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Businesses operate a vast amount of knowledge to survive and thrive in a competitive environment. If properly harnessed, knowledge can boost the productivity of entire companies.

That’s why companies are investing in knowledge management systems – the tools that make it easier to share, access, and update information and knowledge within an organization.

In this post, we’ll talk about how these five knowledge management examples can boost organizational productivity:

The effective knowledge harvesting, utilization, and sharing are pivotal to competitive advantage for any organization. As Sir Francis Bacon quoted “knowledge is power”. The channeled knowledge through the Knowledge Management (KM) system helps bridge the skills gap, allowing people to make better decisions and provide efficient and productive results, ultimately leading to time and costs savings.   

Communities are an integral part of knowledge management in any organization bringing together people, processes, and technologies to capture, manage, find, and share knowledge. The purpose is to enable the community members to collaborate, get upskilled, making their day to day work easier and how.

Here are some of the key outcomes from well-driven Communities:

1 - Increased output:
Well run communities enable people to spend less time looking for information or recreating already existing information.

Imagine that you are in a theater listening to an orchestra. Do you notice that all the musicians refer to the same set of music sheets to ensure that they play their instruments in sync? Just like an orchestra performance, organizations also require aligning various components so that there is a harmonious content management performance. This blog describes the elements that they both have in common.  

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Lately I’ve been watching the quick maturation of learning and development concepts, practices, and technologies with interest and excitement. Organizations are paying more attention to learning and performance, how they apply it within their organization, and how it fits together with the rest of their knowledge and technology ecosystems. Overall, I see a few factors for this evolution of learning and development/performance:

Investment and returns from Knowledge Management

The returns on investment in KM reflects in many areas of engagement of an organization. Since in most cases it is not tangible, management assumes that there are no benefits and hence brings down its focus on management of knowledge.

Sharing an example of possible returns from KM. This was prepared for an IT Service company with around 1000 employees. I am sharing the returns first and then the investments involved. Only knowledge and information reuse based benefits are covered here.

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The current global situation has upended nearly everything across the globe, and the professional world has not been immune. People are adapting to remote work across industries, dramatically shifting how they conduct business and go about their days as professionals. It can be even more difficult to adapt to new working situations when you are unfamiliar with your job or your organization. This being the case, remote work has put new hires and their mentors in new and often challenging positions.

KM is a core function of organizations. It is practices by all organizations irrespective of whether they have a formal KM function or not.

There is a need for Leadership to appreciate what KM can do so that they can benefit from it.

I am highlighting a few aspects of KM that are important:

1. Ability to safeguard and grow core competencies (Know-how and Know-why): Typically done through collation, categorizing & storing key contents

Over the past decade, digital transformation has been a key focus for many organizations. Yet, it wasn’t until the recent months when many have been forced to become fully digital that we’ve seen how critical knowledge management is to an organization’s ability to adapt to unexpected circumstances.

Organizations irrespective of whether they have a formal KM function or not, will have to manage knowledge for the four following reasons:

1. Safeguarding & institutionalizing knowledge: Knowledge that an organization has at its disposal decides its competitiveness. The ability to safeguard this critical knowledge and ensure it is institutionalized determines both long term survival and competitiveness of organizations.