In every organization, leaders are appointed so that they can give professional guidance to their teams. They take the responsibility of providing practical knowledge to their peers and assist them in their tasks. When a team is assigned a project, then the leader is held accountable for the faults found in them.

However, a leader can only fulfill such a role if they have the inner ability to learn new information. This knowledge can be earned from books, daily life, videos, or work experience. However, by just storing it in your brain, that information is useless because it didn’t become a part of their actions.

The Need for a Personal Knowledge Management System

Personal Knowledge Management is the process of drawing important conclusions or lessons from the knowledge that you’ve learned from past experiences. Thorough understanding and implementation of those lessons help the leaders to become proficient in their work.

Hence, came a personal knowledge management system that provides an organized method for storing tips and lessons learned. Marking pieces of text in books, bookmarking blog posts, or writing notes are just some of the ways of using a personal knowledge management system.

Here are a few reasons why such a system can prove to be beneficial for you.

1.   Find Hidden Lessons in Your Past Experiences

You may think journaling is a waste of time, but it proves to be a great tool, not just for jotting down your feelings but also to note down the challenges faced over the years and how did you overcome them. Just remembering about what happened at a specific incident wouldn’t help you to analyze what mistakes you made and what lessons did you learn. 

When you write such processes that occurred in your life, it can help your mind to find hidden patterns that you weren’t able to find before. This is where a personal knowledge management system can aid you in writing down your emotions and experiences. So, whenever you revisit them, you can look at those memories from a different perspective.

It’s a good idea to note down all of the events that occurred during work daily. Make a separate page to write down important information, advice, or practical knowledge that you have learned during the day.

For example, an employee learning about digital marketing services for their next online campaign can write down their thoughts, ideas, and strategies by using a personal knowledge management system.

2.   Keeps Track of Your Performance

One can only know how much ground they have covered when they’ve made a record of all of the achievements and failures they’ve faced along the journey. How can anyone learn from their mistakes if they aren’t identified?

A personal knowledge management system can help you to form a written record of your progress at the workplace. It can help you to spot mistakes you’ve made before and learn from them. So, whenever you’re going through a similar phase, you can revise to find the solutions to your problems.

It’s also a good motivation booster because one can become aware of the achievements they’ve made throughout their work life. If a leader continues to concentrate on their failures, then it can cause them to lose confidence and remain in constant anxiety. So, they won’t be able to face new challenges.

By learning about your accomplishments, it can give you the strength to face the challenges ahead during your leadership journey.

3.   Enhances Creativity

Making your knowledge management system can help to feed your creativity. By noting down important details while researching through different mediums, you’ll try to match concepts. As you’re matching them, you’ll be able to find out new solutions to problems.

4.   Promotes A Collaborative Company Culture

When a leader practices a new skill or technique, all of the followers begin to follow the same technique. Similarly, a business leader who follows a personal knowledge management system will attract all employees to adopt a similar system.

Through the creation of a knowledge management system for your team members, it can enable them to share important concepts or lessons learned during their work time or research. This creates a collaborative learning environment as an employee tries to help their partner in the completion of their tasks.

Leaders can share insights that could help employees to perform better in their tasks. Overall, appointing a system of personal knowledge management can help leaders to boost the productivity of their teams.

Develop Your Personal Knowledge Management System

Now that you know the importance of a personal knowledge management system, you need to know how to make a personal knowledge management system that suits you best. It isn’t limited to the use of a journal for writing down your thoughts. Below are a few ways to make a proper knowledge management system.

Journal every day:  Try to write about your experience throughout the day in your diary or a digital notepad, also include lessons learned. It can prove to be a useful inventory when you revisit it.
Make use of Notes-taking apps or Memos: There are various notes taking applications available that can help in making quick notes about any important information you’ve heard or read.
Apply to an Online Course: These online programs such as Getting Things Done and Building a Second Brain can help you to acquire skills for learning new information and managing it in a better way. You’ll also get the chance to interact with a learning community that is pursuing the same goals.

Wrapping Up

Your skillset can grow only when you know how to apply the lessons learned from your past experiences. To remember the lessons of leadership, it’s essential to record the mistakes you’ve made and how did you rectify them.

This needs to be updated regularly with new information that you continue to find. As leaders, you’re responsible for assisting your teams in major projects. Through the implementation of a personal knowledge management system, you can simply store what practical teachings you know and have learned.

This storage will prove to be a valuable asset for you in expanding your brand and becoming an excellent leader.

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As Drucker says – “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.

