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Initiating effective knowledge management in your organization often seems like a timely and complex procedure, but done right it can lead to powerful efficiency across all departments. However, this process often requires the confrontation of a number of significant challenges and there are common pitfalls that can ensure a project. Here are 5 mistakes that can cost your organization significantly when implementing knowledge management - awareness will enable you to prevent falling into these traps.

1) Doing Too Much At Once

Knowledge management should be a common practice in all businesses, no matter the field and purpose. It’s useful for both the internal and external development of the company. Benefits include optimizing teamwork, teaching newcomers, improving sales, and reviewing results.

And in the age of raging pandemic, knowledge management gains a new form and becomes more essential than ever. KM techniques and strategies become more flexible and adapt to the changes COVID-19 brought. After all, the inability to travel and attend meetings forced organizations to change most of their tactics.

Innovation is at the heart of any organization. All organizations strive towards:

• creating products and services for improved customer experiences.
• overcoming complex business problems using innovative processes and business models for increased impact and revenue.

In this era of digital disruptions and uncertainties, innovation is the key to create a competitive advantage and “design-thinking” is one of the most innovative tools to achieve Innovation and streamline organization knowledge.

One of the biggest challenges faced by most organizations is organizing, finding, and marking information in the knowledge repository in such a way that it is easily accessible as and when needed by the employees. The classical approach used widely is indexing documents to help users in deciding documents relevancy and retrieval. Classical methods comprise classification systems (taxonomies), thesaurus, and controlled keywords (nomenclatures) [Aitchison et al. 2004; Cleveland and Cleveland 2001; Lancaster 2003; Stock and Stock 2008].

It is heartening to note that discussion is taking place after the release of the 4th edition of the Global Knowledge Index (GKI), jointly produced by the UNDP and Dubai-based Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation. Bangladesh ranked low in GKI among 138 countries. Dr. Saleemul Huq, Director of the ICCCAD at IUB, in an op-ed in The Daily Star on December 30 rightly stressed the need for a "national consensus" to make the necessary paradigm shift to transform Bangladesh into a knowledge economy over the next decade.

Communities of Practice are collaborative networks (can be both formal or informal) depending on to foster sharing of ideas and knowledge outside the structured learning environment.

Communities are always developed around a certain skill, profession or learning purpose. In fact, a shared identity is the glue that binds the members of a Community together (Wenger, 1998).

Quite often a good story is the best way to impart knowledge (Davenport and Prusak 1998).

Storytelling is the oldest technique of knowledge transfer and has been touted as the most effective medium to pass across a message to someone since we tend to memorize stories better than dry facts and can easily link them to our personal experiences. Medical technologies have also proved that storytelling is a natural way for brain to capture and retain information.

In the last two decades, the creation and enablement of knowledge as a source for an organization’s competitive advantage has been highly emphasized.  There has been a paradigm shift in how an organization's knowledge is now viewed and nurtured.

Knowledge Management is all about connecting people to people and knowledge enabling them to work better leading to a well-informed, efficient, and innovative workforce. Let's see below how it leads to cost savings for any organization.

Organization’s collected knowledge is its most essential asset. The development of this intellectual knowledge from tacit to explicit, sharing and utilization forms the basis of knowledge management. Its purpose is to ensure that the relevant knowledge in people’s heads and the hard drive is captured and made available to the whole organization for the realization of an organization’s goals.