Today, securing a budget to implement Knowledge Management at scale is a prime challenge, as the business wants to ensure you are promising to deliver tangible business value every time.  Most large organizations acknowledge that these complexities are so dynamic that often we depend on predictable answers to solve the business problem, although we know the situation might have changed. Are we asking the right questions?

Let me take three simple examples to understand this point.

• Snippet-1 (client): You have signed a new contact and the client is asking for what best practices have been delivered for other similar clients and the team is expected to make a presentation around the same.
• Snippet-2 (partner): You have secured a project as a service partner for a large digital transformation project however the incumbent is transitioning out and hence there is a need for their support for the right amount of knowledge transfer.
• Snippet-3 (vendor): There is an existing software that your users are happy with for collaboration and your sales team has received a good pricing from another global player who is offering a better deal. You need buy in from your leaders to proceed basis their experience.

If you look at these three examples, all talk about situations where one needs to depend on others being knowledgeable. We are accustomed to the same old practices for delivering business value through KM based on predictable answers. However, as one can assume in the real world, this stable state keeps changing and creates new complications that raise questions that need to be solved. It is for these questions that one must be knowledgeable to solve the right answers. How can we train ourselves?

Let me introduce you to a proven practice: the 'SCQA story telling model' and explore it a little to understand why one requires to understand the question before we find the answers.

The SCQA model is an acronym for Situation - Complication - Question and Answer. You might have heard about the 'elevator pitch' where you must try to summarize something in five minutes. This method makes it extremely easy. Let us see the below example, which I am sure most KM professionals would be familiar with.

Situation: We are talking about any user (players) who visits a KM portal and they do not see the bigger picture of how they can benefit from sharing their expertise and experience through knowledge harvesting & sharing (context of what is happening)
Complication: This deals with what is changing and needs attention as you can see only few leaders are believers, most users come sparingly and few that visit regularly feel they are not rewarded.
Question: As we can see there is a problem. Basis the problem statement being defined we start developing the questions, many a times its hidden in the complication. Like in our case one can see that the problem is as below

To DESIGN a nimble KM system that is intuitive to the user [group] and advances them to contribute and get incentivized

Answers: Finding the answers would in-turn give rise to a solution(s). For example, in our case we design a more rewarding system through gamification, ape client systems so users start actively contributing. We involve leaders to sign the petition, so their word of mouth motivates individuals to intrinsically contribute and make HR aware of the critical touchpoints to reward users.

In-Summary

Typically, business leaders are looking for a solid pitch to assure their buy-in and sponsor budgets for KM. Most teams focus on the status quo and begin with the quality metrics and start with collecting raw data, analyzing the information to arrive at facts and then present their conclusion. However, they fail to impress largely because the pitch is not convincing.

Through the SCQA method you immediately capture the attention of the business to presenting an abstract of what is intended to achieve through a storyline which is appealing. Once we have got their buy-in then we go deeper into the facts and how we have arrived at the basis for the same which is the raw data interpretation.

KM is a journey that starts the very first time we visit the firm’s intranet portal. Many colleagues have participated in contests, published white papers, or taken expert advice and tell us about checking out the KM portal. But the question is how many of us today know we have our very own customized KM page that shows us the last ten enquires we posted, the latest document we searched and related other information that can add value to our daily routing work.

There is a growing need to harness the true potential of KM and explore the different sections.

Some collaborative spaces are more individual in nature, others like War rooms, PDB are specific to group or projects. There is a growing need however for better awareness not just from the KM team to employees but more importantly managers who with proper governance can help resolve some of the challenges highlighted below.

KM as such is only a tool and must be understood effectively by an employee in applying it to improve his productivity. All the challenges have been shared by employees in accessing KM and I have used my experience and speaking to fellow employees to suggest an approach.

10 Top Challenges for Knowledge Managers to tackle

1. Information is available from multiple sources on Google. Today employees who adopt KM spend time finding the right documents but often face challenges with validation. 

