What is Knowledge Management?

It’s an understatement to say that the world of work is changing. The pandemic-driven shift toward remote work has transformed the way that many organizations document, organize, and access information. In 2021, when 47 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs (1) as part of the Great Resignation, many organizations watched as valuable knowledge and resources walked out the door. Faced with these challenges, one thing is for sure: knowledge management is more important than ever before. 

Defining Knowledge Management

So, what is knowledge management? A quick Google search yields a range of definitions that vary widely depending on the source (academics, librarians and information professionals, consulting firms, and technology companies, to name a few). Kimiz Dalkir, author of Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice identified more than 100 published definitions of the term (2), including his own: “Knowledge management (KM) is a systematic approach to creating more efficient, effective organizations and ensuring full utilization of the organization’s knowledge by leveraging the skills, competencies, thoughts, innovations, and ideas of individuals.” (3)

Simply put, knowledge management leverages people, processes, culture, and technology to get the right information to the right people at the right time (4). The specific goals of a knowledge management program will depend on the organization’s situation and needs, but below are a few of the documented benefits of KM3.

Knowledge management can:

• Connect employees to foster collaboration

• Empower staff with knowledge assets and lessons learned

• Cut down on the risks of not knowing and repeating mistakes

• Accelerate the rate of learning 

• Retain knowledge assets when people leave or retire

Building a Successful KM Program

A successful KM program empowers employees to capture, share, manage, and find information. Entire books have been written about each of these individual elements, but here are the basics of what it means to capture, share, manage, and find knowledge within an organization.

Capture

To share, manage, and find knowledge, that information must first be codified or captured. This process is fairly straightforward for explicit knowledge, which is information that has already been documented in some way — say, in a how-to document, handbook, recorded presentation, or template (5). 

Capture is more complicated when it comes to tacit knowledge, which, by definition, is difficult to codify or document. Tacit knowledge is the information that employees know from experience, and it often lives in the minds of staff, rather than in the text of a document5. It’s easy enough to share tacit knowledge when you can walk down the hall and ask a colleague a question, but less so when staff is remote, or when that employee leaves the organization without documenting said knowledge for future use. 

Share

Sharing describes the actual exchange or flow of knowledge (6). Sometimes this flow happens synchronously (say, in a meeting or presentation). Knowledge exchange can also happen asynchronously, for example, when an employee searches for and downloads a document, or browses a video library for a specific topic.

It’s easy to envision that flow of knowledge in one direction, from corporate or leadership entities down to the rest of the organization. A robust knowledge program embraces knowledge sharing at all levels, so employees can share templates, lessons learned, and insights with peers and managers in all directions across the organization. 

While the right KM platform will provide sharing functionality (for example, through a document repository), technology alone will not create a culture of knowledge sharing. This requires training, incentives, and leading by example.

Manage

All too often, the organizational knowledge base becomes a dumping ground for any and all information with little regard for quality, relevancy, or freshness. If employees regularly find low-quality or out-of-date documents in the knowledge base, their confidence in the platform will dwindle.

Maintaining a high-quality knowledge platform (AKA, the organizational “source of truth”) requires standards, governance, and a routine content review process. 

Find

Findability is crucial to any knowledge management program.  No matter how well the knowledge is captured, shared, and managed, if employees can’t quickly find the information they need, the program will fall short. There are two primary methods of finding information in a knowledge base: search and browse.

In the age of Google, expectations for search are high. Users assume that they can go to the search bar, type in a natural language query, and find exactly what they’re looking for within the first few search results. In reality, well-executed search can be easier said than done. To connect users with the information they seek, you’ll likely need to consider taxonomy, synonyms, periodic reviews of search data, and promoted search results.

A Quick Note on Knowledge Management Tools

Knowledge management is an established yet evolving field, and the tools certainly reflect that range of maturity and complexity. Solutions run the gamut from large-scale intranet platforms to collaborative workspaces like Confluence and ClickUp, and relational databases like Notion and Airtable. Unsurprisingly, the right tool for your organization will depend on your goals, budget, and strategy. It’s worth reiterating here that a tool is just a tool, and without a solid strategy to capture, share, manage, and find knowledge, the program is destined to fail.

Need help creating a knowledge management strategy or selecting a tool for your organization? Reach out to emma@backlog-archivists.org or click here to apply for a free archival assessment. 

1. “Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary - 2022 M05 Results.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 6, 2022. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm.

2. Kimiz Kalkar, Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017), 5.

3. Kimiz Kalkar, Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017), 3.

4. Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert, The New Edge in Knowledge (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2011), 2.

5. Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert, The New Edge in Knowledge (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2011), 3.

6. Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert, The New Edge in Knowledge (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2011), 31.