Knowledge management (KM) has been now well established as a key to innovation and enable organizations to meet the challenges of highly competitive market landscape. With access to knowledge that is streamlined, relevant and readily available round the clock, it makes employees productive, efficient, and foster innovation to help achieve competitive edge. However, Knowledge Management system and capabilities needs to be constantly reviewed and evolved for it to align with business goals and help achieve the organizational goals.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the very impactful tools to gather feedback and measure success of your KM system. The existence of heathy NPS score indicates a well-built KM system.

NPS is a measuring index ranging from 0 to 10 to gauge how effective is your current KM framework.  All you need to ask from your target audience is a single question – “how likely will you recommend a particular service / community to a colleague or a friend?”. Your target audience is divided into three categories based on their response. See description below:

How to analyze the score and make improvements in the KM system

In your KM survey, you can ask one single question similar to the below given examples:

“How likely are you to recommend the Professional Community to a colleague”?

“How likely are you to recommend a specific KM tool or service to a colleague”?

Requesting the responders to add their feedback on why they chose the score and how the service or community is helping people from perspective of enablement and adding business value you can gain valuable insight on what’s working and what’s not:

How to calculate NPS from above data?

% Promoters - % Detractors

The score generated between -100 to 100 is known as NPS. From between 1 to 10 if the score falls towards left of the spectrum, it’s easy to deduce that people are not happy and if received on the right end of the spectrum, employees are happy. The key is to analyze the score, the feedback received and create actionable insights to improve engagement.

The work should be directed in the direction to convert detractors into promoters and keep a track of how NPS changes over time. This will give you a sense of how your KM strategy is working and what changes you need to make while mapping your future KM roadmap to best serve the interest of your employees and organization as a whole.

I will discuss more about NPS, how to use gather insights from NPS and its limitation in the next article.

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Believe it or not, knowledge management (KM) is a key discipline that one must learn in the following fields:

• Business administration
• Information science
• Information systems
• Library science, AND
• Management

As such, knowledge management is a discipline that demonstrates the processes of creating, sharing, using, and managing organizational knowledge and information. Since it uses knowledge to its advantage, KM is often described as a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organizational objectives in various fields (like the ones mentioned).

So, if you’re looking to learn about knowledge management, or want to brush up on your skills, then check out these 5 books!

1. Knowledge Retention: Strategies And Solutions – Jay Liebowitz

“Jay Liebowitz focuses on the knowledge retention part of knowledge management,” says Richard Green, a writer at Assignment Help and UKWritings. “Knowledge retention has to do with managerial initiatives that handle the assessing and retaining of the most critical knowledge within a company. With loss of employees from any circumstance in mind, KR is crucial in knowledge management, or KM.”

2. Knowledge Management – Paul Gamble & John Blackwell

Paul Gamble and John Blackwell team up to write this definitive guide on KM. In this book, the authors present readers with logical and methodical theories, while including the following:

• Examples
• Stories
• Quotes, etc.

With the theories and concepts demonstrated in the book, readers can implement these strategies in their real-life KM projects and organizations.

However, the most important part – the meat – of the book comes from the authors looking at both knowledge and KM in full depth. As both entities are put into focus, readers are taken through many elements that make the relationship between the two outside the firm (or business or organization). When doing so, the book keeps its human focus while considering technological elements.

3. The Power Of KM: Harnessing The Extraordinary Value Of Knowledge Management – Brent N. Hunter

While this book serves as an introduction to KM, Brent N. Hunter still pleases readers with the clear and concise basics of KM. From step-by-step strategies to comprehensive and universal ones, KM can be implemented in any organization.

Hunter suggests that KM is helpful in the following scenarios:

KM can bring enrichment to a business or organization.
KM can help optimize your personal life.
KM can also optimize any and all levels of society. AND
When used worldwide, KM can be extremely powerful alongside regular knowledge.

4. Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice – Kimiz Dalkir

“With knowledge management, there are theoretical aspects to consider,” says Arthur Bowman, a management expert at Revieweal and Essay Services. “Kimiz Dalkir’s book shows you how to use various techniques for knowledge capture, such as road maps, action learning, and so on. Instead of heavily relying on case studies and personal experiences to fully demonstrate KM, this book gives readers tools and instructions on how to make this discipline work for them.”

With that said, Dalkir’s book will cover the following essential elements of KM:

Knowledge application
Knowledge management strategy
Knowledge management tools
Knowledge sharing
Organizational culture

5. Knowledge Management – Shelda Debowski

Finally, Shelda Debowski presents a detailed overview of KM in her book. In Knowledge Management, the author explores the concept of KM from a leadership role and or a strategic management perspective, thus demonstrating the process of designing and introducing KM in a company or organization. Based on this focus – which increases as the book progress – KM has become a thing in the business community and education, thus creating a framework for those wanting to implement this strategic approach. As you can see, this framework is driven by people, not machines.

