The phrase “knowledge management” conjures up many images for those who have been involved in this business of bits and bytes. From broad, high level strategic initiatives to large scale Knowledge Management (KM) system implementations, KM has seen its share of promise, disillusionment and evolution over the years. While the theories and technologies regarding KM have changed, the drivers for the need for KM continue to exist and grow: the explosion of information within a company’s systems, the need to capture knowledge from the minds of retiring workers, the increasing need to find information quickly and efficiently, etc.
The double-barrel challenge for many companies is that although these drivers continue to expand, the availability of budget and/or resources to address these problems has consistently decreased. As companies focus on streamlining their operations as much as possible, the concept of “knowledge management” sounds like an expensive and time consuming process that is often placed on the “we’ll do it later” pile. But does a KM initiative have to be a large and complex endeavor? Is there something that that can be done incrementally to get us on the road towards a KM solution? Thankfully, the answer is “yes” if you are willing to think about these considerations:
It’s Only a Model
The first thing to consider is the model for your KM approach: Do you want a centralized system where knowledge is well-controlled and categorized, but difficult for many users to easily contribute content? Or do you want more of a distributed system where knowledge is spread out among multiple systems and loosely linked through metadata tagging, but is easier for users to contribute content using their system of choice? Or is a hybrid of these two systems the answer, which can provide benefits of each but can also lead to unexpected complexities. The selection of one of these approaches might seem daunting at first, but very often it is simply decided based on the existing culture of the company. The key is to think “community”, whether that is one or two large communities that will control and manage knowledge, or a collection of many different communities that are connected through process and technology to share all distributed knowledge.
Search, Search, Search
Regardless of which model you select, the knowledge these systems manage is useless if users can’t easily find it. The proliferation of internet search services such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have shown us that even the most complex information management system in the history of humankind (i.e. “the web”) can be quickly navigated to find the things we are looking for in a reasonable amount of time. When companies say they want “Google-like” search functionality for their enterprise systems, they mean they want a simple interface with relevant results returned and the means to easily sift through those results. Its hard to think of trying to use the web without something like Google, and yet many companies don’t have even have the basic level of search functionality across their knowledge systems. Search has become maybe the single most important piece to a knowledge management system, especially one that is distributed throughout multiple components within an enterprise. And while enterprise search has been, and still can be, a complex technical implementation, there are an increasing number of tools on the market that are simplifying our ability to implement knowledge search systems.
Click here for Part II of “Knowledge Management for the Rest of Us”, where Mike continues his discussion on considerations like “Don’t Forget the People” and “Bottom’s Up”.
