With billions spent on corporate training yearly, companies just can’t afford for employees to forget knowledge they gain. A knowledge management system is what can help organizations to anticipate forgetting and break the forgetting curve.

Summarizing the results from 2016, the Training Industry Report shows that the total training expenditure in the USA reached $70.65 billion. With such substantial investments into corporate learning, companies definitely expect employees to retain acquired knowledge and use it actively. However, the human memory isn’t perfect and Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve proves that well. Regardless of how interesting and useful a training session is, a month later employees will tend to remember not more than 20% of the knowledge learned.

Usually addressed within corporate learning, the forgetting curve problem also permeates into knowledge management. Therefore knowledge managers should search for appropriate tactics to stop the forgetting process, stabilize new knowledge and make it stick in the corporate memory. To add a practical touch to the topic, below there are possible ways to crush the forgetting curve with a tailored SharePoint-based knowledge management solution. 

Self-learning and Individual Training

When employees choose self-learning or individual training, they are often left to their own devices. While gaining important knowledge through personal research or participating in a training session, employees rarely report on the knowledge they got. If there are no adopted practices of sharing such knowledge, or there is no need in using it regularly, most likely this knowledge will be lost in the near future. 

To prevent this, companies can use a KM system to control knowledge acquired individually and let it become a part of their corporate knowledge. A customized tech tool will give employees the opportunity to manage their knowledge as well as collaborate with a knowledge manager. 

Knowledge pages to track individual knowledge statuses

Personal knowledge pages will allow employees to assess the current state of their knowledge by listing their explicit and tacit knowledge items and looking up their self-learning and training history. The history can include latest training subjects, the date of training and the expected review date. The knowledge that is located in a risky forgetting zone can be highlighted, so that employee could see it upfront and plan the review according to the workload.

Customizable notifications to review ‘fresh’ knowledge

Provided with the opportunity to set personalized notifications, employees will get an alert asking to review recently learned information. Relying on Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve timeframes, notifications can be adjusted for the 2nd, 6th and 31st day after self-learning or individual training.

Timely reviews with a knowledge owner 

If an employee got new tacit knowledge personally while communicating with a knowledge owner, a KM system can help to anticipate forgetting tacit knowledge.  Just like above, employees can arrange a review meeting either 6 or 31 days after the first explanation. If some knowledge gets lost, a knowledge owner helps to restore it.

Tests to check knowledge stability 

To assess how well particular knowledge is retained, employees can take a relevant test to check their knowledge stability. For example, this approach can be used by line or knowledge managers to test those employees who completed an in-house training. Test results can be shown on a knowledge page so that employees could compare the same test through different periods of time and understand if an additional review is required.

Team learning

If a company organizes a team training, even a bigger challenge arises: several employees should retain the same knowledge equally well. In this case, a KM system can help teams to support the required level of knowledge using different knowledge management tools.

Team spaces for knowledge review. If the entire team participates in a training session, it will be useful to provide them with dedicated team space where they can collaborate, discuss training materials, ask questions, clear up complex issues and more. After several reviews in a KM system, employees can arrange a final live collaborative review to retain knowledge better. 

Team notifications. As soon as a critical moment for a knowledge review comes, each team member will get a relevant notification. Then, team members can arrange knowledge reviews aligned with their timetables using their team space. Notifications can also be coupled with a specialized form for employees to mark out questions they want to discuss during an upcoming live review. This will help participants to make the review more productive.

Reviewing workflows. This option can be particularly valuable for knowledge managers. Creating a dedicated reviewing workflow, a knowledge manager will be able to check knowledge of each team member one by one. As soon as all employees review the required materials and pass relevant tests, a KM will be notified about the reviewing cycle completed to analyze the results of each employee. 

Knowledge adoption gets manageable 

Traditionally, KM systems help organizations to structure knowledge, make it uniform and easily accessible for employees, as well as to put into practice a centralized KM strategy. At the same time, knowledge management software can also become a knowledge manager’s tool to monitor how well new knowledge is implanted, thus control the forgetting curve. Using specialized features, a knowledge manager can:

• Initiate knowledge reviews. A knowledge manager can see the knowledge that wasn’t reviewed within the required timeframe and invite employees to brush it up with a relevant notification.
• Assess knowledge retention. Analyzing test results, a knowledge manager can understand how well employees capture new knowledge. If the forgetting curve is still deeply concave, a knowledge manager can then reconsider the effectiveness of reviewing techniques, initiate a more strict reviewing policy and offer alternative learning methods to achieve better results.
• Rethink a training program. By assessing knowledge retention after particular training sessions, a knowledge manager can exclude less effective training programs that are characterized by the most explicit forgetting curve. 

