Why context is everything ; combining knowledge and business process management.

Written by: Bram Eekhout

To us at Bizpearl, knowledge management (KM) is all about finding what you need as soon as you can. That way we save your company money and save your employees frustrations. That doesn’t mean that other aspects of KM are not important, but we simply feel that this is one of the ways we can provide real value to your organisation.

Finding practical knowledge you need in a large organisation these days is often not easy. We usually encounter two situations: 

1. There is no KM strategy and/or platform present. Documents are being stored on various hard drives making them impossible to find for others, let alone people know they even exist. 

2. There is a document management/archiving solution in place, like for example Sharepoint or Confluence. These platforms can be effective to store documents but that only works if everyone wants to use them (properly), and everyone works in exactly the same way using these platforms. Very often that is not the case and documents disappear into a void never to be found and/or used again.

There are two main take aways from our perspective: 

• If you want to share organisational knowledge internally effectively you need some kind of KM platform. 
• A document management platform can work for archiving documents if implemented and used correctly, but often does not work that well for sharing knowledge, improving collaboration and saving money at the same time.

Focusing on effective knowledge sharing we believe you need a way to present practical knowledge people need to do their jobs (better) in such a way that is instantly clear where they have to go to find what they need. In other words, we believe in giving people context to lead them to the knowledge they need when they need it. That is why we combine knowledge management with business process management (BPM).

Visualising what’s going within a company (processes, roles/responsibilities, internal communications and supporting software) in the words of the employees themselves creates the much needed context to lead your people straight to the knowledge, skills and expertise they are looking for. A visualised context takes away the need for using search words, browsing through long search results and, once you finally get to the document you need, the task of scanning a long document first to get what you need, if it’s even in there. Creating a custom context specifically tailored for an organisation leads people straight where they need to be within a few mouse clicks. Combine this by only displaying practical knowledge that is most important to people you will not only drastically reduce search time, saving your organisation a lot of money, but also save your people lots of frustrations. That is why we like to say ‘Context is everything.’

Combining knowledge management with business process management not only creates much needed context, it also creates a foundation for business process improvement, change management, employee onboarding, compliance, and process harmonisation. That is why we believe that KM implemented and executed from a combined business process and knowledge perspective can provide so much value for your organisation.

Bram Eekhout is the CEO and founder of Bizpearl, a consulting firm specialised in knowledge management, business process improvement and change management. He is passionate about sharing knowledge within organisations effectively, working better together and how knowledge management serves as a foundation for implementing change successfully. He tweets as @BramEekhout.