Knowledge management (KM) has been around for nearly thirty years and is a mature discipline with established practices and products. The way an organisation manages its knowledge is important across all industries, but it’s particularly valued in sectors such as professional services, engineering and pharmaceuticals.
The digital workplace is critical for successful KM. Digital workplace teams often look after products, drive adoption and carry out activities that can be described as examples of knowledge management. Similarly, KM teams often manage aspects of the digital workplace. Over the years we’ve worked with many KM teams on their intranet, knowledge-sharing platform and digital workplace.
KM encompasses multiple activities and has many moving parts. It often needs to have particular foundations to work effectively, and also is continually evolving with the introduction of emerging technologies such as AI.
To drive a co-ordinated, consistent and effective KM program is it essential to have a co-ordinated KM strategy that helps to align KM efforts and optimise approaches. In this post we’re going to explore what a knowledge management strategy is, why its important and teight steps you can follow to create a KM strategy.
What is knowledge management?
Knowledge management can be defined as the way an organisation gathers, stores, shares, optimises and processes knowledge. Thiis involve multiple processes and activities and a number of different roles. It also encompasses the technologies, tools and applications involved in managing that knowledge. KM also requires change management to encourage knowledge sharing and usage.
What might be covered by a knowledge management strategy?
Within one organisation, KM can involve some or even all of the following, all of which might be covered by an accompanying KM strategy:
- Managing knowledge products: launching, developing and managing a range of knowledge products including knowledge platforms, intranets, reports and dashboards.
- Knowledge sharing and transfer: encouraging employees to share knowledge items and support learning and knowledge transfer.
- Turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge: capturing knowledge so it can be accessed and use by others.
- Expertise location: finding experts and specialists to answer questions, work on project and service clients.
- Reusing knowledge assets: helping turn output from projects into reusable knowledge assets.
- Taxonomy and ontology management: defining and managing taxonomies and similar to drive search, underpin processes and facilitate artificial intelligence.
- Search management: managing search and defining information architectures to support and improve findability.
- Support for artificial intelligence: providing governance, frameworks and approaches to lay the foundations to enable successful artificial intelligence.
- Research: carrying out research and analysis and providing corporate library services
- Analytics: managing and facilitating access to analytics, covering areas such as data visualisation
- And more!
What is a knowledge management strategy?
A KM strategy can be defined as a plan and accompanying roadmap that states what an organisation wants to achieve around knowledge management over a particular period of time, and what needs to be done to make that happen.
It could detail:
- An overarching mission or vision around KM.
- Some guiding principles that underpin that mission.
- The scope of what the KM strategy covers in terms of technology, activities and support.
- Data to explain the “why” behind the KM strategy
- The roles and structures that will help deliver the strategy.
- A roadmap and timetable.
- Key milestones and KPIs.
- Details of the technology, processes and change management involved.
What are the benefits of creating a knowledge management strategy?
A knowledge management strategy has a number of benefits:
- Creates a north star and common objectives
- Having a KM strategy establishes a common north star as well as detailed objectives so that everyone is on the same page and understands what the priorities around KM are. This is critical to ensure that KM activities have strategic alignment and that everyone is working for a common goal.
- Co-ordinating execution
- A strategy is essential for co-ordinating activities across different teams and stakeholders at a detailed level. This avoids misunderstandings, reaching critical milestones in the best possible way, establishing priorities and ensures there is alignment between different roadmaps, technologies, tools and change management efforts. You cannot design an effective KM project, programme or initiative that spans across multiple functions without a strategy in place.
- Establishes scope
- Sometimes it can be hard to know where KM stops and starts, because it can be applied to so many different areas. Having your strategy helps to establish the scope to help focus efforts in the right places.
- Supports onboarding
- Employees need to get themselves up to speed when they first join a company and this invariably means reading and understanding some key policies, some covered in what is effectively the “employee handbook.” Some policies also need to be read for compliance purposes. Effective policy and procedure management means that you are able to control the policies that new employees read, integrate them into an efficient onboarding process that doesn’t overwhelm, and then report on these too.
