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Knowledge Management (Best Practice Guide) v2 SCREEN
Knowledge Management (Best Practice Guide) v2 SCREEN
Knowledge Management:
From justification to delivery
www.ipl.com
IPL Limited
Best practice
Foreword
Every company can be global. Every company can have distributed supply-chains. Every
company is hunting for emerging market growth strategies. Every consumer is comparing
products and searching for the best service at the best price.
Everyone can be informed, but not everyone has the tools to ensure that knowledge is
available everywhere before it is needed. Knowledge drives every decision you and your
staff take; from day-to-day operational choices made by your employees, to strategic
changes made by directors. Having the best knowledge available to your decision-makers
is vital. Yet much is difficult to find: in peoples heads, on individual computer desktops, or
buried deep in personal email archives.
Knowledge management breaks down these barriers, putting information in the hands of
every employee by capturing and sharing it effectively; ensuring your staff can find what
they need quickly.
Implementing a collaboration system alone will not bring major benefits. People are the
lifeblood of your organisation and central to the success of your knowledge management
practice. Getting them to buy in to your knowledge management system will help ensure
that they, and your entire organisation, enjoy work efficiency, cost savings, strategic
responsiveness and increased revenues.
Increasing competitive pressure is squeezing margins and leading to greater decisionmaking scrutiny. Its critical to ensure your company has an information advantage. Dont
wait until you have lost market share or your profit margins have fallen to react: put the
right knowledge system in place now, so that when the crunch comes, you know where
to go for all the information you need to make the best decision for your organisation.
Best practice
Explain the benefits of Knowledge Management
Gavin Chait
Knowledge vacuums
If a key piece of knowledge is stored in
one staff members head, or even on their
computer desktop or email inbox, it is
only accessible by that individual. If they
are ill, on holiday, or leave the company,
that knowledge disappears from the
organisation. An effective knowledge
management system will capture this and
ensure that staff know exactly where to find
the knowledge they require. This will have
the additional benefit of reducing the time it
takes for new staff to get up to speed.
Lost revenue
Failure to manage your organisations
knowledge effectively can lead directly
to lost revenue. This could be as a result
of your staff taking poor decisions based
on incomplete knowledge, or missing
opportunities, such as the chance to move
into a certain market or even sell access
to your body of knowledge. Manage your
knowledge in the right way, and youll
dramatically reduce these opportunity costs
by maximising earnings from your existing
assets.
Prove the return on investment
Building a knowledge management
system and implementing the required
organisational and procedural changes
to make it work is a major, long-term
investment, but if gone about in the right
way, will also deliver benefits in the short
term.
The benefit of having an effective
collaboration tool in place thereby
removing departmental silos will be
visible immediately. Users will be able to
find what they are looking for more quickly,
become more efficient and make betterinformed decisions.
In the longer term, as usage of your
knowledge management system grows,
you will be able to analyse how it is being
used, learn what users are searching for
and where knowledge gaps exist; link
valuable pieces of knowledge; and create
a more holistic view of how pieces of
knowledge are having an impact on your
organisations revenue and profitability.
Gavin Chait has a track record
of championing, developing and
implementing knowledge management
systems.
Best practice
Understand the concepts of capture, share and find
Capture
Metadata
management
Information
architecture
Data
governance
d
Fin
Data security
management
Information
lifecycle
management
are
Sh
Ian Sinclair
through architecture will result in data and
information being created in inappropriate
locations and tagged with equally
inappropriate metadata. Without a sound
information architecture, it will be impossible
to guarantee that all the knowledge on a
certain topic can be found with possible
repercussions for those operating in strictly
regulated environments, and indeed overall
user confidence in the systems ability to
help them do their jobs better.
Completing the solution
By default, the collaboration tool will enable
the sharing of data across the organisation,
but no company exists where there is not
some limitation on what can be shared
(personal and commercially sensitive data
being two examples). Making knowledge
easily available has to be balanced against
legislative and regulatory requirements,
as well as any internal security protocols
that apply. Therefore, Data Security
Management is required, covering who has
access to what. It is this area that poses the
greatest risk to the delivery of a knowledge
management system, because a perceived
security breach often leads to a kneejerk
reaction where whole business areas get
locked down. To avoid this, the security
model that is built into the system from the
start must be rigorous, allowing users to
see only what they have permission to.
Lastly, the knowledge management solution
must display the status of the information
being shared. Opening up corporate
knowledge to the enterprise has many
benefits, but there are also risks, notably
the possibility of making business decisions
based on flawed knowledge. To help
overcome this, users must understand
exactly what provenance the material they
are reviewing has. Information Lifecycle
Management procedures help ensure that a
formal status structure is in place, identifying
key points in the information lifecycle, such
as draft, final, published, superseded or
obsolete. This is a critical function, because
it provides a safeguard that prevents users
from acting on knowledge that may be
limited in its application.
Ian Sinclair is a Business Consultant at
IPL with over 15 years experience in
delivering information and knowledge
management solutions.