This is more to do with a behavioural pattern for adoption. Today most of the information on Google is copyright and the employee would be willing to use a proven framework document uploaded on their KM portal, with the relevant guidelines on how to customize the framework available but what is lacking is who will validate the final document.

There is a need for creation of project champions in teams who can guide employees to use chat forums and publish their questions online to seek the right help to validate information.

2. Project wins need to be supported by the right resources. Today delivery managers are faced with the challenge of depending on resourcing teams to find a fitment as employee resumes are not updated.

During the tenure of an employee, he/she would have updated their resume at least once on a Resume Corner. The challenge is a resourcing team has their owned defined portal and process more importantly is based on the band of an employee. Today, many employees with cross functional skills are not updating their resume completely.

A "Managers corner" where constant reminders are sent should be present and a monthly dashboard sent to the BU Head to ensure employees frequently update their resumes highlighting any significant achievements. 

3. Many teams are doing similar projects as a part of the same domain and some of this work is being recognized but the success factors are not clearly captured completely while building a framework.

Key Wins are highlighted at a BU level and recognition is happening for talented performers who are motivated to build solution frameworks. Today organizations are looking at patenting these frameworks but there is a burning need for identifying trainers who can coach employees working on similar domain projects to identify the tenants of building a framework, more importantly executing it as per the project scope. Webinars are effective but not everyone prefers disclosing his identity in an open forum.

Communities of Practice should be explored more where Discussion Thread links are shared and content can be downloaded for analyses, questions posted, other sections of KM portal accessed such as an Expert Corner and RFP Corner. 

4. Consultants are mostly onsite and are facing a challenge with identifying themselves with the culture of the organization.

Most of the time employees use their time doing certifications, completing administrative work like bills submissions and if nothing just sitting at home.

There is a need for more effective capturing of time sheet data and aligning their time to contribute to knowledge sharing sessions like organizing sessions to new recruits , domain-based case study creations and more such that their tacit knowledge is of broader use and reference to the organization.

5. Not all employees know how to be smart workers using KM, mostly they cite accessibility, access rights permission denied and search not valid as reasons.

It is the responsibility of the manager to educate the employee on updating KM regularly. Most employees today have VPN access and are good workers, but the challenge is there is no proper governance established. If immediate managers see the benefits in the long rung motivating employees to share documents and review the same before uploading on KM can be a winner. Today most of the employee’s upload documents for compliance; they do not see the added benefit and recognition that comes if their document is referenced by another team member.

Contests must be expanded and recognize talent where documents mentioned in a Proposal by another fellow employee are recognized rather than the number of employees who have accessed it. 

6. Project Managers do not want their artifacts to be put on KM as most of the time this involves seeking customer permission. 

This is a challenge as the information must be reviewed and selectively edited by someone from the team. Most of the time project managers do not disclose the set of documents in the WSR document.

It should be made a practice where the WSR is reviewed and the number of documents uploaded tallied with the WSR, if any gaps are found valid reasons should be sort from the delivery teams.

7. An employee mostly reaches out to the KM team at the last moment and finds an answer. Today most organizationa have tools like Slack / Microsoft Teams other collaboration tools handy however these are stand-alone from the KM portal which has the ready templates, proposals of past projects, case studies and other information available. However, there are instances where there is a need for an international case reference, backdated reference documents and other such scenarios. It is important to do an online search, put a query or write to an expert all options worth exploring with KM portal. However, the problem is running against time will we get a response quickly?

The answer lies with the KM Team, as sometimes archived documents are not visible but that does not mean they are not present. It is important to ask your KM Champion and seek his recommendation on the best approach. 

8. Employee before leaving the project uploads all his documents on KM but in a hurried and haphazard manner such that it is useless. 

There must be a manager scorecard showcased at the QIC that merits the use of more frequent KM usage at a BU level. This does not have to be an extensive exercise and involve a lot of data collection and analysis.

Managers can make a choice and decide the type of documents that must be uploaded on a regular basis and drive compliance and quality rather than quantity.