Another thing that the book talks about is how KM affect the inner workings of an organization. The very essence of KM is (and should be) based on the following:

• Strong leadership
• Strategic management, AND
• Effectively managed service

You’ll then seeing the benefits of collecting, organizing and sharing the knowledge base of your workforce, as a leader (or related role). In short, when it comes to being a leader, or having some form of leadership role in your company, KM helps you not only track your employees’ knowledge bank, but also helps you create and maintain a knowledge culture in that same environment.

Conclusion

So, there you have it!

Knowledge management is essential for business practices, leadership roles, and other important roles in various industries. So, if you’re craving more knowledge in knowledge management, or if you’re just diving into the world of KM, then check out these 5 books. Happy reading!

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One of the major aspects of customer service is agent productivity that as a result helps the company in improving its customer experience (CX). Agents (users, employees) should be given access to all the necessary information and documents that are stored in an organized manner. In the training duration, it might happen that agents do not know what the next exact step should be taken while solving a customer’s query. 

This can be prevented with the help of knowledge management tools like decision trees, picture guides, augmented reality, learning management systems (LMS), and more. Hence, it is important to boost agent productivity and thus, increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) and this can be done with the assistance of knowledge management software. 

What is knowledge management? 

Knowledge management is a platform that helps in managing the company’s information and helps in creating and sharing information. It helps the company with various aspects like improving customer experience, increasing customer satisfaction, boosting agent productivity, and more. 

If all the information is not easily accessible to the employees then it might bring great loss to the organization along with a lot of valuable time spent in finding the required information. A knowledge management system (KMS) collects all the information of that organization and stores them in an organized way which makes it easier for the employees to find what they are looking for instantly. 

Why is it necessary for business?

Training the customer agents can be a tough and time-consuming activity. But with the advancement in technology and the significant increase in customer expectations, it is very much important that the agents are well-trained with the right skills. This is where the knowledge management system (KMS) comes to the rescue. The KMS helps the agents in learning the right skills, keeping a track of their training progress, and also helps in self-learning. 

Agents can be trained with KMS tools like knowledge base, augmented reality, and learning management system (LMS), etc., with much more ease. There can come up situations where the customer agent is under the training process and is unaware of the next step to be taken while resolving customer queries. In these situations, the knowledge management system becomes useful by guiding the agents with tools like decision trees, picture guides, etc., that provide a step-by-step guide. 

How to boost agent productivity? 

As discussed earlier, how the knowledge management system (KMS) helps the agents with tools like augmented reality, learning management systems, decision trees, FAQs, knowledge base, and more, also helps to boost agent productivity. 

There are other points as well such as ensuring that the agents are well-trained and that agents have access to well-organized information, their workload is reduced with the assistance of automated support and feedback from the agents are collected. Now let us look into these points more briefly. 

Make them well-trained 

With the help of decision trees, customer agents would know the exact next step to be taken while solving customer queries during their training process or even after that. Also, call centre heads have to make sure of the fact that the agents are well-trained with the knowledge of the company's services to their customers. Trainers, with the help of picture guides, make the agents familiar with the company’s services. 

Agents can have the access to all the information stored in an organised manner with the help of a knowledge base. This helps the agents to quickly resolve customer queries. It is also essential to track the agents' training progress which can be done with the help of a learning management system (LMS). 

Organize all the cluttered information 

All the information in an unorganized way might bring great loss to the company. Information, when needed by the agents and cannot be found quickly, increases the average handling time (AHT) and also decreases customer satisfaction (CSAT) as the customers will have to wait for more for getting their issues resolved. 

Hence, it is crucial that all the information and documents of the company must be collected and stored in an organized manner through which agents can easily find any particular information when needed while solving customer queries. Thus, boosting agent productivity and increasing customer satisfaction. 

Automate support 

Leaving all the customer queries to be resolved, at the hands of the customer agents might not only take a lot of their time but also decrease their work efficiency. This issue can also be prevented with the deployment of self-service systems with the assistance of a knowledge management system. 

Customers can solve their problems with self-service easily and thus, the agents do not have to spend their time on some common or the same repeated questions. They can focus on more complex queries. Implementation of a self-service system would be a win-win for the company as this helps in increasing their work efficiency and boosts their productivity and also helps in increasing customer satisfaction. 

