Knowledge management: how to innovate

How can organisations implement effective knowledge management?

When you consider that an employee spends an average of 7.5 hours each week looking for information without finding it (source: Association Information et Management), it's easy to see why companies need to set up a knowledge management process to keep their knowledge capital under control.

What exactly does the concept of knowledge management cover? How can it be put in place within a company, and what tools are needed? All the answers in this article!

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What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management: definition

Knowledge management ( KM) is a process that aims to transform information into usable data in order to build up a useful knowledge base that is accessible to all employees.

This capitalisation of collective and individual knowledge is achieved by implementing a set of procedures and tools to manage it effectively.

This knowledge may come from :

• internal to the company. This is the case for business knowledge and skills, and everything that has been created (research and development, tools, patents, etc.),
• external to the company. It has been acquired and used legally by the company, in particular by monitoring its economic, technological, socio-cultural and legal environment.

The objectives of knowledge management

The aim of knowledge management is to make the most of the intangible capital that knowledge represents in order to :

• manage skills
• capitalise on experience
• promote access to knowledge
• improve internal and external communication, etc.

Managing explicit and tacit knowledge

There are two types of knowledge on which a company can capitalise:

• explicit (or tangible) knowledge, which is physically materialised on paper or digitally. It can take the form of patents, procedures, analyses, plans, summaries, etc., and can be updated, stored and communicated.
• tacit (or intangible) knowledge, which refers to all the implicit knowledge, know-how, best practices and innate skills that are sometimes unconscious and therefore difficult to represent. The company's intellectual capital is therefore transmitted randomly and is subject to the risk of loss or deterioration.

The challenges of knowledge management

The main objective of organisations wishing to implement good knowledge management is to be able to use knowledge as a performance accelerator, in order to gain a competitive advantage and become more competitive.

Knowledge management provides an effective response to a number of challenges faced by companies, including

• improving decision-making by capitalising on lessons learned from past projects ;
• Motivating employees, whose knowledge and experience are recognised and valued, which can generate motivation and a feeling of belonging to the organisation;
• increase productivity, with a significant reduction in the time taken to search for information, greater autonomy and access to new knowledge to improve the quality of work;
• safeguard the knowledge of people who leave the company by ensuring the transfer of information;
• accelerate and optimise learning for new arrivals;
• empower employees by making information more easily accessible;
• safeguard intellectual capital, to ensure that it is passed on and does not disappear;
• encourage innovation by making collaborative working more fluid and sharing experience and knowledge.

Implementing a knowledge management strategy

The benefits of implementing knowledge management are substantial, and can really boost business performance.

Before taking the plunge, you need to be fully aware of the scale of such a project, which is a real technological and organisational challenge. It will require strong impetus from senior management and managers to combat potential resistance to change, and to secure the commitment of all the company's employees.

While there is no single method for setting up a knowledge management approach, here are a few essential steps to guide you on this wonderful adventure.

Step 1: Identify the knowledge to be safeguarded

From the mass of knowledge in your organisation, you need to select the knowledge that you want to formalise, at least in the first instance. Not that some are more interesting than others, but it is important to assess them against your own criteria (cost, usefulness, etc.), and to choose those that will best serve the company's strategy.

Such an analysis requires a good overview of activities, processes, employees and stakeholders, so that you can pinpoint the :

• knowledge that needs to be safeguarded, the key knowledge and skills that make activities work and are well co-ordinated, and on which it will be necessary to capitalise,
• knowledge to be acquired, with a view to improving productivity.

Step 2: Identify the knowledge

To safeguard knowledge, it needs to be recorded. This is all the more difficult in the case of tacit knowledge, which is sometimes unconscious.

To do this, you can :

• List the different departments, then the different services,
• list the different projects (completed, in progress and to come) for each of them,
• make an inventory of the various skills, knowledge, processes, documents and other expertise that have gone into bringing these projects to fruition,
• Conduct interviews to bring out unconscious knowledge and know-how, and then conceptualise them,
• complete by using feedback from work meetings, brainstorming sessions, an ideas box, etc.