9. When an Employee is on bench, he is spending hours giving interviews for new projects to be billable. Every employee is interested in his QPLC. Their efforts are always invested to tell their immediate managers of their billability and find suitable projects to be aligned to. There have been occurrences where an employee is not updated his manager or vice versa and this has led to billability not being achieved.

To resolve there has to be a BU level skill dashboard visible to all employees for open positions by band, competency and other parameters if an employee’s tenure in the project is nearing the project end term.

10. Customers are seeing better connect from senior management visits than survey feedback as the ownership is better managed.

Today review calls, escalation matrix is some of the ways customers are being given authority to get the right service from a partner. They are seeing value in ownership as many times senior management visits also are planned to resolve a problem in a timely manner. However, many times the customer is failing to acknowledge these initiatives and only remembers the issue at hand which impacts the CSAT.

It is important for clients to recognize that any problem is a time for due diligence and recognizing that a change is managed two ways. There must be a proper signoff and the customer aware that his feedback has been captured in the KM portal and would be used for future reviews to improve the service delivery.

To summarize I have aligned most of the suggestions around the three parameters below.

Employee Productivity

1. It is important employees do not always use KM for a last-minute information search but understand how to navigate KM depending on the kind of requirement.

2. Employees refer the BU dashboard regularly and plan well in advance for their next project. Update their resume with significant achievement that helps delivery managers identify their talent.

3. Managers drive employee to regularly access KM and the same is highlighted during QIC’s to ensure the organization is committed.

Employee Satisfaction

1. It is important employees see value from KM in their work being referenced rather than just the number of times it is accessed.

2. Many employees who do not prefer face to face interactions may be more comfortable using chat forums, WarRooms or even webinars where they type a question to the presenter. 

3. Onsite employees see value in taking knowledge sessions for new project team members, working on case study references, framework design and more for reusable artifacts.

Customer Satisfaction

1. Customers must be made more aware of the knowledge captured in KM portal. It is not just project artifacts but even review meeting minutes , senior management connect sessions and others are important. It is important senior management signoff happens and the feedback is captured on KM portal to ensure quality service delivery.

An effective Knowledge Manager

1. Should be visible to all employees in the BU through his actions rather than reactions. He must reach out informally as well and talk to fellow employees to relate information to them.

2. Learn two ways, spending more time with Project Champions helping employee know the merits of using the virtual KM world.

3. Know the customer’s pulse and drives information to delivery teams supporting them with data to make a winning impression or resolve conflicts. This cannot happen visiting the client place it has to be done informally using the relationship with the delivery or sales teams.

4. Represent the BU as their spokesperson, success stories are not always captured in case studies. An effective KM Manager should sell Knowledge to fellow employees.

5. Acknowledge helping employees in different time zones working on the same domain as many times timings may differ. Helping your BU employee service his customer better should be the motto of all Knowledge Managers, as their success is yours.

Knowledge sharing at the workplace is essential for any organization that wants to grow and thrive. Successful organizations have a strong knowledge base due to teamwork support, continuous encouragement, and having an effective knowledge management system in place. While everyone in the organization is doing their best to achieve their goals, knowledge sharing can quickly change to knowledge hoarding.

The knowledge that employees share is an integral part of the knowledge-sharing culture. However, most people don’t realize this. Employees who have different perspectives on knowledge sharing will create huge problems for the organization in the long run because knowledge sharing will fail at its core. While the culture of knowledge sharing is developed to boost the efficiency and productivity of an organization, some employees are usually unwilling to share knowledge for different reasons.

Why hoard information?

While knowledge sharing sounds like a simple thing, it’s one of the hardest tasks for employees to perform. Most employees have no idea of the type of information they need to share. When they learn about the organization’s secrets, they tend to stop sharing information. They do this by hoarding the information they have. As we mentioned earlier, there are a couple of reasons that propel them to act in this manner.

