Knowledge Management’s Place in Business Processes
Everything happening in your organization is based on data, information, and knowledge:
- Internal processes are driven by employee knowledge of best practices.
- Products and services are designed, built, and improved on through the knowledge your team holds.
- Providing value to your customers depends on deep knowledge of their needs.
Without this knowledge, your business wouldn’t be able to function. But the mere existence of knowledge is not enough to allow it to operate properly, grow, and succeed. Knowledge must have the ability to flow freely and integrate seamlessly throughout business processes in order to be useful.
Workflows, information processing, decision making, and employee motivation interact with each other and Knowledge Management processes in complex ways. Learning to incorporate KM into your business improves internal collaboration, employee onboarding, and customer support.
Knowledge Management gathers, stores, communicates, and applies knowledge to your organization’s various processes. CRM and knowledge-base integration take it one step further by using customer data from your CRM and support data from your knowledge base to give employees the best information they need to do their job.
How Other Organizations are Doing It
If organizations want employees to contribute and use knowledge as part of their normal routines, KM processes and tools must be integrated into existing processes and workflows. Productivity slows when people must stop what they’re doing to share. Businesses that have successfully managed to do this have used a variety of approaches:
- KM has been integrated into business processes and workflows at the enterprise level.
- Technology leveraging like workflow management software, collaboration platforms, CRMs, and other high-tech solutions are used.
- Communities of practice are aligned with critical business processes and employees can find relevant content, engage in peer-to-peer problem-solving, and build relationships with experts and other team members.
These strategies result in work environments throughout the organization where employees consider KM as part of their job responsibilities. They feel empowered to share what they know.
Knowledge Management Integrations for Salesforce
Effective Knowledge Management integration into your business processes relies on managing knowledge as an organizational asset. Successfully integrating your KM with software like Salesforce requires much more than merely addressing logistical issues like structure and process. C-level buy-in is as crucial as your organization’s culture adopting and adapting to new ways of doing business.
Successful KM integration depends on a change management strategy that’s built on:
- Clear business need
- Comprehensive, targeted training
- Top-level support and advocacy
- Well-defined knowledge management vision
And all this needs to be guided by an effective communication strategy that impresses on employees what KM is, how it works, and the value it adds. When employees are trained from Day One on the importance of KM, it’s much easier to instill knowledge-sharing and collaborative behaviors.
Salesforce gives all your departments – and all processes – a single shared view of every customer. It allows you to deliver the personalized experiences modern customers expect and demand. Salesforce is the ideal solution for selling or support and it works with your knowledge base to intelligently recommend the content your teams need when they need it.
Conclusion
Shared knowledge and the expertise it’s drawn from are the drivers that move businesses forward. Integrating KM into your business processes is a complex endeavor, but enterprises that have successfully done it prove the payoff is immense.
No matter which products and/or services you offer, finding a way to integrate knowledge management into your business processes should be at the center of your organizational strategy.
