Does Your Organization Need Knowledge Management?

Based on an article by analyst Lauri M. Orlov-Forster - Published in CIO Magazine

Have you ever tried to explain knowledge management to someone?

Just as process management was difficult to explain in the 1990s, today, "knowledge management" is vague and difficult to conceptualize. It is too broad to have a specific meaning, too comprehensive to establish clear criteria for success, and subject to too many interpretations for activity in this field to result in less than a year.

Some compare the attempt to manage knowledge to finding a needle in a haystack. On the one hand, knowledge management is the essential desire to do better work in creating, collecting, and transferring what employees, partners, and customers know. On the other hand, when diving into the details, it seems that this concise and enthusiastic vision lacks the means to translate it into practical action.

Therefore, until definitions and rules are finalized, organizations should not try to blindly adapt themselves to the jargon and knowledge management methods. Instead, they should take a step back, examine themselves, and understand their needs.

Here are 6 questions that will identify your organization's needs and help you decide whether you can benefit from knowledge management methods. Try to answer these questions, and you will know if your organization needs knowledge management.

All questions have a similar opening: "Does the organization need to improve in..."

• Sharing solutions to customer problems?

  • Organizations try to ensure that successful solutions provided to customers are preserved and reused. Ask yourselves: Do you need to store and recycle information about problems and solutions? Is there a need to link problems and solutions to other service systems?

• Helping teams share information and work?

  • Large organizations typically have distributed work teams, some independent and some dependent on others. However, since they all work toward the same goal (the organization's goal), their success usually depends on their ability to share. Ask yourselves: Do the existing teams in your organization need to share knowledge, ideas, lessons learned, and updates with other teams? Would implementing an environment with technological, procedural, and cultural sharing platforms contribute to achieving organizational goals?

• Creating communities or locating experts in specific subjects?

  • In every large organization, experts in various fields emerge. These experts are needed by different people at different times and for different needs. Work becomes longer or more complicated without them, and sometimes, the product is less successful. Ask yourselves: Are there people with specific specializations in your organization? Can they reduce the time for problem-solving, decision-making, taking action, or initiating projects for others in the organization? Would there be value in creating opportunities for them to meet with others or among themselves?

• Managing unstructured information?

  • Sometimes, important knowledge is found "between the lines." There is a difference between "knowing how to manage a process" and "knowing how to manage a process in the best way." Ask yourselves: Do the actions performed in our organization require experience and seniority? Do people collect unstructured knowledge in their minds? Would there be value in extracting this knowledge from these people and integrating it into formal work?

• Providing user-adapted access to existing information?

  • Every organization has a lot of knowledge, but not all are relevant to all employees; each employee needs only part of the knowledge to perform their job. Sometimes, the purpose of filtering is information security; sometimes, it is to prevent overwhelming the employee with information. Ask yourselves: Are the organization's employees exposed to much information? Do they need all of it? Do employees in the organization waste a lot of time searching for information that already exists in the organization?

• Documenting, designing, and executing business processes?

  • Every organization risks losing an important part of its organizational memory when key employees whose work processes have not been documented leave. The Business Process Management (BPM) process is the coding of work processes that ensures that the experience the organization has accumulated is not "lost." Ask yourselves: Does the organization depend on specific people to perform their work? Are there specific people whose departure/absence would severely harm the organization?

In conclusion, you identified the challenges presented while reading the questions; if your answers helped you identify your organization's weaknesses and areas for improvement, then knowledge management can serve you!

Thus, even without understanding all the principles of knowledge management, you can benefit twice: you will both help your organization improve and enhance your understanding on the theoretical side.

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