Gather feedback

Feedback must be collected not only from the customers about how well the company’s services are but also from the customer agents about their work. They might have some creative suggestions in their mind that can help the company to improve their services. This will increase agents' work efficiency and also help in increasing customer satisfaction. 

Conclusion 

This can be said that for the betterment of the company it is important to boost agent productivity. The knowledge management system (KMS) along with the learning management system (LMS) has many key benefits for the company which improves training, enhances operations and overall ROI.  

Knowledge management as applied in modern organizations is both a simple concept and a wide-ranging one. Definitionally, it can be boiled down to the effort to manage information and resources to improve the organization’s efficiency. But this effort can of course be applied to any number of specific issues or aspects of an organization.

In this piece, we’re going to explore the use of knowledge management for the navigation of an overabundance of information within a business.

Can There Be Too Much Data?

Any discussion on this topic needs to start with the logical question, which is whether or not there’s any such thing as an overabundance of information. Or, putting it another way, is there such a thing as having too much data for a modern company?

A lot of people might be inclined to impulsively answer in the negative. In our increasingly digital world, we’re perpetually inundated with discussions about the importance of data in business. We understand that robust data operations yield invaluable insights, and we hardly think to question whether there might be an upper limit on how much information is actually useful. The general perception is that the more data a company can produce, the deeper its insight will be — and the deeper the insight, the greater the opportunity to enhance efficiency and improve operations.

There’s a certain logical sense to this, but the truth is that there is such a thing as generating too much information, to the point that it becomes an inefficiency unto itself. As one discussion on data saturation put it, it’s actually a problem that is “everywhere” in modern business. This is because “the rapid rise in our ability to collect data hasn’t been matched by our ability to support, filter, and manage the data.” These comments were made with specific regard to marketing departments, but they do a nice job of summing up the problem more broadly. Companies that focus too much on gathering data in large quantities wind up with more than they know how to make sense of, and thus struggle to find meaningful insights.

How Knowledge Management Can Help

The most fundamental way to think about how knowledge management can be applied to this problem is to slightly tweak the definition provided above. As stated, KM is typically about the effort to manage information to improve efficiency. In this case, however, we might think of it more as the effort to make the management of information more efficient in the first place, so as to improve the quality of business insights. It’s a subtle distinction, but one that establishes a helpful way of thinking: a focus on turning the scattershot collection of information into a more targeted and productive effort.

This is something that’s easier to theorize about than to put into practice. It is actually easier, at this point, for organizations to simply cast a wide net and gather all possible information that might pertain to company performance — from internet activity, social media, internal performance, and so on. Where KM comes into play, however, is actually in narrowing that collection process to focus only on what is relevant, pertinent, and ultimately useful. It is essentially a filtration process that narrows the parameters of data collection in ways aimed at generating only the most helpful information, and avoiding excess clutter.

Naturally this is not an exact or flawless process. Some excess data without particular utility will trickle through. But by making the actual collection process more efficient, an organization can effectively apply KM as a solution to this problem.

How to Implement Knowledge Management

As mentioned, this sort of solution is easier to develop as a theory than to implement as practice. However, there are simple and strategic ways to go about the application of KM.

One is to turn to an employee or team specifically trained to handle data-related needs. For some companies, this might mean hiring data and/or analytics experts from the outside. Others, however, may find it more efficient to train internal administrators for the task at hand. Today, this sort of training is accessible via online business administration degree programs that make it easier for working professionals to study and learn new skills without having to quit their jobs. These programs prepare students for a number of different business tasks, but operations management, data research analysis, and marketing coordination are among them. Any of these specialties can help a company employee to gain expertise in data-related practices, and thus prepare said employee to direct a KM effort.

The other, similar but perhaps simpler option is to establish and train people in what are sometimes referred to as gatekeeper roles. Beyond the general definition that inspires the term, the gatekeeper concept is one more commonly associated with product development. Basically, the idea is that someone in a gatekeeper role controls the flow of information between stakeholders and project development teams, so that there isn’t excessive information or pressure moving one way or the other. And the same concept can be applied to data operations as a form of KM. Essentially, an organization can train gatekeepers to recognize what is pertinent and what is not in data collection, and thus — with relative ease — cut down on the clutter. This in turn makes an entire data operation more efficient.

In the end, the effort can be more complicated than how it is presented here. Particularly where larger organizations are concerned, data operations tend to be vast and multi-faceted. Applying KM across the board takes a thorough, effective strategy. The foundation for this strategy, however, is understanding the problem and the ways in which knowledge management can be implemented to solve it.

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Article specially written for kminstitute.org