In business, knowledge is priceless. Yet, while most businesses generate huge volumes of knowledge, these documents are often left inaccessible in enormous, hard-to-navigate libraries – or hidden in the minds of talented staff. Reports, insights, policies, guidelines, correspondence, manuals: all unable to benefit the business simply and frustratingly due to the nature of how they are stored. Knowledge management solves this problem. It unleashes a wellspring of value.
With an effective acknowledgement management strategy, you can unlock your organisation’s knowledge and put it to work across your teams. Learn how below, then get in touch with our experts to learn how we can transform your knowledge management with customised artificial intelligence.
What is a Knowledge Management Strategy?
A knowledge management strategy is a plan designed to create, share, organise, and implement documentation and information. The goal? For knowledge to continually benefit processes, innovation and performance.
Your strategy should enable access to legacy information and organize new data. It should let staff who need information find it immediately so they can make faster, better-informed decisions. And it should stop siloing and enable communication and collaboration between teams.
A powerful knowledge management strategy, produced in line with an organisation’s goals and ethos, should ultimately create a knowledge-driven culture. One where knowledge is inherent to the way the business operates, helping drive and improve every aspect of it.
What is the Purpose and Importance of Knowledge Management Strategy?
A knowledge management strategy’s purpose is to enable the effective use of information and documentation within an organisation.
Many businesses struggle with this. A 2022 International Data Corporation (IDC) survey of large businesses found that 33% experienced challenges with data siloing and collaboration, and 37% found external use of knowledge limited, manual, or time-consuming. 32% felt that data wasn’t in a usable format, and 32% said that existing tools were difficult to use.
Following this, a 2023 IDC survey found that 82% of organisations had siloed data, leading to nearly a quarter not trusting it. All this leads to employees, on average, losing 20 hours per month on poor knowledge management tools. Another survey found staff lost a massive 2 hours each working day searching for the right information.
Ultimately, this has resulted in Fortune 500 companies losing around $31.5 billion each year from knowledge siloing. In the US, this equates to around $44.8 million lost per year on average per organisation.
The challenges are vast, but solving knowledge management with a clear strategy can unlock a wealth of important benefits:
- Improved decision-making, time-to-market, innovation, and better processes and practices (39% of respondents in IDC’s 2022 survey).
- Better customer support through lower service volumes and quicker resolution times (35%).
- Greater satisfaction and engagement amongst employees, customers, and partners (35%).
- Improved employee performance through collaboration, learning and productivity (35%)
- Improved revenue, reduced expenses and greater profits (31%).
- In the survey, 0% of businesses experienced no benefits at all.
What are the Key Components and Methods of a Knowledge Management Strategy?
All effective knowledge management strategies should include certain key components, crucial in driving both immediate and long-lasting benefits.
1. Motivate knowledge sharing
Strategies should include methods to motivate members of the organisation. Help them understand the benefits and what they need to do to manifest them. Incentives and rewards, training managers on required behaviours and how to encourage them, and setting clear goals are all valuable.
2. Aid knowledge networking
To ensure your strategy sticks, incorporate aspects that enable knowledge networking. In practice, this means approaches that connect staff so they can effectively share their expertise and the information held within their own discipline. Communities, sharing spaces, and opportunities for discussion all play their part.
3. Create and store knowledge
The lynchpin of your strategy is the creation, collection, storage, and access of knowledge. The use of generative AI can be enormously helpful here. Rather than relying on off-the-shelf platforms which might not entirely suit your organisation, a custom AI can have bespoke features and connections. Once it’s up and running, it will then automate the administration and delivery of knowledge from databases into processes and, finally, to end users and back.
4. Analyse and apply knowledge
Knowledge, old and new, needs to be analysed through an automated system which categorises, summarises, and lets it be applied effectively. Once again, AI can play a critical part, learning and adapting based on previous analyses and categorisation and honing the ways data is applied through a process of constant review.
5. Codify knowledge
Data needs to be able to be searched easily and quickly, which can only come from a process of codification. In the process, similar pieces of knowledge are grouped together based on the ways in which they are used. These categories can then be used to aid knowledge retrieval through the system.
6. Spread knowledge
End users need to know their organisation’s knowledge is at their fingertips. This might involve creating a chatbot-style user interface that connects to your knowledge management system, alongside regular reminders to use it, the ways it’s being used, and the results it’s driving.
