Drive collaboration across your organisation with knowledge management

In the age of digitalisation, lost or siloed information can cause an organisation a lot of issues. If knowledge is hidden or difficult to find, employees waste time looking for resources or end up duplicating documented information that already exists. This can lead to inconsistencies and time being wasted. Furthermore, without easily accessible information in a single source of truth, communication and collaboration are unlikely to thrive.

To keep up with digitalisation and to effectively support a remote or hybrid workforce, organisations must find new ways of working. Knowledge management—the deliberate process of identifying, managing, maintaining and sharing knowledge and expertise within an organisation—can provide your teams with a base for knowledge, making information easy to access, action and iterate according to changes in demand. It’s important to note, knowledge management isn't solely about managing processes; it is also about managing data with complete transparency and visibility.

In this blog, we'll explore knowledge management further. We'll examine best practices and benefits, before outlining how to build a strategy. Let's take a deeper look at this practice.

Knowledge management is the process of identifying, organising, storing and sharing information within an organisation. It extracts both numerical and non-numerical information or from employees and technology within an organisation so it can be utilised by wider teams. When knowledge is shared in this way, it means that when someone goes on holiday, leaves the business or takes a sick day, you don’t lose it.

Knowledge management practices collect your teams’ knowledge and present it as one shared truth. With a single source of truth, all the knowledge that is available to your business is accessed from a single source. Effective decisions are backed by data that is processed into information. This knowledge is then shared with teams to use to confidently make decisions. As a result, they will increase their productivity and perform tasks consistently, efficiently and hopefully more effectively. Using a single source framework eliminates data fragmentation by having everything in one place, and it saves time when searching for answers.

Knowledge management encourages everyone to become champions of their insights, creating a point of contact for other colleagues to reach out to if they wish to understand more, and building natural cross-team collaboration across the organisation.

A lack of knowledge management can become a trigger that can collapse or impede your progress toward achieving your strategic goals. With effective knowledge management skills, teams can elevate their morale, creativity, motivation, innovation and everything they need to collaborate more effectively.

Easy access to knowledge and information will allow your teams to follow correct processes and share what aspects of the process haven't worked, enabling iterations to be addressed quickly, to prevent the same mistakes from being repeated. Leading to faster and more effective problem-solving.

When change occurs having an open platform of shared knowledge will pay dividends. It can provide a place where colleagues and team mates can find the latest information, review details of changes, understand proposed changes at all levels. As well as providing the current understanding it should also retain a history of the changes to ensure that an audit trail is available in case of any need to review changes.