Building Smart, Future Ready Organisations

Knowledge Management is the process of collating, sensemaking, organising, analysing and sharing key organizational know-how, know-when and know-who. It works on 5 major contexts – People, Process, Technology, Content and Strategy.

The purpose of Knowledge Management is to improve efficiency and knowledge and create an organizational knowledge base to aid decision-making and make knowledge available to people when they need it. Knowledge Management deals with activities that help organisations with the following:

• 1.Capture relevant information and knowledge and make it easily accessible
• 2.Identify and safeguard critical knowledge
• 3.Facilitate easy tacit knowledge sharing and collaboration
• 4.Generate new knowledge, innovative ideas through interventions
• 5.Reuse of Knowledge
• 6.Institutionalisation of knowledge

KM tools help organizations collate and ensure they have the right and updated processes, standardized procedures and systems in place so that it empowers all employees to operate efficiently and effectively. These tools will help to elicit, capture, store and disseminate information and knowledge. This may include the following:

• 1.Content management systems that include knowledge mapping, best practices and lessons learnt, etc.
• 2.Intranet
• 3.Enterprise social networking platforms
• 4.Q&A platforms
• 5.Expert database
• 6.Search and Insights engines

Knowledge Management systems are a combination of all the technical tools that support the functioning of the KM function and help organizations and their employees practice KM. The focus is to facilitate capturing, safeguarding and reuse of knowledge. Assist in sharing and collaboration by providing technical platforms. The technology used must enable the users to access knowledge and information to make decisions that will improve efficiency and be effective in everyday work improvements.

Some knowledge management systems are:

• 1.M365
• 2.Alfresco
• 3.Liferay
• 4.Confluence
• 5.Google Workplace

The first step in a knowledge management process is to identify knowledge needs and sources or the acquisition of knowledge, how to capture it, organise it and where to store it. Thereafter, it is about making it accessible and shared amongst us, and lastly, how we can continuously improve and keep it updated so that the users will always have the latest knowledge based on a single point of truth. This is also supported by the subprocess like the following:

• 1.Content Management Process
• 2.Knowledge reuse process
• 3.Lessons Learned management
• 4.Metrics and reporting
• 5.Change Management Process

Knowledge management can be classified based on its focus. It can be a combination of tacit and explicit knowledge focus. Tacit is the knowledge that is within or, which cannot be articulated and yet to be shared while explicit is knowledge that has been authenticated, articulated, verified, shared, stored and made available to the organisation.

Knowledge management technology is a tool to facilitate KM. There are numerous ways to enhance the speed of knowledge acquisition and knowledge sharing with the aid of technology. A combination of KM technologies/ KM products that can be used are:

• 1.Content management - SharePoint, Drupal, Salesforce (business content), Documentum, OpenText
• 2.Collaborations - Slack, Teams, M365, Expert finder, Stardog (for knowledge graphs)
• 3.Ontology management – Pingar, Ontotext
• 4.Search Engines - Lucidworks, Elasticsearch, Pingar

• 1.People
• 2.Process
• 3.Technology
• 4.Content Management
• 5.Strategy
• 6.Culture

• 1.Helps safeguard critical knowledge
• 2.Improves productivity of employees
• 3.Avoids duplication and helps in saving efforts
• 4.Supports ESG goals through supporting reuse
• 5.Facilitate systematic continuous improvement and foster innovation

Today, especially in a post-pandemic globally connected workplace, the need for knowledge management is paramount to an organisational success.

• 1.KM facilitates making effective decisions (Eg: how dashboards give visibility to a mega warehouse of a global logistics company).
• 2.KM enables the organisation to continuously learn and improve (post project learnings, after action reviews, retrospect, trainings and lunch & learn)
• 3.KM boosts positive organisational culture and Innovation. It supports a knowledge-sharing mindset in all employees and not just senior management, and provides efficient cross exchange of ideas and innovations.
• 4.KM Is about diversity, equity & inclusivity, and it involves the design of programs and systems that enable people from all backgrounds feel a part of the organisation, have full support in making the organisation a better place for work and fun and empowers everyone to achieve their fullest abilities at the workplace.