7. Demand knowledge
Your knowledge management pipeline should never be allowed to dry up. If it does, your users will experience diminishing value and end up using it less frequently. To stimulate demand, your strategy needs to bring sources of knowledge into your system. What data do you want to collect, how can it be collected, and how can it be connected to your end user?
8. Act on knowledge
Knowledge has no value unless it’s acted upon. Consider the ways in which team members can be encouraged and given the autonomy to put knowledge into practice through their workflows, processes, procedures and practices.
9. Improve your strategy further
Businesses change over time, and so do the technologies their processes rely on. Knowledge management is no different. How your organisation generates and uses knowledge will change. Just as generative AI has revolutionised the discipline over the past few years, so will new innovations. Reappraise your strategy regularly – every six months, say – incorporating feedback and innovation to keep it razor sharp.
At Oakland, our expertise in generative AI lets us aid all of the above factors. Using approaches like intelligent agents, we can automate the outputs of your strategy so it not only manages knowledge and puts it to immediate use but continues to learn and adapt to your specific nature and needs. The result is a custom AI solution.
Learn how to enable knowledge management through generative AI.
How to Develop Your Knowledge Management Strategy
Once you have understood the components and methods your knowledge management strategy needs to include, you can start developing it.
1. Perform a knowledge audit
The best place to start strategy development is a thorough audit of your current approaches to knowledge management and the information held within your business. This includes:
- Processes and tools
- Information silos
- Knowledge gaps
- Size and makeup of knowledge base(s)
- Sources of explicit knowledge (documentation etc.)
- Sources of implicit knowledge (company processes, culture, workstreams)
- Sources of tacit knowledge (staff experience, expertise, and soft skills)
- Impact of operational inefficiencies due to poor knowledge management.
Analyse this data to clearly understand where you are and, after factoring in your objectives, where you need to be.
2. Define the value proposition
To ensure buy-in, particularly from management, you need to define the value of improved knowledge management, including benefits such as increased productivity, collaboration, innovation, and profit.
Tailor the sources of value to your organisation, its challenges and objectives, then quantify them and show the likely return on investment.
3. Define your knowledge management objectives
Understand the objectives of your knowledge management strategy. Use the findings of your audit and the greatest sources of value to tailor short, medium and long-term goals which can help formulate your strategy and guide the wider initiative.
4. Specify your knowledge management metrics
To understand progress and the accomplishment of objectives, decide what metrics you will hold yourself accountable to. There are four main types of metrics to consider:
- Activity: Number of contributions, rate of user engagement, search trends, login frequency.
- Performance: Number of interactions, content retrieval time.
- Maturity: Average content age.
- Impact: Volume and quality of feedback, business outcomes.
5. Create your strategy
Put your insights into action and craft your strategy. As well as formulating how it will all work, remember to apply an adequate budget to ensure completion and assign the work to an expert or team so it isn’t slowed down by day-to-day activity. Finally, accurately timeline the formulation and implementation of the strategy to further ensure its success.
5 Key Knowledge Management Strategy Best Practices
On top of making sure your strategy contains and is developed the right way, there are some other smart best practices you can adopt to improve its efficacy:
- Run training sessions: Especially important if you haven’t had a strategy and process in place before, training sessions for users and administrators will prevent any bottlenecks in aptitude from preventing your strategy from landing.
- Create a learning environment: Supporting continual training and development, an online learning environment filled with helpful how-tos and guides will prove a helpful resource for new and existing employees.
- Create forums: Promote a culture of knowledge sharing by creating online and in-person avenues for users to discuss approaches, best practices, and results.
- Regular promotion by senior management: If your senior leaders share their excitement about the initiative, their passion will impress upon your teams. Leading by example will help guarantee the system doesn’t fall by the wayside.
- Create a dedicated team: By having a long-term team create the strategy, ensure it’s implemented, and analyse the results to improve it further, you can make knowledge a key part of your organisation.
Examples of Knowledge Management Strategies
In our experts’ work with Network Rail, we helped this large and complex organisation create an AI-driven knowledge management system which put past project learnings into practice.
The result? Faster, less expensive, and more valuable rail projects and infrastructure for the UK.
Your knowledge management strategy is your organisation’s ticket to improved performance and collaboration. Get in touch with your experts today or explore our AI consulting services to learn how we can help you unleash the value of knowledge.