Employee motivation matters

Unless employees have to refresh knowledge to solve a particular task, knowledge reviews are pretty often unpleasant. At the same time, without a well-established reviewing process, companies will continue losing substantial investments into corporate learning. 

Although the described KM tools can be helpful in overcoming the forgetting curve, obviously, it can still be difficult to control bulk reviews on the regular basis. To make things go easier, it’s always reasonable to motivate employees to make timely reviews willingly, be proactive and review for knowledge without any enforcement. 

One of such incentives can be going for a mobile app with review exercises, to let employees reanimate their knowledge at any time with their mobile devices. This complements the KM approach described above in a way that employees can get points for regular knowledge reviews, to be reflected on their knowledge pages. These points can be later transformed into tangible corporate perks. 

Zach Wahl, expert in knowledge and information management strategy, content strategy, and taxonomy design, presents a brief explanation of the importance of knowledge management and making connections.  Zach leads the Taxonomy Design Certification program at KM Institute, and is the CEO of Enterprise Knowledge, LLC.

After nearly twenty years of Knowledge Management Consulting, I’ve developed core themes to what I believe comprises good KM. EK’s definition of KM embodies many of these themes:

“Knowledge Management involves the people, culture, content, processes, and enabling technologies necessary to Capture, Manage, Share, and Find information.”

We supplement this with our KM Action Wheel. The wheel represents the many uses of KM:  

• Creation of knowledge and information; [KM Action Wheel]
• Capture of knowledge and information (from tacit to explicit, and/or into KM systems);
• Management of knowledge and information, often using an array of technologies including knowledge bases, intranets, content management, document management, and records management;
• Enhancement of knowledge and information, making it better over time through increased collaboration, adding tags to improve its findability, and linking it to other knowledge and information to tell a more complete story;
• Ensuring that the appropriate knowledge and information is findable by the right people in intuitive ways, maximizing its use and reuse; and
• Connecting, creating links between knowledge and information, between the holders of knowledge (your experts), and between your various repositories, resulting in a web of enterprise knowledge that builds on itself over time.

Most importantly, though, is the word ACT in the middle of the wheel. For us, effective KM doesn’t happen for the sake of KM, it happens to enable specific actions and results. All KM efforts should be grounded in a deep and clear understanding of the results you’re seeking and the actions you’re attempting to enable.

Unfortunately, KM as a concept continues to be sullied by overly academic viewpoints and an unfortunate association with projects that are all talk and big ideas, but are unacceptably short on results and practical thinking. A look at Google Trends expresses this unfortunate reality all too clearly, with a steadily declining interest in the term since 2004.

I, along with my colleagues at EK, have worked extensively to realize Practical KM that results in meaningful business value, supported by the best principles in Agile, IT, Information Management, and Change Management. All of this, integrated, is EK’s version of KM and we have the success stories to prove its effectiveness.

What I hope to see in 2017, and what we have been and will continue to work toward, is this concept of KM and ______. Our work will be to apply these concepts for our clients and continue to offer the latest thought leadership on them through our blogs and conferences.

KM and Business Value

The two concepts that I feel are most important to be intrinsically linked are KM and Business Value. KM initiatives have too often been seen as the “nice to have” when there’s budget leftover. Every KM project, big or small, should begin with a clear understanding the the KM Actions we are seeking to enable and the resulting value to the organization (ideally hard ROI) we anticipate achieving. At every turn, decision-making should go back to that core question, “Will this decision result in the business value we’re seeking?” If the answer is no, reassess and adjust.

KM and Information Management

I’ve written previously about my lack of interest in trying to draw a line between Knowledge and Information Management. These two concepts exist on the same spectrum, harnessing People, Processes, Content, Culture, and Technology to translate tacit knowledge, experience, and expertise into content that may be captured, managed, enhanced, and found by others. KM and IM (or KIM) belong together in most engagements where organizations are trying to get a handle on their knowledge assets or are concerned about losing knowledge, duplicating effort due to knowledge that wasn’t found, or wasting time looking or waiting for knowledge insteading of acting.

KM and Technology

There are those within the industry who wish to draw a hard line between Knowledge Management and IT within Knowledge Management Systems. I see technology as an enabling factor to effective KM. Using this broad definition, any number of Content/Document/Records Management products, knowledge bases, Learning Management Systems, Enterprise Search Tools, Taxonomy Management Tools, or Semantic Web Technologies fits within the box of KM Systems. This is not to say that simply installing SharePoint means you’re “doing” KM. On the contrary, an effective KMS requires a perfect merger of KM and IT best practices, ranging from knowledge sharing processes to content governance, KM culture change to KM systems adoption strategies, and KM content capture to IT systems migration.

