Absolutely. Universal Knowledge is built from the ground up with restful APIs. This means that every function within the tool can be exposed through a different interface or application.
A set of documented use cases and code examples are provided to make the process of integrating the knowledge base data and functionality into another tool as simple as possible.