💡Some skills, knowledge and know-how may not be visible or may not have been identified at management level. Involving all employees is one of the keys to success in order to have a fully comprehensive view of knowledge.

Step 3: Formalise knowledge

Formalising knowledge involves :

• representing it in the appropriate way, which may be in written form (article, guide, specification book) or drawn form (diagram, graph, illustration, plan, map) ;
• organising it by categorising it. It can be useful to classify information in different categories, the aim being to ensure that it can be found by those who need it;
• make it accessible, because that's what it's all about.

The easiest way to do this is to use knowledge management software, which proves to be an invaluable ally when embarking on this approach. Document360, knowledge management software, offers a wide range of functions to facilitate the creation and formalisation of content.

It includes a markdown code editor (a lightweight markup language commonly used for text editing) to enhance and personalise your documents: page layout, integration of links, tables or images. You can then classify them in different categories or projects, and also access them using the quick search function.

Step 4: Share knowledge

This stage is crucial, because it's all about ensuring that those who need the knowledge can access it seamlessly, so that they can take ownership of it and use it to fulfil their missions.

It is also essential for everyone to be able to share their knowledge, whether by contributing to existing information (update, addition, comment, link with other information, etc.) or by sharing new information. It is this collaborative dimension that adds strength, value and relevance to a knowledge base.

Knowledge management software helps to share knowledge by facilitating the creation of content and integrating communication tools to disseminate it.

This is the case with Elium, a collaborative knowledge management platform on which each employee can create, formalise, contextualise, enhance and share information of all kinds:

• report
• web article
• video,
• email,
• company chat, etc.

An internal newsletter and notification tool enables targeted content to be distributed directly to the people who will find it most useful, and interaction is encouraged by the opportunity to comment on it. An advanced search engine ensures that everyone can quickly find the information they need to make the best day-to-day decisions.

Step 5: Secure data

Your organisation's knowledge is your most precious asset, so it's important to secure it. The European Data Protection Regulation (RGPD) imposes strict rules on the level of confidentiality of customer data, which must also be taken into account from the outset of the project.

You therefore need to be able to manage the confidentiality of each piece of data, and determine with whom it may or may not be shared:

• externally (press, customers, partners, service providers, etc.),
• internal to the company,
• within a department
• a certain function
• certain people only, etc.

💡To help you manage it with complete peace of mind, some knowledge management software allows you to manage and set the level of confidentiality for each piece of knowledge in the database.

Step 6: manage knowledge updating

As part of a continuous improvement approach, to ensure that knowledge remains as relevant and useful as possible, it must be kept up to date.

This is because the knowledge base is constantly being updated, either because there have been changes (in legislation, internal processes, etc.), or because new information or new insights can modify or enrich it. It is also important to ensure that information flows smoothly in both directions. Here's what can enrich knowledge:

• feedback following the use of the information,
• the vision and opinion of new employees,
• information monitoring
• conclusions from conversations and debates,
• comments, etc.

The use of a collaborative platform, such as Netframe.co, is an excellent way of doing this. It enables company resources to be shared in a single workspace and provides an always up-to-date knowledge base. All employees can easily follow the activities linked to their projects and documents.

See all software Knowledge Management

Knowledge management: from process to culture

Implementing effective knowledge management has many benefits for an organisation or company.

In reality, it's all about creating a genuine knowledge management culture, because success ultimately depends on all employees taking ownership of this tool, and not just on centralising data. This is where the magic happens and the benefits are multiplied tenfold.

The value of information increases as it is used, contextualised, modified, improved, discussed and debated. This knowledge base should serve as a basis for encouraging collaborative working and stimulating collective intelligence.

And, for all this to work to its full potential, knowledge management must be an integral part of the corporate culture, which involves every employee, whether they are department heads, team managers or employees. Everyone has interesting and complementary knowledge which, when put together, creates inestimable wealth.

Updated article, originally published in May 2020.