1.     Lack of trust

One of the main reasons behind hoarding information is a lack of trust. Employees block and hoard information to stay ahead of their colleagues and receive rewards. To solve this problem, leaders need to focus on the goals and objectives of the organization. Employees need to be rewarded based on their progress. Also, leaders should encourage their employees to work together on projects to create an atmosphere of trust.

2.     Time management

Poor time management always results in failure and dissatisfaction. Every employee in an organization wants to perform their duties and achieve their long-term goals in the shortest time possible. This is why you’ll always find employees busy. With no time to spare, busy employees will have a hard time sharing important information with others. Instead of looking at information sharing as a separate task, leaders should encourage employees to delegate tasks to assignment writing services and include knowledge sharing in their daily tasks to make their work easy.

3.     Failure to understand knowledge sharing

While hiring new employees has its advantages, it’s quite difficult to find a newbie who understands the concept of knowledge sharing. Due to a lack of training on knowledge management and communication, they might fail to know what to do with the knowledge that they’ve been withholding. This problem can be eliminated if leaders find time to train newbies on sharing knowledge properly. Communicating with junior and senior staff regularly, and hosting in-house and web-based training will allow employees to learn more about the process of sharing knowledge. Apart from that, all webinar and training records should be easy to access.

4.     Lack of a common platform to share knowledge

Employees might feel vulnerable if they have to ask for information from upper management. A research study conducted by McKinsey and Company found that the average employee wastes 20 percent of his or her time searching for essential information or looking for a colleague who can help them obtain the knowledge they need. Leaders need to create a knowledge-sharing platform. Studies have shown that the creation of these platforms and using paper writing websites saves 35 percent of an employee’s time.

5.     Knowledge is power

Most employees know that knowledge is power. Therefore, the individual who hoards the most information is considered to be the most powerful in the workplace. Some employees will pile a lot of information in their heads while others lead them to get it. They hope to be treated in a special way for sharing information. Therefore, the management must identify and reward employees who share information and deal with those who hoard it.

6.     Considering information sharing as a non-important task

Some employees consider information sharing as a low-priority task and dedicate most of their time and energy to tasks that they consider beneficial and important. To solve this problem, the upper management should serve as an example to all employees. Leaders should find time to share knowledge with their employees and ensure that their employees do the same. They should also include knowledge sharing as an objective that has to be achieved by every employee in the organization.

7.     Punishing employees for sharing information

Some leaders and employees punish their colleagues for sharing information. As we said earlier, employees need to be trained on the knowledge sharing process to know the kind of information that they need to share. The knowledge-sharing process should be aligned with the goals of the organization.

8.     They think they are sharing information

Employees might be sharing information with their colleagues. However, they could be doing it the wrong way. They could be using the wrong channel or sharing the wrong type of information. Leaders need to show them how to share information using the recommended ways. Upper management also needs to ensure that their employees have the best tools and equipment to perform their duties.

Conclusion

When employees share knowledge properly, the organization will grow and thrive. Knowledge sharing nurtures teamwork, boosts productivity, and builds trust between employees and upper management. Leaders need to train employees regularly and encourage them to share information to promote themselves. Now that you know the reasons behind hoarding information, what are you going to work on today to achieve your goals?

Without communication, efficient Knowledge Management (KM) would be exceptionally difficult to maintain. Communication is a knowledge manager’s best tool. By utilizing it effectively, you can strengthen literally every aspect of your business.

But how exactly do communication and KM interact? What defines their relationship? And how can you go about building seamless communication strategies?

For any business looking to get ahead in this rapidly changing, data-driven marketplace, the answers to these questions can make or break your efforts. Here's what you should know about strengthening your communication for efficient Knowledge Management.

The relationship between communication and knowledge management

First, it's essential to define the difference between communicative processes and Knowledge Management in general.

Communication, simply put, is the diverse act of expressing an idea from one consciousness to another. It takes on a variety of forms and these days is increasingly digital. In the business world— like in every other aspect of life—the effectiveness of communication can determine your success, whether you’re attempting to boost sales, cut costs, or improve the employee experience.

