Knowledge Management represents a disciplined approach to institutionalizing organization business process, practices and system use. Effective roll out includes setting goals, identifying a tool, creating content such as business process documentation and training materials, and developing a plan for maintaining knowledge over time.

Whether in SharePoint, Confluence or any other application, a well thought-out Knowledge Management System (KMS) is an asset that improves on-boarding new staff, provides staff with documentation of processes necessary to carrying out job duties, offers insight into best practices or approaches to solving the problems of your constituents, and aligns best practices across the organization.

This post will look at two major considerations an organization should consider before beginning development of a KMS. We will consider how to establish clear goals at the outset of the project to to fully engage stakeholders, as well as challenges you are likely to encounter along the way.

Setting End-User & Organization Goals

As with any project, careful goal-setting provides the project team with a guiding light to work towards during the project.  Questions we recommend asking at the outset, include:

• What does your organization intend to accomplish by formalizing your knowledge management?
• Where will this “knowledge” come from and who will be responsible for creating content?
• Who are the stakeholders that you hope will benefit from a clear knowledge management strategy and platform?
• Who will be responsible for the platforms upkeep and continuing development?

Spending time to develop clear answers to questions like thesewill help the project team leave no stone unturned and provide a path to a successful project.

Knowledge management goals can be grouped into two main buckets to help the project team organize their thinking: End User Goals and Organizational Goals:

End-User Goal Setting

From the perspective of staff (the end user) that will be practically using the KMS, what does the project team need to consider to optimize their experience? Common goals we recommend setting for end-user experience einclude:

1. Intuitive navigation: An effective KMS is one that is intuitive to use. It should be familiar, navigable, and searchable to ensure ease of use for end users. Users should be able to find information in the same layout on each page, be able to navigate across the site via related links, should be able to easily search your platform to find the content they need.
2. Utility: An effective KMS fills a regular business need or have “utility.” Consider, for example, a knowledge-base that provides detailed technical and functional instructions for using your CRM system. A KMS that provides core business process documentation, provides troubleshooting procedures, and describes exception processes is one that is likely to fill an important organization need – to have “utility.” Simply providing a place to put documents would not sufficiently describe the actual purpose of the KMS.
3. Provide a support cycle. Those individuals responsible for serving end-user requests should see the KMS as a means to close the loop on the support cycle. Each time a new support ticket is created and solution identified, that solution should cycle back to the knowledge-base. It will provide the end-users with material to directly use in the future while also providing the next support person a reason to reference.

Organizational Goal Setting

Organizational leadership should provide broader goals for the system. Important questions to ask include:

• Why does leadership want to develop a knowledge management platform?
• How can the organization ensure the platform remains living and dynamic as time passes?
• What Obstacles stand in the way of adoption?
• How can leadership use the platform as means of expressing organizational thinking?

We recommend setting goals around the following:

1. Maintenance: Describe the level of maintenance required for the KMS content to be relevant and accurate and be sure the organization is willing and able to resource that commitment.
2. Adoption: Define usage metrics that demonstrate how widely adopted the KMS is. For example, Human Resources should leverage the KMS 100% of the time with on-boarding, support operators should include reference material to the KMS in 100% of ticket responses, and every department head should commit to providing regular content to the KMS.
3. Business Process and Best Practices: Set expectations to review content in a KMS regularly to ensure it aligns with organization processes and best practices. For example, if a lending organization wants loan officers to approach credit review in a specific way, the KMS should speak to that in very specific, and clear terms. A KMS provides an opportunity for institutionalizing practices that reflect strategies set forth by leadership.

Setting clear goals for a knowledge management platform at the project’s outset will make sure the project team is on track and on the same page as leadership.

Challenges of Knowledge Management

Committing to knowledge management is not without challenges. A few challenges worth anticipating and planning for include:

1. Delivering quality Content: Quality is a factor of relevance, accuracy, and how well it is communicated. Ensuring you have a strong understand of the utility of the information and are able to resource keeping information current will help make content relevant. Having organizational buy-in to review and maintain content can ensure that information is accurate. And, quality of communication will benefit from having trained resources that can create compelling content and a tool that can meet the end-user expectations for access to information (e.g. navigation, search-ability).
2. Providing resources for maintenance: Maintenance, along with practical content, should be well thought out before the platforms launch. Whether it be a knowledge team, or knowledge champions in charge maintaining certain content, a strategy to maintain the platforms utility must be put it in place.
3. Ensuring platform adoption: Use creative strategies to get your end users engaged with the platform and excited to contribute.

Summary & Conclusions

A well-conceived and planned Knowledge Management System can provide major utility to both its end users and the organization as a whole. Setting clear goals for all stakeholders at the projects outset and taking steps to preemptively mitigate common challenges involved in knowledge management will help your knowledge team create a platform that becomes integrated with the organizations work and endures over time.