Knowledge Management – Not a Junk Drawer of Information

Imagine that you are at home and you receive an error message on your computer, laptop, tablet or whatever. You have never seen this error before, but like many people you ‘Google’ what the error means to point you in a particular direction to either resolve or ignore the message. Now move forward to Monday morning at work. If you were to receive this same message would you be in a position to leverage some form of knowledge base.

Why should there be any difference?

Provided your organization collects knowledge the main challenge that they may face is how to manage the data. Teams are capturing information and storing it somewhere, either in a portal, a group share, a wiki, or something completely different.

While we don’t want to discourage the gathering of knowledge we need to ensure that this is done in a way which will provide value to operations teams and that it can remain relevant to continue to provide value over the long term. In other words, just because you say you have data doesn’t mean that you are managing it effectively.

This is why a knowledge management strategy needs to be outlined to determine what information is captured, how it will be used and who will ensure that it remains current. What we don’t want to happen is that the information is not utilized in a way which can improve the customer experience.

Once we have mastered how IT manages its knowledge we can apply this to our business counterparts. After all they are also capturing information in the same way IT does. The only difference is that IT enables these types of e-hoarders by continually adding space.

The overall goal is to use information collected either through tribal knowledge, data collection from incidents or input from our customer base to improve the overall delivery of service.

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