Common mistakes while implementing Knowledge Management (and Fixes)

Picture courtesy: https://www.natfas.com/knowledge-management-3/
In this blog, I will introduce knowledge management, highlight the mistakes that are frequently made and how to fix the issues

As per the current ITSM trends a lot of focus on Knowledge Management, Self-Service, and Self-Help. With this comes the uncertainty and complexity of implementing an effective and well-designed knowledge management process and while challenging, this doesn’t mean you can shy away from it.

According to findings from "TheState of Knowledge Management: 2016-17 KMWorld Survey” knowledge management is gaining momentum and encouragement. More than one-third of those surveyed, 38%, said they don’t have any knowledge management structure in place or are sitting in the “exploration stage.”

If you’re in the early stages of planning for your knowledge management system, or maybe you’ve already tried and failed at your knowledge management attempt, this blog is for you.

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management is the systematic management of an organization's knowledge assets for the purpose of creating value and meeting tactical & strategic requirements; it consists of the initiatives, processes, strategies, and systems that sustain and enhance the storage, assessment, sharing, refinement, and creation of knowledge.

Knowledge management (KM) therefore implies a strong tie to organizational goals and strategy, and it involves the management of knowledge that is useful for some purpose and which creates value for the organization.

What are the different Knowledge Types?

According to Knowledge Management Tools, knowledge falls into three categories:

• Explicit Knowledge: Formal and systematic, and usually in the form of written documents, it’s easy to communicate and store, such as information found in documentation, books, instruction manuals and on the web. It can also be in an audio or visual form such as instructional diagrams or videos.
• Tacit Knowledge: Typically, the information held in people’s heads. The trick is to either enable them to share this information via tools and processes or to connect these people with those needing the information.
• Embedded Knowledge: Information stored within policies, procedures, legal documentation and other unstructured data (such as social media). This can require observation, insight and analytics tools to identify this knowledge.

The Benefits of Knowledge Management: 

Developing and executing a knowledge management strategy can bring many benefits to the organisation as a whole:

• Ability to create a “trusted source” or a “single source of truth” for key information that needs to be shared either internally or with your customer base.
• Improvement in KPIs such as Average ticket Handle Time, First Contact Resolution and Customer Satisfaction.
• Lowering the Time to Competency for new employees.
• Lowering overall training costs.
• More accurate call logging, and reduced after-call work (ACW).
• Enabling wider sharing of information across the whole organisation.
• Operational efficiencies communicating key information more quickly.
• Enabling emerging technologies such as AI, chatbots, robotic process automation.

Mistakes while implementing Knowledge Management:

Knowledge management can be hard. There are many technology companies out there which claim to have all the answers, but – trust me – there is so much more to the discipline than deploying a platform.

Often, organisations leap into knowledge initiatives without proper planning or strategy. So, what are the common mistakes?

• Doing things the traditional way: If you want to succeed at knowledge management, you must cater to your users and the style of experience they want—more knowledge at their fingertips, that’s readily available and accessible with just a few keystrokes. Many companies keep using their same knowledge strategy of gathering as much information as they can, but in the end, it’s rarely updated and barely used. This method is not the best if you want to succeed in the long run.
• Having a thought process of "build it and they will come": Many organizations think knowledge management is simply building a massive repository of knowledge articles, and that this act alone will encourage people to use it. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Creating a knowledge base is not the end. Once developed, it must be regularly updated, easily and readily accessible, and its usage needs to be reinforced company-wide.
• Ignoring your data: Successful knowledge management implementations use as much data as possible to determine what knowledge is required. Taking data from the ITSM Tool is an excellent source to understand what kinds of enquiries are being handled. In fact, tickets data is a great way of initially setting up a structure to your knowledge plan. Other sources that are vital to keeping knowledge fresh are social media feeds, company-owned and third-party forums, staff ideas, customer input and general web search. Each of these sources will have a different level of trust that you may wish to apply – you don’t want people randomly pasting information into your knowledge systems without some form of diligence in place.
• Not measuring and monitoring for success: After implementation, the real work comes in tracking and measuring how the knowledge management environment is being used. Some key performance indicators should include data on:

·         Article usage

·         Article satisfaction

·         Navigation times

·         Navigation flows

·         Ease of use

Capture as much data as you can on how the knowledge is used and consumed. A good self-help tool should assist you in learning which processes and navigation function best, what articles users find valuable, how deep users dig to get the information they need, and who is actually using the knowledge base. Furthermore, use this data to justify increases in resources, funding, and additional tools to maintain the success of your company’s knowledge investment.

What Can Be Done to Fix These Issues?

As mentioned above, knowledge management can be tricky, so here are a few ideas about what to consider on the journey.

Engendering a Knowledge Culture:

• Identify key influencers and enthusiasts and enable them to become evangelists.
• Celebrate key milestones and other successes (e.g. most used article for the month).
• Make knowledge contribution part of employee KPIs.
• Report on knowledge usage and value and make it a key business metric.
• Ensure that all departments access the benefits of a well-managed knowledge environment.
• Have knowledge as an agenda item on management and board conversations.
• Train employees on the process and the system – and make this training mandatory.

Design Thinking

• Start with a vision for what knowledge represents in your organisation.
• Define and communicate a clear strategy to enable this vision.
• Develop personas to describe the types of people contributing to and consuming your knowledge.
• Plan the taxonomy and required metadata with these personas in mind.
• Define the types of reporting you will require to understand the value and effectiveness of knowledge.
• Continually test, optimise and develop your processes, systems, reporting, training, and communications based on what you learn from usage data.

Creating Insights from Data

• Monitor system usage to create lots of data about what knowledge is popular.
• Combine this with disposition data from the Delivery teams, web self-help, chat transcripts and social media to allow you to develop an understanding of what knowledge is effective, and what isn’t.
• Create a measurement system that allows an understanding of the value of knowledge. This should consider the effort to create and manage the content as well as the usage data.
• Measure knowledge over time to give an indication as to when knowledge assets start to devalue and need to either be changed or archived.

Curation as a Key Part of the Process

• Do not just keep pouring more and more information into the system without considering whether the content is popular, effective and valuable.
• Understand when knowledge has reached the end of its usable life and archive it.
• Realise that data is the key asset required for curation, and structure it well.
• Understand that knowledge can be sourced from anywhere, but that doesn’t mean it should be. Identify trusted sources and ensure that you understand the efficacy of the information.
• Regularly review and modify the taxonomy and metadata based on your market, your customers and the ultimate purpose of your knowledge management