Best practice
Highlight the virtues and build momentum
Implementing a successful
Knowledge Management system
A knowledge management system is not
something you can design and develop
overnight: to make it a success, you will
need to consider various things as you build
your business case. It is critical to consider
the requirements of your users and how
the system will meet these on a day-today basis, in such a way that improves
on their current ways of working. Hand
in hand with this must be consideration
of how your organisational processes
and structures need to evolve, and what
procedural changes you may need to
make the knowledge management system
a success. Only once you have a clear
idea of the system you need and how and
where it will fit, will you or your development
partner be in a position to make technology
choices and design the right system for
your organisation. Once it is in place, it will
only be a success if you push through the
changes required and the system is taken
up by your user base.
Appoint a champion
The first thing to do is to appoint a senior
manager as a knowledge management
champion, or better still, build a team of
champions. Depending on the size and
structure of your organisation, the whole
process from idea to implementation could
be lengthy. Over this time, the organisation
could well see changes in management
and vision. For instance, a board member
who was keen on the project may move
on, putting the whole process in danger
of stalling. Having a team of champions
there to keep reminding the business of the
benefits it will enjoy, bring stakeholders on
board and maintain the projects momentum
could be the difference between successful
delivery and the knowledge management
system never getting off the drawing board.
Ewan Milne
Choose the right technology and
development partner
With your use cases defined, requirements
drawn up and purse-string holders
convinced, you can write your RFP and put
the project out to tender. Unless you have
a specific reason for wanting a particular
design or technology, its a good idea to
leave these choices up to those bidding for
the work. This will enable them to propose
the most suitable solution for your needs,
based on their experience. Encourage
questions from bidders during the process,
because this will help them tailor their
proposed solutions to your needs. Once
the bids come in, engage with the potential
suppliers to understand why they have
proposed things in a certain way.
There are numerous things to consider
as you select your favoured solution. To
implement a knowledge management
system, youre nearly always going to be
configuring an off-the-shelf product with
some bespoke elements. The cost, time
and complexity of building a system from
scratch is neither necessary nor part of your
core business. There is a choice between
open source and proprietary software, and
at first glance, the former may look more
appealing due to the often much lower
upfront cost. However, make sure you (and
your development partner) understand
the products licensing model, because
additional costs may appear as you require
greater functionality, thereby diminishing or
eradicating the price difference.
Best practice
Other aspects to take into account are your
own (and the developers) knowledge of
the platform being proposed, the maturity
of the online support community, and
whether the functionality you require is
supported by your chosen product when
configured in the way you plan to use it.
This last point is particularly important,
because while a platform may in theory
support a given feature, it may not do so
in every configuration. Your development
partner needs to know the proposed
product and its limitations, especially since
product-based solutions are inherently less
flexible than entirely bespoke ones, where
workarounds are easier to create.
Think about what features you need
from your system: key to the success
of a knowledge management system is
effective and intuitive search. Consider
adding semantic search functionality
using technology such as SmartLogics
Semaphore. Quality search results also rely
on you carefully designing your taxonomy
of tag terms, such that articles stored in the
system are tagged using a limited and wellunderstood range of terms. This ensures
that similar material is effectively linked and
discoverable. Search is also helped by
avoiding a complex folder hierarchy when
storing files. In an ideal world, a big bucket
approach, where all documents are kept
in a single folder, is a good idea. However,
it requires meticulous tagging and naming
of files to avoid it becoming unwieldy and
difficult to find information. Moreover, users
often prefer to browse rather than search,
so a simple, but limited folder structure is
recommended to aid knowledge discovery.
Best practice
Draw maximum benefit from your organisations knowledge
Chris Bradley
What value do you place on knowledge?
Over time, your knowledge management
practice can deliver even more benefits, by
linking knowledge to business decisions.
Consider the example where a salesman
in an organisation is working to secure an
order for a given type of technology and, as
part of his research process, he accesses
a particular piece of knowledge in the
system. He may be the only person that
year to do so but, as a result, he secures
the organisations biggest deal of the year.
At first glance, the piece of knowledge
may appear unimportant, since it was only
accessed once. However, in practice, it has
made a huge difference to the organisation,
which is important on two fronts. Firstly, the
fact that the piece of knowledge in question
was of value should be fed back to those
behind it and their superiors. Second, it
underlines the importance of the knowledge
management system to the organisation:
without it, the deal may not have happened.
A way to link specific knowledge to specific
decisions is to provide project teams
with workspaces within the knowledge
management system where they can
collect links to knowledge they are using in
their work this requires some behavioural
change from the staff involved, since
they will have to link knowledge to their
project explicitly. When projects then
report to the organisation on their results
and performance, it is possible to find
out the impact that a piece of knowledge
had by discussing this with the individual
or team concerned. As well as from a
commercial viewpoint, this can be beneficial
from a governance perspective, enabling
organisations to trace back to understand
why a decision was made.
The key thing to realise is that the
knowledge management system requires
on-going development and management
to ensure it is delivering maximum benefits
to the business, thereby facilitating the best
possible decision-making for stakeholders
at all levels.
Chris Bradley is IPLs Chief
Development Officer, and has worked
in the information management field for
over three decades.
We employ knowledgeable, talented people who've built up plenty of experience helping clients
identify and solve their data issues in a language that's easy to understand.
www.ipl.com
hello@ipl.com +44 (0)1225 475 000
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