Knowledge management (KM) is as relevant today as it was when it emerged in the mid-nineties as a management discipline. While there is sometimes a perception that KM has faded and is no longer being practiced, actually KM is very much alive and kicking, particularly in industry sectors such as professional services, pharmaceuticals and engineering. Within some organisations KM has never really gone away.
KM spans a number of different activities and touches multiple areas including capturing knowledge, improving search, managing communities of practice, providing access to experts and even laying the foundations for generative AI. There is quite a lot of overlap in terms of the remit of KM teams and digital workplace teams and in practice, someone managing the digital workplace might be carrying out KM and vice versa.
KM is extremely mature with a global professional community, a network of academics, a huge body of work with methodologies, frameworks and tools, and also a well-developed set of KM technologies and tools There is much to draw from in terms of looking at inspirational examples, proven approaches and best practices.
In this post we’re going to explore some high-level knowledge management best practices that are relevant for KM in 2024. On the way we also look at what KM is, why it is important, some examples of KM, and why KM can fail. We also cover what you need to do to implement some our suggested best practices.
Because KM is such a vast topic we’re only really scratching the surface here of what KM teams can do to be effective. It’s also a topic with a passionate professional community, so not everyone will agree with our KM best practices!
What is knowledge management?
There is no absolute standard definition of Knowledge management (KM). However, it’s generally recognised to be the way an organisation manages its knowledge in terms of creating, capturing, storing, sharing and exploiting knowledge.
KM will generally encompass the people, processes, technology and content involved; it is as much about change management, culture and influencing behaviour, as it is about tools and technology.
What is knowledge management important?
Knowledge management is important for a variety of different reasons which can vary between different organisations. Below are just some of the ways KM is important.
- Underpins client delivery and customer service
- Knowledge management can help support the delivery of services to clients and support customer service in different ways – for example by establishing best practices for service delivery, allowing assets from projects to be re-used, helping people find experts to help solve issues and answer questions, providing one source of truth for product knowledge and more.
- Enable R&D
- Many organisations including pharmaceuticals, engineering, manufacturing and consumer goods have Research & Development functions that research, invent, test and improve new products. This may result in the registration of new patents. These functions are heavily reliant on knowledge management approaches and processes to provide access to and manage the internal and external knowledge that facilitates this work.
- Drives innovation
- KM can also help drive innovation within a company, by providing access to research and resources that drive innovation process, supporting collaboration on new products and services, and also enabling structured approaches to managing ideas.
- Drives efficiency
- Knowledge management helps drive efficiency and productivity in different ways. For example, KM helps employees find the information and assets they need more quickly saving time in the process. KM improves specific processes by streamlining the flow of data and knowledge. KM also saves time by providing access to different assets so that employees don’t reinvent the wheel.
- Supports compliance and reduces risk
- KM will usually build in processes that take into account compliance in areas such as data privacy, GDPR and the protection of customer data, particularly around resuing content.
- Prevents knowledge escaping from the company
- Often when a subject matter expert or someone highly experienced leaves a company, all their knowledge and expertise walks straight out of the door, and is effectively lost. Knowledge management captures some of what people know so it can be shared and accessed by others, before it “escapes” from your company.
- Supports learning and professional development
- KM is often closely associated with learning and professional development by helping employees find and use knowledge which they can learn from. KM can also provide structured access to subject matter experts that can transfer their knowledge to others, as well as nurture professional communities of practice that also drive learning and specialisms.
- Increases findability
- KM helps to increase findability by enabling search and establishing user-focused approaches to information architecture. This means employees can find essential information, content and knowledge successfully and effectively. KN involves several different activities that improves findability including developing taxonomies, applying metadata and fine-tuning search.
- Helps prepare for the future with AI
- KM helps establish the foundations so that an organisation is more ready to get the best out of generative AI – this might include establishing the right data management approach, a unified approach to metadata, a methodology to train bots, effective governance to mitigate risks and more.
What are some examples of knowledge management?
There are many examples of knowledge management, and these will depend from organisation to organisation. Typical real-world examples include:
- Reusing assets from a project in such a way that they can send with other clients in a professional services firm
- Managing a knowledge base of product and services content so that it can help contact centre staff resolve customer issues.
- Support a professional community of practice relating to an industry sector specialism.
- Providing the ability to locate subject matter experts throughout a global organisation, using a common agreed list of areas.
- Using automation to create model documents to reduce the time it takes to produce contracts for an in-house legal team.
- Improving enterprise search through fine tuning a solution and making changes to an organisation-wide taxonomy.
- Preparing for the introduction of Microsoft Copilot with an agreed population of documents.
What are knowledge management best practices?
KM best practices might be considered to be practices and approaches that support KM and have been built up through a huge body of knowledge and also proven to work. Our view of some of KM best practices has been shaped on what we’ve seen on numerous KM and intranet projects, frequently within KM-critical sectors such as professional services and pharmaceuticals.
How do you implement management best practices?
Implementing best practices and approaches will help KM to succeed in your organisation, but there are some tactics that are particularly important to help with the implementation.
- Have a KM strategy
- Having a KM strategy is key to ensure you have the focus, clarity and co-ordination to implement KM and its related best practices. It ensures everyone is working on the same page, and also establishes the intentionality and prioritisation behind your KM program.
- Have absolute clarity of roles and responsibilities
- KM is fiddly to implement and requires clarity behind the different structures, roles and responsibilities to avoid overlap and ensure everyone know what they are doing.
