What Is the Knowledge Management Process?

What Is the Knowledge Management Process?

People, process and technology each play integral roles when it comes to implementing knowledge management. It’s crucial that your company not only has a dedicated knowledge executive, someone who manages knowledge as an asset and knowledge management as a working machine, but what is fundamental in executing the discipline is the process you follow.

Whilst every business is different and there is no cookie-cutter approach to the knowledge management process, most commonly the following structure is utilised:

• Discovery: What existing knowledge can be collected?
• Capture: What undocumented knowledge can be extracted
• Organise: Is the knowledge consumable?
• Share: Is the knowledge accessible?
• Evaluate: How can the knowledge be optimised further?

It’s important that this process, or a variation of this process is followed for the successful deployment of knowledge management. Skipping or neglecting a step could prove detrimental to the final result.

Step 1: Discovery

Before Discovery, it is good practice to discuss knowledge management goals and objectives to provide your knowledge manager with clear direction as to what your company needs to know and what knowledge needs to be found.

Following this, the first step of the knowledge management process concerns the collection of any explicit knowledge that already exists within the company. Explicit knowledge is codified, consumable and can be easily communicated, some examples include:

• Policies such as HR or returns policies
• Processes such as Sales or product launch processes
• Documents such as product specifications or supplier agreements
• Reports such as marketing effectiveness and customer research

Due to its nature, the collection of explicit knowledge is straightforward but can take time.

Knowledge managers might discover explicit knowledge in shared company DMSs, CRMs, intranets and other records. Whilst this knowledge already exists, it is likely to be highly fragmented and therefore requires dedicated time to data-mine. Effective knowledge management software assists in semi-automating this otherwise time-consuming step.

Step 2: Capture

The Capture stage of the knowledge management process is responsible for extracting and capturing any tacit knowledge that exists within the company. Unlike explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge is generally difficult to identify, articulate and remains below the surface.

Tacit knowledge is learnt over many years, is usually utilised subconsciously and resides within the minds of senior employees, often becoming second nature to them. Because tacit knowledge is not easily communicated, specialist skills and methods are used in order to extract this incredibly valuable type of knowledge. Such methods include:

• Observation
• Interviews
• Surveys
• Retrospect (reflection meetings that take place after the completion of a project)
• Knowledge harvesting (often involving senior employees)

Once tacit knowledge, for example, expert opinions on competitors or salesperson intuition on customer behaviours has been captured, it is the role of the knowledge manager to transform it into a digestible form.

Step 3: Organise

The purpose of knowledge management is to embed, share and teach knowledge to relevant audiences, therefore it is paramount that the knowledge itself is presented in a comprehensive yet simple and digestible way.

This means that your knowledge executive must translate the tacit data collected into consumable knowledge.

Deep analysis and skill are required to collect, unpick, combine and rebuild tacit knowledge into comprehendible articles that match the company’s tone of voice and the entity in which the user is searching for.

Most businesses use knowledge base technology to simplify this process, ensuring control and organisation whilst knowledge is imported to one centralised repository.

Knowledge base providers that utilise Natural Language Processing (NLP), can even advise knowledge managers, flagging poorly structured titles and offering recommendation to improve them.

Step 4: Share

This stage is particularly important to knowledge management, it is what makes knowledge accessible and available to the right people at the right time, whether it’s:

• Internally for employees searching for critical documents, acting as a central knowledge library
• Externally for customers in the form of self-service software , using a filtered view they can access relevant articles

The most effective way to share knowledge throughout a company is through a knowledge base. Once articles are imported, they can easily be updated, reviewed or added to using the straightforward editor. Any changes are reflected in real-time to ensure information consistency and accuracy, no matter how or who is viewing it.

Built on AI and harnessing NLP, intelligent knowledge base technology, users have access to results fast. By unpicking sentence structure and analysing each word, NLP can comprehend what a user is asking regardless of how they have asked it. Such knowledge bases offer article recommendations on every key-press to further boost efficiency.

Users can also navigate to knowledge articles using categories, sub-categories, filtered views and favourites tabs.

For more on how to successfully roll-out a knowledge base, click here.

Step 5: Evaluate

The final stage of the knowledge management process is one that should be continuously carried out. It is responsible for ensuring that the knowledge stored and distributed is proving effective to its audiences. Without this step your knowledge becomes stagnant and knowledge management has no space to optimise.

For constant operational and knowledge improvements, your knowledge base analytics should measure:

• Search result metrics:analytics that demonstrate the effectiveness of articles based on resolved queries, subsequently revealing the effectiveness of your knowledge base
• Top query metrics: these provide key insights into customer trends and requirements, revealing where any content gaps are and areas for optimisation
• Trigger metrics: these metrics show where certain tools trigger on your website, revealing effectiveness and how customers are interacting with your brand