Best Practices for Knowledge Management
Successful knowledge management best practices are well planned, realistic, and have definitive goals. Identify one business unit and implement new initiatives there. By rolling out best practices in stages, you have a better opportunity to pinpoint areas to refine, which will mitigate any potential disruptions and ensure accomplishment of organizational objectives.
Knowledge Access and Structure
Highly effective knowledge management systems have the capability to gather and expand information from an array of sources. Your centralized database contains valuable information from articles, documents, manuals, handbooks, and more. Your knowledge management system should pull data together for users seeking answers.
The right taxonomy of data is critical. It will enable your system to present the best information and guide users towards the data they need. Organization of the content should focus on searchability and usability, and the architecture should facilitate the delivery of relevant information.
Content Should Be Relevant and Concise
Relevant content is more easily consumed by the final user. For instance, a customer with a problem will describe that problem in terms of symptoms, whereas the customer service agent will most likely discuss more technical aspects of the product to address those symptoms. To bridge the language gap, you can include a comprehensive glossary of synonyms for the technical language that will explain it in easy-to-understand words.
Concise content is built from comprehensive, accurate answers built from a small amount of information. It maintains the right balance of quality, quantity, and volume of data.
Maintaining and Expanding Knowledge
Your knowledge management strategy is dynamic. To remain effective, the system must be continuously maintained, updated, and expanded. This includes adding new content, checking for errors in current content, and eliminating obsolete, unused content. This should happen regularly for the validity and accuracy of the knowledge base.
Generating new content will improve and expand your knowledge base, and this is key to the success of your overall knowledge management project. This takes a balance between producing relevant content quickly without errors to fix later.
Final Thoughts
A wide array of factors play into establishing and sustaining a robust, scalable knowledge base. With proper planning and use of best practices across your organization, the implementation should be a success and have a profoundly positive impact on your operations.