Knowledge Management, on the other hand, represents the ability of a business to capture information, share it, and apply it effectively. As you can see, communication is a central aspect of this process. Within the framework of KM, efficient communication is necessary in three key areas of business. These are:

1. Information gathering.
2. Disseminating insights and analytics across a company.
3. Forming a narrative that translates information into real-world applications.

Streamlining these endeavors company-wide is a fundamental skill for any business development manager. After all, you'll be working across departments and specialists to transfer information from one source to another. Without the right data sources, a proper method of communication across your company, and a narrative contextualizing your knowledge, you will fail in your endeavors to coordinate information.

As you're aware, this will make digital and global trade especially difficult. With Supply chains alone requiring real-time, transparent modes of communication, your ability to process information is key.

Strengthen your communication efforts to make these processes seamless.

How to make communication efforts seamless

Fortunately, strengthening your communication efforts doesn't have to be as difficult as it might sound. Sure, communication takes constant effort and careful coordination. But with a business framework dedicated to effective KM processes, you can build a communication system that all but eliminates human error.

Here are some effective strategies for helping you make your communication efforts seamless:

1. Constantly invite feedback: Without the coordination and cooperation of your entire team, your KM strategies will not be as effective as they might be. Because of this, feedback is one of the most essential communication techniques that you can use to promote the application of any knowledge. Coordinate with your team, creating an open and empathetic environment in which insights, questions, and concerns can all be shared freely and easily.

2. Build continuous learning into the company culture: Communicating knowledge effectively is much easier with a dedication from all parties to continuous learning and growing. By espousing these values in your company culture, you support an environment in which people are willing and eager to listen. This will help in your efforts to create an empathetic space for feedback and ideas, and will in turn help you encourage dialogue.

3. Encourage a dialogue: By building an open and horizontal dialogue with your workforce, your KM strategies will take on new life. Such an approach invites each member of your team to share their passions, their projects, their questions, and concerns to develop mutual understanding. This can take many forms, from circular in-person group brainstorming sessions to open platforms for instant messaging and knowledge sharing. The right tools will make such a dialogue even easier.

4. Apply effective communication technologies: In the wake of Covid-19, more business places than ever have moved to remote work. Without the right communication platforms, your KM processes will suffer. For example, Lucidspark states that more than 50% of employees admit to working on other things during virtual meetings, making a strategic plan for remote work vital. Tech tools like collaborative digital bulletin boards, group messaging, and document sharing all help to ensure that employees are contributing and staying focused.

5. Innovate, innovate, innovate: Finally, commit to an environment that is constantly open to change and adaptation. The digital world makes new processes possible all the time. From new communication tools to agile frameworks for coordinating your knowledge, your ability to innovate will determine the effectiveness of your KM strategies. A change mindset will help employees learn and grow while inviting greater understanding into knowledge applications.

Building efficient knowledge management through communication

By following these strategies for strengthening your communication efforts, Knowledge Management will improve across your entire organization. Open dialogue invites empathy and improved communication while continuous learning makes for more open-minded employees. Build a culture of innovation by highlighting these values, then reap the rewards as workers seamlessly apply new and improved processes.

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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IS ESSENTIALLY ABOUT GETTING THE RIGHT KNOWLEDGE TO THE RIGHT PERSON AT THE RIGHT TIME

It really doesn’t matter what industry you operate in – knowledge management is something you have to think seriously about. If you think about it, everything in your business is based on knowledge, that is data and information. Whether it is your product or service, which is built from knowledge held by your people, or your ability to engage with customers and provide value, which is based on knowing about their needs, or even your internal policies, which is based on knowing about best practices in the industry.

If your organization didn’t have knowledge, then none of these things would have been able to happen. That said, it’s not enough to just have the knowledge. The knowledge should be able to flow through the organization and reach the right people. That’s what knowledge management is all about.

What is knowledge management?

