Knowledge Management Expert insights
4 ways a knowledge management system impacts your organization
5 mins read
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Jonathan Davies
5 mins read
The way knowledge is managed impacts every organizational aspect – people, processes, products, or services. And like anything else, the way it’s stored matters.
Today we’re taking a look at the ways a knowledge management system makes the difference between a productive and an unproductive workforce.
Information and knowledge can be - and mostly are - used for collaboration. Sharing them is at the core of collaboration – it’s where the discussion starts, where ideas get generated, tasks get assigned, and everyone starts contributing. That’s coming up roses when people have access to the same information, but oftentimes they don’t.
With hundreds of document versions floating around and team members not being sure which one’s the latest, collaboration can (and most likely will) become messy (to say the least). Information silos are another obstacle to building a collaborative culture, preventing team members from making fully informed decisions.
An information silo is a piece of isolated information that can’t freely correspond with related information flows. It’s also the knowledge management challenge that 54% of organizations face and can cost them up to $1.5M a year. Communication and collaboration silos can also lead to:
Knowledge management systems help you create a culture of knowledge sharing where knowledge is available to everyone within the organization. It keeps knowledge ready to facilitate collaboration – it makes it easy to find, the information is organized, and everyone can hit it off from there.
Did we mention something about making informed decisions? Knowledge management software distributes information to make it accessible to everyone in the organization. So...what’s the impact of knowledge management on decision-making?
The difference it makes? Better decisions are taken faster.
When you hear “knowledge management”, you probably get the feeling it’s all about organizing dry pieces of information. But it’s not only about file storing and sharing, it’s also communication that revolves around it. Whether it comes to static or dynamic communication, sharing knowledge equals transparency.
What does transparency look like in top-down knowledge sharing?
To make sure it's not only the organization communicating with its people, but also employees communicating their thoughts and opinions with their company, knowledge management systems as co-communication hubs also need bottom-up communication. So what’s the impact of bottom-up communication on knowledge sharing?
We bet you’ve had (or currently have!) that one person in your company that always asks you to drop them a link to docs to folders because they never know how to find it, and you always help them out because that’s what being nice means, but now imagine that’s the approach of your entire workforce. That’s when you’re dealing with an “ask” culture as opposed to a “search” culture.
Search cultures thrive where information is organized in a way that makes it fast and easy to find; as a result, people don’t need to ask around because they know how to find what they’re looking for on their own. It’s the best culture to build when it comes to knowledge management, but it’s also the hardest one – and the knowledge management system is here to help you impact that cultural shift:
When the business grows, so does the knowledge shared. The way you manage it is impactful — it determines how information gets found, shared, and stored in your organization. Your people are involved in this process, and the way they interact with knowledge can be seen in their work: from day-to-day tasks all the way to their motivation and engagement with the content.