- Have access to the right skills and specialisms
- Successful knowledge management and implementing KM best practices relies on having access to the right skills and specialisms. Make sure you provide the right training and have additional resourcing if you can’t get access to the right skills in-house. Where possible, encourage people to develop expertise and specialisms to support the evolution of your KM progamme.
- Learn from others and as you go
- KM is a journey and frequently a learning curve. Looking at what works and doesn’t, following examples from peers in other organisations, and adapting your practices and priorities accordingly, will help drive a more successful KM programme.
What are knowledge management best practices?
KM best practices might be considered to be practices and approaches that support KM and have been built up through a huge body of knowledge and also proven to work. Our view of some of KM best practices has been shaped on what we’ve seen on numerous KM and intranet projects, frequently within KM-critical sectors such as professional services and pharmaceuticals.
Why does KM fail?
You’re never guaranteed success with knowledge management, and many attribute a high failure rate to KM projects. There are a huge number of reasons why a KM project might fail, ranging from a lack of resourcing to too much focus on the technology side.
Knowledge management could fail because:
- There is a lack of clarity about the aims of the initiative and people are uncertain about their role or what is involved.
- Not enough attention is given to the people and change management aspects of KM, so there is no change in behaviour or culture to encourage knowledge-sharing and adoption. This often happens because there is too much emphasis on the technology side of KM.
- The enabling foundations for KM haven’t been built, for example having the right governance, taxonomy, data standards and more in place.
- There is no one responsible for KM so it lacks the stewardship to drive success over time.
- The KM initiative or project is not adequately resourced.
- The technology choices to enable KM are not fit for purpose.
- There are unrealistic expectations around the impact of KM or the time it will take for it have impact, so it will be viewed as a failure when actually it may need more time or see the impact.
- There is a lack of in-house skills or access to the right expertise to deliver the KM initiative.
Ten KM best practices for 2024
Here’s our view of ten high-level KM best practices for 2024.
1. Focus on people and culture not always technology
Technology is an important enabler for KM. However, fundamentally KM is more about encouraging people to share knowledge and driving a knowledge-sharing culture. A KM best practice is ensure there is enough focus on the people and culture side of KM. Never view KM as another technology project. Knowledge guru Dave Snowden once said that knowledge can only be volunteered rather than conscripted; focusing on people is key.
2. Leverage frameworks and models
There is a huge body of work around KM that has been produced over the past thirty years or so. This includes a significant number of frameworks, model and methodologies that are available to adapt and use within your organisation. By leveraging what has gone before it means you can execute successful KM for the future. You also don’t need to necessarily follow a model or methodology religiously – pick and choose what works for your organisation’s needs and circumstances.
3. Have a consistent taxonomy and metadata strategy
Taxonomy and ontology management with an accompanying metadata strategy provides a consistent and meaningful way to describe and tag content throughout the enterprise so that is uniform across different systems and applications. A best practice for KM teams is to focus on this area as it can deliver value in multiple ways:
- Delivers improved search experiences for example through filtering.
- Brings together data together from disparate sources for example through dashboards.
- Helps enable smoother processes and automation.
- Provides a common way to describe expertise throughout an organisation.
- Underpins getting value out of generative AI
- And more.
Focusing on taxonomy and ontology management involves both active stewardship and getting input from subject matter experts.
4. Leverage automation where you can
A significant level of knowledge management activity can be supported by automation. For example, you might want to make sure information updated in one system is also automatically updated in another. Automated solutions around particular KM scenarios such as model documents can also improve efficiency. Where possible use automation in KM – it is consistently surprising what can be achieved.
5. Optimise content to make it reusable
The reuse of high-quality content so that it can be reused for other purposes is a recurring concept in KM. For example, a presentation or spreadsheet created for one client could potentially be partly reused with another. To help make this happen KM teams can spend time optimising content to make it more reusable – for example setting up a process to automatically remove client names from documents.
6. Focus on enablement and facilitation
For knowledge management to succeed at scale, it needs to be an approach and set of behaviours that everyone – or at least a substantial group of employees – can adopt. KM teams need to focus on enabling and facilitating knowledge management and knowledge sharing across the workforce, rather than just being a team that just carries out all the knowledge management activity themselves. If KM is only carried out by the KM team, it is very difficult to derive value from KM at scale.
7. Always work in partnership with your users
Often KM works best when it is carried out in partnership with your users – founded on robust user research and then evolved and improved with their feedback and input. This helps ensure your KM initiative is user-centric and people-focused, and also drives legitimacy to support adoption.
8. Drive continuous improvement with feedback and analytics
KM is never done and there are always improvements to make. Committing to a process of continuous improvement can help you to evolve and advance KM over time. Feedback gained from working with users (already mentioned above) will be an important ongoing data input for continuous improvement. Equally important is using analytics to measure the effectiveness of KM , and making changes based on these, ultimately taking a data-driven approach.
9. Derive community management processesalytics
Professional communities of practice can have real value in helping foster expertise and knowledge on particular topics. Wider than this, communities such as employee resource groups can also really help support diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I). In our view a KM best practice is to use community management approaches and processes to ensure communities of practice are active and continue to grow. To support this, define the roles of community managers and provides accompanying resources.
10. Always ensure KM has strategic alignment
KM doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A best practice is to make sure KM activities are fully aligned with your organisational strategy as well as those of key stakeholders such as IT, HR and in-house legal teams.
Need help with KM? Get in touch!
Knowledge management has real value and we hope this view of some KM best practices has helped you to think about KM in your organisation. If you need help with KM or want to discuss a KM project, then get in touch!
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