- Drives compliance and minimises risks
- Knowledge Management (KM) approaches need to take into commitments around data privacy and more, particularly in reusing content. Having a KM strategy usually helps provide clarity and ensures compliance and governance is wrapped into KM initiatives and approaches, minimising risks.
- Drives momentum
- Having a strategy that is signed off by multiple stakeholders – and ideally leadership – reflects a commitment to KM and can help drive momentum.
- Help you to prepare for the future
- KM helps lay the foundations for areas such as artificial intelligence with the right governance, taxonomies, training process for machine learning, content preparation and more. Having a KM strategy that takes this into account can help drive AI readiness and ensure organisations get value out of AI in a way that also minimises risk.
- Improves processes
- KM can be applied to multiple different knowledge-related processes such as finding experts, , finding information, winning new work and more, helping drive efficiency and increasing productivity. Having a strategy in place may target and prioritise specific processes that are ready for improvement.
What is a good knowledge management framework for your strategy?
There are many knowledge management frameworks, methodologies, tools and approaches that can be used to help structure your strategy. A popular framework is to consider KM from three different aspects – people, processes and technology:
- People: covering areas such as the people who hold knowledge and areas such as culture, behaviours, skills and managing change.
- Processes: the core processes and policies required to make KM happen.
- Technology: the technology and tools used to facilitate KM.
Additionally, sometimes “Content” is thought of an additional component of a KM system which has its own considerations, while others add “Culture” as a separate element.
People
Process
Content
Technology
Culture
What are eight steps for developing a knowledge management strategy?
There is no standard methodology for creating a KM strategy, but taking the following steps would provide a good basis for defining an effective strategy. Note that some of these steps could be carried out concurrently.
1. Decide on the scope of your knowledge strategy
A knowledge strategy can be quite specific or be very wide. Working out the rough scope of what you are trying to achieve up front can help to maintain focus. Which areas of the business, core processes and likely technology solutions are covered by your strategy? Having an idea of the scope can help guide you to undertake the necessary research and knowledge audit (see below). Note that the output of your research may also cause you to tweak the scope of your strategy
2. Decide on your stakeholders and approval process
Based on the scope, decide which stakeholders need to be give input into your KM strategy, and who should approve it. Form here you can confirm the process for reviewing signing off the strategy.
3. Undertake user and stakeholder research
Any knowledge management strategy (and any related digital workplace strategy too) can never be based on assumptions. Undertake user research and accompanying stakeholder research to understand how people work, pain points, how knowledge can be shared, any challenges and constraints, stakeholder priorities and more to form the basis and detail of you KM strategy. You can use interviews, workshops, observation, surveys and other research methods during this discovery period.
4. Carry out a knowledge audit
To accompany your user research, carry out a knowledge audit to understand the tools and technologies that are in use, as well as the key knowledge assets and repositories that staff are relying on. A knowledge audit might also capture any knowledge-related processes. A knowledge audit will provide critical information and detail to design your knowledge management strategy.
5. Work out your mission and principles
From the output of your discovery and also your knowledge audit you can start to analyse the information. From there, define a high-level mission and vision, as well as the guiding principles or central tenets of the strategy. At this stage the details of the KM strategy could still be quite high level, but you could also start to have more detail.
6. Validate with your stakeholders
At this stage consider validating your knowledge strategy with your stakeholders, getting their input and making sure you’re o the right path.
7. Finish the detail and work out a roadmap
Armed with some input from stakeholders, finish the detail of the strategy and work out the roadmap. Also add some details of the roles and resources, that will be required to execute the strategy.
8. Seek final approval
Based on the stakeholders involved and the approval process, seek final approval for your KM strategy.
Need help with your knowledge management strategy? Get in touch!
Defining a knowledge management strategy will provide focus, value, momentum and consensus for your KM initiatives. Ultimately that should help drive KM success. If you’d like to discuss knowledge management in your organisation, or need help with your KM strategy, then get in touch!