At its heart, knowledge management is essentially about getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. It is all about how you document, store, communicate and apply knowledge in an organization in order to improve the processes of the organization and, ultimately, its bottom line. Knowledge management is about finding the best ways to do the things above, so that it can be available on demand for anyone that needs it. In order to understand knowledge management better, we need to know about the different types of knowledge, namely explicit and implicit, or tacit, knowledge

Explicit knowledge

This is any knowledge that is codified and stored and ready to be shared with others. Thing about the rule book, memos, databases, tutorial videos at your company and so on. All of these are examples of explicit knowledge.

Implicit knowledge

This is the knowledge inside the heads of people on your team. But that’s not enough. For it to count as implicit knowledge it also has to be especially difficult to explain. Think about their intuition, natural talent and experience gathered over the years. Implicit knowledge is not only hard to explain, it is as natural for the holder as breathing. We all breathe easily, but not only do we rarely consciously do our breathing, many of us don’t even understand how breathing works!

The importance of knowledge management

Knowledge management is all about utilizing the knowledge in an organization to help it thrive. By having proper knowledge management, an organization can store explicit knowledge and organize it, codify implicit knowledge, turning it into explicit knowledge, and make all that knowledge accessible to your team or audience, so they can work better.

Knowledge management systems help with workflow, onboarding activities, and even HR processes, among others. For customers, knowledge management helps the organization to keep its customers informed and engaged, as well as build their trust in the brand. This can be in the form of bog posts, videos, FAQs, wikis, case studies, and social media content, among others.

What are the benefits of knowledge management?

There are many useful benefits to having a knowledge management system. Below are some of the most important ones:

It aligns the whole team

Knowledge management makes communication more systematic, which enhances collaboration. It also makes it easier for employees to see how their knowledge contributes to the betterment of the organization, getting them more engaged in the process.

It makes the team more productive

Organizations agree that improving their knowledge management systems makes them more productive. With a good knowledge management system, your employees have access to instructions to help them carry out their tasks and follow best practices. They can also communicate and collaborate with each other better and are more efficient as a result.

Persists knowledge in the organization

Good knowledge management helps your organization retain knowledge, even after the knowledgeable employee has left the organization.

Improves the customer experience

Good knowledge management is just as good for your customer as it is for you. Customer-facing knowledge allows the customer to better serve themselves, which improves engagement while reducing your workload. It also helps your customer support team by providing them with a large knowledge base that empowers them to deal with customer issues.

Steps to building an effective knowledge management framework

So now that we understand the benefits of knowledge management, how do you build a good knowledge management framework? Below are the steps:

Have a clear focus

The first step is to know who, exactly, you’re creating the knowledge for. Whether its for your internal team or your customers, it’s important to know who, so as to build the right knowledge management framework.

Define everyone involved and what role they will be playing

Everyone on the team should contribute to your knowledge building efforts. You need project managers, who oversee the initiative, knowledge finders, who gather the knowledge, good communicators to package it, and creators to make it accessible to the most people. These and other roles need to be defined well from the start, so as to make the process more efficient.

Define the tools you will use

Modern technology is a boon on the knowledge building process. There are many tools out there that you can take full advantage of when building a knowledge management framework. A searchable knowledge base is a good place to start. Not only should they be easy to search and navigate, but also allow for optimization and analytics, as well as communication and collaboration. You may also need separate communication, project management, and content creation tools.

Collect data

Next, collect internal data, reports from third parties, and consumer generated content for your knowledge management system. The main focus at this point is to collect data. It can be analyzed later.

Organize the data

Once you’re done collecting data, you can now organize it. For example, separate customer reviews into positive and negative, and then rank them. For most of your data, you will have to create some kind of hierarchy to help make sense of it.

Summarize the most important information

Next step is to give the data some context. Summarize findings in the most objective way you can, while giving it proper context. You can then store, analyze, and apply all that knowledge in the future.

Conclusion

As you can see, knowledge management is an extensive subject, and a single article can’t possibly hope to cover the full scope of it. We have tried, however, to cover the most important aspects. The main takeaway is that, with proper knowledge management, your organization can do much better.

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