KM and Agile

At EK, we’re firm believers in agile principles and have worked hard to promote these concepts and drive change and transformation for our customers. KM and agile are a natural fit for each other. KM efforts consistently benefit from maximized touch points with end users and stakeholders. They also require iterative progress in order to a) drive support and encourage adoption, b) demonstrate regular business value to ensure support and focus on action-oriented results, and c) ascertain whether we’re “getting it right” before going too far down a particular path. Since KM is so much about culture and adoption; getting your stakeholders to want to change is a critical success factor, and we think agile can help get you there.

KM and Measurable Results

Finally, as we define Agile KM road maps to help organizations realize their end user’s goals and maximize business value, it is critical that we’re able to measure our successes. This is important to ensure we’re reflecting on our progress and, as mentioned above, that we’re “getting it right.” Measurable results are something that we establish when we’re designing a road map so we can assess our progress iteratively throughout the effort. Measurable results need to be more than checkmarks in a project plan that say a particular deliverable has been completed. Instead, they must show the business impact of completing the action. They also play a great role in establishing “celebratable moments” that can be used to communicate the team’s successes and communicate progress to potential stakeholders.

Do you need help making KM and ______ a reality in your organization? EK is here to help.

Launching their knowledge management initiatives, organizations often resemble oil extraction companies. They start to drill their knowledge wells and rub their hands in anticipation of the upcoming boost to their business. However, knowledge management often turns to be even harder than real oil extraction from the entrails of the earth. That is, even with such a sustainable resource as knowledge, only few companies succeed in making a good use of it.

After finding the optimal ways to externalize and store their corporate knowledge, organizations often stop halfway forgetting how important it is to actively use it. This leads to negative consequences: provided with the access to all the necessary knowledge, both tacit and explicit, employees just don’t retrieve it and thus underperform. But what can be the reasons of such inertness?

Why knowledge lays idle

The problem of poor knowledge use can have two reasons: technological and organizational ones.

The technological reason points to defects in knowledge management tools themselves. Instead of stimulating knowledge use, they impede navigation across knowledge sources or don’t let employees reach out to knowledge owners. As a result, organizations get exposed to the following issues:

Explicit knowledge is hard to access. Badly structured, non-indexed, non-rated knowledge assets can be really annoying for employees. However, the case is pretty common. According to the TSIA survey The state of knowledge management 2015, 66% of respondents state that they don’t index their knowledge base, while 58% confirm they don’t index community content.

Tacit knowledge is underused. When a knowledge management system has no hands-on collaboration tools, employees lose the opportunity to exchange tacit knowledge. As a result, knowledge gets stuck in employees’ heads only and hardly crosses departmental borders. In this case, knowledge flows are very short, as knowledge is shared among limited groups of people.

Apart from technical issues, there can be organizational barriers. A corporate culture with poor knowledge use can bring up the following scenarios:

Knowledge use is optional. In the absence of official guidelines on knowledge use, employees perceive it as an unnecessary, futile procedure that only eats their working time. As a result, employees rely on their own knowledge exclusively, which makes working processes inconsistent and deficient.

There is no formal procedure for knowledge maintenance and update. Obviously, employees are interested in using up-to-date and relevant information, so as soon as they find their internal knowledge sources outdated and misleading, they won’t return to them anymore. There are 2 critical situations that can put knowledge use to a stop:

• Chaotic knowledge generation and storage. When managed chaotically, knowledge sources quickly become overloaded with information noise. Therefore, users have to spend a lot of time trying to sift out relevant information and, eventually, stop searching for it at all.
• Knowledge isn’t maintained and upgraded. If nobody controls how adequate knowledge is, it quickly becomes obsolete and useless. Surprisingly, the percentage of companies neglecting knowledge updates is pretty high. TSIA’s statistics shows that less than 50% of the surveyed companies regularly review their knowledge base content for accuracy, and 27% admit that knowledge hasn’t been updated for a very long time.

Stimulating knowledge use with technology

To increase knowledge use, companies can take a few feasible steps to adjust their knowledge management solutions or tools. Taking corrective actions, organizations can tailor software features to be knowledge use accelerators.

Convenient and pervasive search that will enable users to quickly find required information across all knowledge sources. For example, companies using SharePoint-based solutions can fine-tune the platform’s search capabilities to provide users with a direct way to knowledge located on different sites and site collections. Even a bigger advantage have the owners of SharePoint 2016 that allows an instant, hybrid search across different SharePoint environments, both on-premises and cloud.

Knowledge rating tools will allow classifying knowledge assets by their value and relevance. This will help users to get the most valuable knowledge ranked first in knowledge search results.

Automated workflows for knowledge updates will help knowledge owners to carry out knowledge reviews as soon as the relevancy of a knowledge asset expires. Such workflows will allow organizations to keep updated such important knowledge assets as market researches, internal policies, methodologies and more.

