Knowledge management allows us to preserve, within the organization, all the intangible assets that are part of the knowledge acquired from the people who work there, but how can we manage knowledge? For example, many companies have Process Design areas, usually responsible for keeping all the organization’s documentation up to date.
The most important thing for the organization is that people understand the positive impact that knowledge management has on the improvement and optimization of processes and customer service.
What steps should I take to manage my organization’s knowledge? Although there is not a standard route for all companies, these are essential points to take into account when designing the organization’s knowledge management strategy:
Sensitization
The most important thing is that people understand why it is essential to standardize the organization’s processes, avoid the fleeing of intellectual capital, and reduce reprocesses, therefore improving its productivity. Thus, a perfect moment is an induction when joining the organization. In this way, the new people who join the team know the importance of knowledge management in the culture.
Simplified information
One of the most critical attributes of knowledge management is simplifying content, designed, and directed mainly for the people who will use it, even considering when the information will be consumed. However, one of the most significant barriers is the volume of characters in the content. Many times, having long documents make the team give up before finding the information they are looking for. They often resort to asking the person next to them, increasing the risk of running the process with errors.
Easy access platform
Multiple applications allow managing knowledge. The selection of the tool has a lot to do with the industry and how our company operates. It is not the same to consult a document of more than 100 pages. We must look for the information we need to serve the client before us, versus having a one-pager designed to know the process or the characteristics of a product or service. It is crucial to have a solution that allows access to statistics to monitor the evolution of the use of the solution and the opportunities to improve the platform, processes, and content.
Critical route
People always look for the most straightforward or shortest process to achieve their goals. Therefore, we need the solution to be part of the critical access path to any system in the organization. This ensures that people who work in the company go through the home of the solution, reducing the risk of not knowing how to access it.
Interaction
We live in a globalized and digital world. People are not just used to consuming information and producing and consuming it. This change in the way we interact on the Internet makes people expect interaction: to comment, suggest improvements, explain specific cases, all this to take an active part in the knowledge management strategy that we want to implement. Therefore, we must consider different functionalities that allow us to make the experience of our teams as they expect it. For example, comments on the content to answer questions and alert about outdated content, among others.
Although, each organization must implement a knowledge management systems that allow it to monitor all the variables that come into play for its industry and ways of operating. These are just a few recommendations based on previous experiences in implementing knowledge management systems in multiple organizations.
Do you have any questions or queries? Write me! We can schedule a 30-minute meeting to tell you how I can help your organization manage its knowledge.
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