Knowledge management systems

An enterprise starts to provide a product/service that fulfill specific need of a community (customers) part of a market that operate in a particular business.

Enterprise idea is based on a vision (desired future state, the mental picture of what an organization wants to achieve over time) can be described by a mission ( why an organization exists what it does, who it does it for and how it does what it does). The mission and vision are implemented following a strategy.

Enterprise main assets are people who work together to design and produce the product/service in a particular organization using specific processes and tools.

The capability to create product/service that meet customer need comes from knowledge of all the aspect of the enterprise. This is the reason why having an information sharing knowledge system that cover all enterprise aspects is so important.

Why implement a shared knowledge management system?

It is not an easy task to implement a comprehensive shared knowledge management system that but it can provide your company an incredible competitive advantage over competitors for the following reason:

• Provide better service to the customer: a better understanding of business and your product/service features produces better solution adding more value to customer. No more solution will be implemented using workaround that are going to cause bigger problem in the long run.
• give a better view of the business, providing new opportunities to increase your customer portfolio and developing new innovative product/services
• Help to figure out areas where company can improve reducing cost and increasing efficiency
• Reduce human resource risk due to lack of documented knowledge (for instance delay of project because people with specific skills are working on other projects or even worse if those people left the company)
• Improve performance of people who work in the company. People will spend less time to find information. No more people will bother colleagues in order to find who was the one who face a similar problem before and how he/she deal with it (the person involved most of the time forgot about it) or if the product version X have the feature Y. It is easy to train new employee making them productive in a very short time. It is also a way for them to develop new skills and grow with the company.
• Make people to keep aligned to new product version and features (this is especially useful for people working in different workplace with offices in different cities/countries or employees that are usually at customer sites)

Why implement a shared knowledge management is so difficult?

Since implementing a knowledge management system has so many advantages why it is not a standard practice in lots of companies?

• It requires plenty of time and effort
• Every person working on a company has access to certain kind of information and a vision of product/services and how company works and based on his/her role.
• There might be staff resilience due to some people are afraid to lose authority or even their jobs
• people might be reluctant on developing new skills and change in general (We’ve Always Done It That Way approach)
• it is difficult to arrange knowledge content in a way that it is easily comprehensible.

In most company there are also information system/portals already in place to manage certain company activities (ex. Paycheck portal, travel booking portal, customer service portal, time management reporting system etc., service documentation portal).

Wiki as knowledge management systems

The main idea is to use wiki as knowledge management tool to:

- integrate existing company information system by providing an easy way to access them

- complement existing company information system and start organizing content on the wiki about your company according to main components (business, vision/strategy organization, company organization, product/services, process and tools, customer).

An appropriate strategy to involve people in using wiki as new knowledge management system need to be put in place as well.

In the next articles I will show how to arrange wiki content based on company main components and how to implement an appropriate strategy to support knowledge management system within the company with particular focus on IT services.