Collaboration tools for tacit knowledge exchange will facilitate dissemination of tacit knowledge among employees by allowing them to connect to knowledge owners regardless of their location. Companies that use SharePoint intranets can enhance knowledge use with the help of diverse built-in collaboration features, for example, knowledge discussion hubs, knowledge exchange and Q&As.

Fostering knowledge use on the organizational level

To improve knowledge use on the organizational level, companies should aim at intensifying cross-departmental knowledge exchange and make knowledge use an essential part of daily working processes. To reach this goal, companies can:

Provide employees with ready-to-go knowledge. Developing SharePoint-based knowledge management solutions, we at ScienceSoft advocate the push approach to knowledge dissemination that encourages companies to distribute available knowledge among employees with the help of:

• In-house trainings and courses aimed at showing available knowledge, introducing knowledge owners and bridging knowledge gaps. Trainings can be allocated in a corporate learning management system (LMS) that will be integrated with a knowledge management system so that employees’ new knowledge and competencies can be then fixed in a knowledge base and added to the knowledge map.
• Collaborative knowledge transfer that should stimulate more active knowledge flows throughout the company. To facilitate collaborative knowledge transfer, companies can focus on creating both formal and informal Communities of Practice (CoP) and provide them with the possibility to carry out knowledge exchange workshops supported with discussion forums and blogs.

Make knowledge use obligatory  

Corporate knowledge use should be considered as a critical factor in a company’s success. A high importance of knowledge use should be communicated to employees during their working process and supported with relevant internal policies. For example, a knowledge management policy can stipulate an obligatory use of available corporate knowledge in employees’ daily tasks. Moreover, a regular knowledge use can become an essential element of employees’ performance reviews. Therefore, employees not following the policy will be subject to penalties.

Bringing the accelerators together

Even clearly understanding the value of knowledge and having invested into knowledge management, many companies still don’t stimulate knowledge use. As a result, employees continue to ignore corporate knowledge and apply ineffective methods that impede their working process. Since the reasons for poor knowledge use can be technological and organizational, companies should take relevant measures to eliminate barriers at all levels.

Organizations that already put their efforts into developing knowledge management tools, can start with reviewing their current functionality and focus on features that would stimulate knowledge use (pervasive search, rating tools, automated workflows for knowledge updates, etc.). If corporate knowledge has barriers to its use on the organizational level, then companies should concentrate on creating a favorable knowledge environment where employees can freely reach out to both knowledge assets and knowledge owners.

Do you assume people will adopt your new knowledge management initiative, or is adoption something you are actively investing in? Resistance can be the death knell for a KM project, and can lead to technology being left unused, processes being ignored, and knowledge being hoarded.

If you’re currently experiencing some of these challenges, a change management strategy can help. One of the key benefits of a change strategy is that it creates opportunities to have conversations with end users and stakeholders, and learn how to communicate in the user’s terms. As a result of these conversations, users and stakeholders will better understand the value and outcomes of the KM project. The more conversations, the better: for a change strategy to be most effective, it should be included in a KM project at all stages of the process, including the very beginning.

Here’s how we have applied change management techniques to KM projects at EK:

1. Technology Changes

Nearly all knowledge management projects involve some sort of technology, such as an intranet site, social media tool, or wiki collaboration platform. Resistance to these tools often looks like a sad, blank tool that is gathering dust.

In my experience, many of these change failures can be prevented by tailoring end user training to the value the technology actually adds to people’s daily work. For example, I’ve taught basic SharePoint classes on the benefits of version control, co-authoring, and storing files outside of an email platform. For groups that are less tech-savvy, these simple lessons are much more impactful than teaching them about why they should stop using navigation and start using search to find documents.

2. Process Changes

Knowledge management frameworks are often built around processes: content authors need to tag their content correctly, admins need to follow a records management schedule, or staff needs to follow a standard publishing process.

The change management principle of co-creation can help with process changes. A new process that’s designed without the input of the people actually using it will almost certainly fail, by leading to workarounds. For example, in terms of a publishing process, a low percentage of “emergency” publishing will be a good indicator of success. In addition, taking an agile approach to content development and gradually improving processes over time will help make change manageable.

3. Cultural Changes

Promoting knowledge sharing and growing communities of practice are cultural aspects of many knowledge management projects. These types of changes are often the most difficult to manage because they are difficult to “force” – they address behaviors and habits that are ingrained in an organization.

Applying change networks can help you surface issues and build excitement and trust in these cases. A change network is a group of people outside of the management team who is serving as “ambassadors” for the change. They are a motivated group that will help spread the value of KM and will bring issues to the group that people don’t feel comfortable saying publicly. In the past, I have also used a change network as an informal focus group to test project communications, new tools, and other KM ideas.