Managing Knowledge

Whether it’s raising money for the community, selling flowers, or building cars every business or organization has a mission that must be carried out in the most efficient way possible. The ability to carry out this mission consistently over time is directly governed by your ability to manage knowledge. Carrying out this mission requires aligning the day to day activities of workers with the mission, which requires providing timely and relevant information for workers and making it easy to institute change.

The hub through which this is carried out is your company knowledge base. There is a wide spectrum of models for how companies operate their knowledge base. On one end are the companies that have no formal knowledge base at all aside from the records generated from the work they perform such as customer and job files, invoices, etc. Information is held within the experience of the workers. Roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined. These companies are hit the hardest by the loss of their ‘corporate memory’ when someone leaves and are very slow to grow because they must find people that already have experience or hire people that must learn by doing and watching – which takes a great deal of time.

On the other end of the spectrum are companies that have developed methods to store, catalog, cross-reference, and retrieve company knowledge on demand. These companies capture and document the worker’s experiences and expertise. Change comes naturally as outdated information is updated in real time. Employee lead to new or updated procedures for operation. Corporate memory is not lost as employees come and go because their expertise has been captured in the knowledge base for a replacement to pick up on. Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined. Training time for new employees is drastically reduced due to the fact that the training materials are a direct product of the knowledge base. Further, efficiency and productivity are maximized as employees have the ability to serve themselves to critical information instantaneously.

With today’s technology it is easier than ever to employ efficient and cost-effective solutions to preserve your corporate knowledge. KM Executive uses this technology to provide an inexpensive online solution that makes it easy to build and maintain a knowledge base and has a variety of pratical applications.